מי אני האט געשריבן: ↑דינסטאג אקטאבער 19, 2021 5:26 pm ומענין לענין באותו ענין אז מ׳האט דערמאנט קשיות אויפ׳ן מולטיווערס היפאטעזיע בתוך די געדאנק פון פּראבּעבּיליטי איז ווי באקאנט דא די בּייעס וואס רופט זיך דעם געמבּלער׳ס פאָלאָסיִ. דאס איז ווען מען רעכענט און צומישט אן אינדעפּענדענט זאך׳ס פּראבּעבּיליטי מיט די פּראבּעבּיליטי דערפון על הכלל כולו. למשל, ווען א געמבּלער ווארפט א מטבע פאר העדס אדער טעילס וואס יעדעס ווארף האט א שאנס פון 50/50 פאר העדס אדער טעילס. ער ווארפט דאס פיר מאל און עס געלונגט אויף העדס אלע פיר מאל, קלערט ער אז די פיפטע מאל ווארפן איז מער מצוי אז עס זאל פאלן אויף טעילס ווארום די שאנס, על הכלל כולו, פון ווארפן פינעף מאל א מטבע און עס זאל אלעמאל געלונגען אויף העדס איז 1/32 [האלב צו די פּאַוּער ער פון 5]. אבער עס איז נישט אזוי: די יעצטיגע ווארף פאר זיך איז פונקט אזוי 50/50 און די שאנס פון פינעף מאל העדס איז די זעלבע ווי זאגן אז עס זאל פונקט זיין די ערשטע פיר מאל העדס און דערנאך דייקא טעילס. די זעלבע זאך איז ווען ס׳געלונגט אים נישט די ערשטע פאר מאל און דערנאך קלערט ער, ״יעצט מוז עס שוין געלונגען. ווארום וואס זענען די שאנסן אז עס זאל האלטן אין איין נישט געלונגען.״

דר. איִען העקינג טענה׳ט אז בנוגע די מולטיווערס היפאטעזיע (בעיקר קעגן דר. דזשאן וויִלער׳ס מהלך פונעם מולטיווערס וואס איז סיקווענשאל - איינע נאך די אנדערע ועיין ערך סייקליק מאדעלס וואו די פונדאמענטאלע געזעצן פון זייערע פיזיקס וכו׳ טוישן זיך יעדעס מאל) איז דא אן אינווערס געמבּלער׳ס פאָלאָסיִ. דאס הייסט אז מ׳זעהט אן עווענט פאסירן וואס האט גאר א קליינע שאנס פון פאסירן נעמט מען אָן אז בע״כ האט געמוזט קודם געשעהן גאר אסאך פאסירונגען מיט א נארמאלע שאנס. עס מוז אבער נישט זיין אזוי. עס איז אזוי ווי א געמבּלער קומט אריין אין א קעסינאָ, זעהט אז מ׳האט געווארפן צוויי דייס און ביידע זענען געלונגען אויף 6, און נעמט דעריבער אָן על סמך זה גרידא אז דאס איז נישט די ערשטע ווארף פון דייס פונעם נאכט.

דר.פּעטריק מקרעט טענה׳ט אבער אז עס איז נישט דומה. עס איז מער דומה צו דעם וואו דער געמבּלער רמוז ווארטן אינדרויסן און מען רופט אים אריין נאר טאמער עס פאסירט אן אויסערגעווענטליכן ווארף; אזוי ווי די מענטשהייט וואס קען נאר עקזיסטירן אין אונזער סארט יוּניווערס. אין אזא פאל מאכט יא סענס און עס איז יא ראציאנאל אז ווען מען רופט אים אריין ווייל עס האט פאסירט חשבונ׳ט ער אז עס האט שוין פאסירט אסאך ווארפן.

The analogy anyway is not good. The analogy that you walk into a casino and you see someone roll the double sixes, and then you try to conclude they must have been rolling all night. Because the point is that we conditionalize on the fact that we saw double sixes

We exist - that's already known. There was no option that we could have seen anything else. We're not gonna find ourselves in a universe that does not allow for us to exist. So the question that we're addressing is, being good Bayesians, that we have two propositions in front of us. That is that there's either a single universe with certain values of the constants, or there's a multiverse, and in different parts of that multiverse, you're gonna get different values of the constants, and some will be hospitable to life, and some will not. And the question is, what are the chances that in those two theories somewhere, it's hospitable to life? That's why the analogy is not good

It's not that here we observed it in this one place and it's hospitable to life. But the question is, given these two grand theories of cosmology, what are the chances that life would be able to exist anywhere? And I think it's clearly more likely in the multiverse case

So if you buy that argument, I think that you would say that the fact that we exist I think there is something that is legitimate in asking when you're comparing cosmological theories, what is the probability, I don't want to quite say a priori, but at least before some things that we know, what is the probability that would predict the existence of people like us somewhere? That's the question being asked. I think that's a legitimate question to ask

How does the shift from an overly simplistic “falsification” paradigm to one based on abduction and Bayesian inference affect our attitude toward the multiverse? Rather than simply pointing out that the multiverse cannot be directly observed (at least for some parameter values) and therefore can’t be falsified and therefore isn’t science, we should ask whether a multiverse scenario might provide the best explanation for the data we do observe, and attempt to quantify this by assigning priors to different possibilities then updating them in the face of new data – just as we do for any other scientific theory

Put this way, it becomes clear that there isn’t that much qualitatively special about the multiverse hypothesis. It’s an idea about nature that could be true or false, and to which we can assign some prior probability, which then gets updated as new information comes in

The multiverse isn’t, by itself, a theory; it’s a prediction of a certain class of theories. If the idea were simply “Hey, we don’t know what happens outside our observable universe, so maybe all sorts of crazy things happen,” it would be laughably uninteresting. By scientific standards, it would fall woefully short. But the point is that various theoretical attempts to explain phenomena that we directly observe right in front of us — like gravity, and quantum field theory — lead us to predict that our universe should be one of many, and subsequently suggest that we take that situation seriously when we talk about the “naturalness” of various features of our local environment. The point, at the moment, is not whether there really is or is not a multiverse; it’s that the way we think about it and reach conclusions about its plausibility is through exactly the same kind of scientific reasoning we’ve been using for a long time now. Science doesn’t pass judgment on phenomena; it passes judgment on theories

In defense of the multiverse Carroll writes “Science is about what is true.” But, no, it’s not. Science is about describing what we observe. Science is about what is useful. Mathematics is about what is true

Fact is, the multiverse extrapolates known physics by at least 13 orders of magnitude (in energy) beyond what we have tested and then adds unproved assumptions, like strings and inflatons. That’s not science, that’s math fiction

If Ockham could see what physicists are doing here, he'd pray for God to bring reason back to Earth. You should remove unnecessary assumptions, alright. But certainly you shouldn't remove assumptions that you need to describe observations. If you do, you'll just get a useless theory, equations from which you can't calculate anything. These useless theories which lack assumptions necessary to describe observations are what we now call a multiverse. And they're about as useful as Ockham's prayers

You can believe that the seeming arbitrariness of the constants of nature is due to an infinite number of other universes. You can believe that, but you don't have to. Science cannot confirm that the other universes exist, but it also cannot rule them out. Just like science cannot rule out the gods and angels

Sean Carroll writes: “The best reason for classifying the multiverse as a straightforwardly scientific theory is that we don’t have any choice. This is the case for any hypothesis that satisfies two criteria: (i) It might be true; (ii) Whether or not it is true affects how we understand what we observe.” But those are exceedingly weak criteria indeed. As an extreme example, take the very fuzzy notion of God: it might be true, and whether it’s true or not this would affect how we understand the world. So what? Neither of those two observations — in itself — provides an iota of reason to believe in God. Or the multiverse

Despite this cast-iron logic, some thinkers believe that the longer the universe goes on, the better it is, ethically speaking. As John Leslie, a cosmological philosopher at the University of Guelph in Canada, told me, "This is true simply on utilitarian grounds: the more intelligent happy beings in the future, the merrier." Philosophers of a more pessimistic kidney, like Schopenhauer, have taken precisely the opposite view: life is, on the whole, so miserable that a cold and dead universe is preferable to one teeming with conscious beings

In the face of these apparent fine-tunings, we have several possible options:

1. Life is extremely robust, and would be likely to arise even if the parameters were very different, whether or not we understand what form it would take
2. There is only one universe, with randomly-chosen parameters, and we just got lucky that they are among the rare values that allow for the existence of life
3. In different regions of the universe the parameters take on different values, and we are fooled by a selection effect: life will only arise in those regions compatible with the existence of life
4. The parameters are not chosen randomly, but designed that way by a deity

Generally, not nearly enough credence is given to option #1 in this list. We know very little about the conditions under which complexity, and intelligent life in particular, can possibly form. If, for example, we were handed the Standard Model of particle physics but had no actual knowledge of the real world, it would be very difficult to derive the periodic table of the elements, much less the atoms and molecules on which Earth-based life depends. Life may be very fragile, but for all we know it may be ubiquitous (in parameter space); we have a great deal of trouble even defining “life” or for that matter “complexity,” not to mention “intelligence.” At the least, the tentative nature of our current understanding of these issues should make us reluctant to draw grand conclusions about the nature of reality from the fact that our universe allows for the existence of life

Swinburne says:

To postulate a trillion trillion other universes, rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of our universe, seems the height of irrationality

That might be true, even with the hyperbole, if what one was postulating were simply “a trillion trillion other universes.” But that is a mischaracterization of what is involved. What one postulates are not universes, but laws of physics. Given inflation and the string theory landscape (or other equivalent dynamical mechanisms), a multiverse happens, whether you like it or not

This is an important point that bears emphasizing. All else being equal, a simpler scientific theory is preferred over a more complicated one. But how do we judge simplicity? It certainly doesn’t mean “the sets involved in the mathematical description of the theory contain the smallest possible number of elements.” In the Newtonian clockwork universe, every cubic centimeter contains an infinite number of points, and space contains an infinite number of cubic centimeters, all of which persist for an infinite number of separate moments each second, over an infinite number of seconds. Nobody ever claimed that all these infinities were a strike against the theory. Indeed, in an open universe described by general relativity, space extends infinitely far, and lasts infinitely long into the future; again, these features are not typically seen as fatal flaws. It is only when space extends without limit and conditions change from place to place, representing separate “universes,” that people grow uncomfortable. In quantum mechanics, any particular system is potentially described by an infinite number of distinct wave functions; again, it is only when different branches of such a wave function are labeled as “universes” that one starts to hear objections, even if the mathematical description of the wave function itself hasn’t grown any more complicated

A scientific theory consists of some formal structure, as well as an “interpretation” that matches that structure onto the world we observe. The structure is a statement about patterns that are exhibited among the various objects in the theory. The simplicity of a theory is a statement about how compactly we can describe the formal structure (the Kolmogorov complexity), not how many elements it contains. The set of real numbers consisting of “eleven, and thirteen times the square root of two, and pi to the twenty-eighth power, and all prime numbers between 4,982 and 34,950” is a more complicated set than “the integers,” even though the latter set contains an infinitely larger number of elements. The physics of a universe containing 1088 particles that all belong to just a handful of types, each particle behaving precisely according to the characteristics of its type, is much simpler than that of a universe containing only a thousand particles, each behaving completely differently

Likewise, a multiverse that arises due to the natural dynamical consequences of a relatively simple set of physical laws should not be discounted because there are a lot of universes out there. Multiverse theories certainly pose formidable problems, especially when it comes to making predictions and comparing them with data; for that reason, most scientists would doubtless prefer a theory that directly predicted the parameters we observe in nature over a multiverse ensemble in which our local environment was explained anthropically. But most scientists (for similar reasons) would prefer a theory that was completely free of appeals to supernatural agents

The multiverse is not a theory; it is a prediction of a theory, namely the combination of inflationary cosmology and a landscape of vacuum states. Both of these ideas came about for other reasons, having nothing to do with the multiverse. If they are right, they predict the existence of a multiverse in a wide variety of circumstances. It’s our job to take the predictions of our theories seriously, not to discount them because we end up with an uncomfortably large number of universes

Also, at first glance, the God hypothesis does seem simple and precise – an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent being. (There are other definitions, but they are usually comparably terse.) The apparent simplicity is somewhat misleading, however. In comparison to a purely naturalistic model, we’re not simply adding a new element to an existing ontology (like a new field or particle), or even replacing one ontology with a more effective one at a similar level of complexity (like general relativity replacing Newtonian spacetime, or quantum mechanics replacing classical mechanics). We’re adding an entirely new metaphysical category, whose relation to the observable world is unclear. This doesn’t automatically disqualify God from consideration as a scientific theory, but it implies that, all else being equal, a purely naturalistic model will be preferred on the grounds of simplicity

The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing"

"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED"

Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for

This objection is just the old appeal to the Anthropic Principle using a congenial new illustration of it. The Anthropic Principle is the idea that you shouldn’t be surprised at the fine-tuning of the universe because if the universe were not fine-tuned you wouldn't be here to be surprised about it. And given that you are here, therefore you should expect the universe to be fine-tuned. This objection is fallacious because while it's true that given the fact that you've evolved within the universe you should expect to observe a finely tuned universe, that doesn't in any way follow that it's probable that a finely tuned universe should, in fact, exist. It’s enormously improbable, and therefore you really should be surprised that it exists and should be seeking for some sort of an explanation. Moreover, the analogy is just flawed because holes and puddles are not fine-tuned. The puddle could be any different size or shape. The puddle isn't like life which requires a narrow range of parameters in order for the universe to be life-permitting. The shape and size of the puddle are not essential to it. With life, there has to be this finely tuned set of constants and quantities otherwise the life would not exist, not simply the life would take some other form like another shape or size in the case of the puddle. The puddle would still exist, it would just be a different shape or size. With life, if there were not this fine-tuning it wouldn't be there. There wouldn't even be matter or chemistry much less life in the universe. So the analogy, however congenial, is simply flawed and doesn't do anything to undermine the argument for fine-tuning

Occam's razor says don't multiply causes beyond necessity. You only posit such causes as are necessary to explain the effect. But obviously Occam’s razor does not say don't posit any causes! Otherwise you would never have any scientific explanation. You would just remain with the data and would explain nothing. But Occam's razor is a principle of economy that says you are justified in positing only such causes as are necessary to explain the effect. And that's exactly what the theist does in inferring to God as the cause of the beginning of the universe, or the source of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life, or the applicability of mathematics to the physical world. It's not in any way a violation of Occam's razor

More debatably, Paley’s writing indicates that the world seems to minimise purposeless suffering and permits creatures to experience pleasure without any apparent ulterior purpose – a suggestion that there is goodness in the governance of the world

With gusto Maimonides reviled what he considered to be the errors of the imagination. Among his favorite targets was anthropocentrism. "Every ignoramus," he wrote, "imagines that all that exists exists with a view to his individual sake!" (MN 3:12) "It is thought [by the ignorant] that the finality of all that exists is solely the existence of the human species so that it should worship God." (ibid 3:13) Maimonides' own position is unequivocal: "It should not be believed that all things exist for the sake of the existence of man. On the contrary, all other beings too have been intended for their own sakes and not for the sake of something else." Spinoza, echoing Maimonides' report of the anthropocentric view, writes: "It is commonly supposed… that all things in nature work toward some end… for it is said that God made all things for man, and man that he might worship Him." For his own part, Spinoza flatly states that all final causes are figmenta

Both Maimonides and Spinoza denied the notion that the universe has any final end outside of itself (or God), and both maintained that it was owing to the prejudice of anthropocentrism that the notion had ever gained currency. Furthermore, both argue against the universe's having a final end on the dual grounds that it makes no sense to speak about the perfect God's needing to work either through means or for an end