On 7/15/2017 4:48 AM, David Nyman wrote:
I'm not sure I follow your logic here. The point I was making is
that "the physical world, with all its complexity" looks highly
constrained, something that is indeed widely noted - a put up job, to
quote Fred Hoyle. It has further been noted that such tightness of
constraint might point to its being a prerequisite for sentient life
and hence for the conditions of observation itself. Consequently, far
from looking "very constrained and unnatural if you reverse the
direction of explanation", it's the opposite that seems increasingly
possible. IOW, things look less constrained and unnatural if you take
the view that the observed conditions are observationally selected
from a more generalised basis.
As to mysteries, take your pick. The one to which I was referring was
treating the complex physical world to which observation gives access
as a brute given. Of course this is a viable metaphysical position at
which to stop further enquiry.
I find this metaphysical line of argument advanced by "everythingers"
annoying. First, /looking/ highly constrained isn't necessarily /being/
highly constrained. My friend Vic Stenger wrote a book, "The Fallacy of
Fine Tuning" showing that most alleged fine tuning is not really so
fine. Second, there is no canonical definition of scope - every
realized universe, however structured, will look "highly constrained"
relative to putative infinite possibilities. Third, simply jumping to
an everything-exists "explanation" doesn't explain anything - it simply
pushes the problem over into explaining why there is experience at all;
a problem that is hidden under the cloak of "it's anthropic". And even
then it often turns out that the "everything" is not really everything,
but rather everything computable or everything mathematical or
everything describable or some other not-really-everything. Fourth,
everythingism vs brute-fact-as-we've-found-it is a false dichotomy.
There may be yet unexpected layers of explanation, or even (my favorite)
a virtuous circle of explanation. Everythingism could have been adopted
by the ancient Greeks and science never gotten off the ground. Plato
would have loved the idea, because he wanted thinkers to ignore the
shadows on the cave wall and think about "what's really real"; but as
Sean Carroll has remarked, "All human progress has come from studying
the shadows."
Brent
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