“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!'"
I would be Buddhist if I would not be christian, but I am glad I can be christian. If what I believe is true, then boy are we lucky!
But this itself is not strictly logical because changing the fundamental constants doesn't imply a change of the fundamental laws. The fundamental laws may very well work fine with different constants but we may just not be there to observe them in action because the outcomes may not result in a universe conducive to life (hence: anthropic principle).
As a bad analogy, physics affects an egg falling to the surface of a planet in low gravity in the same way as an egg falling in high gravity. The outcomes may be different, but the laws are the same. And of course, in the latter case it's less likely for something to survive the fall and live to even ask these questions in the first place.
There are some interesting possibilities that arise at this point. e.g. What if this Universe is only "somewhat" tuned for intelligent life? What if, on some more "appropriate" level of "tuning", more stable, fundamental particles are observable for longer periods of time yielding even more insight into the fundamental laws of the universe?
Lots of interesting stuff to talk about around a camp fire...
Assuming the existence of some abstraction called spin to derive the fundamental forces is a great exercise in internal consistency, but hardly meets any definition of "bootstrapping" as I understand the term.
The only theory I've ever encountered that passes this smell test to me is the mathematical universe hypothesis[0] because it's intuitive to me that math just "is" in some sense and does not require any upstream mechanisms or assumptions. As far as I'm concerned, if you have to assume the existence of anything whatsoever, it's not bootstrapping.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singular_Universe_and_th...
The other explanation seems to be the multiverse. i.e. we just got a random set of self consistent laws. Again there seems to be no explanation as to why or how the multiverse came to be, is there?
But how did they get any way at all? How and why do they evolve?
> multiverse. i.e. we just got a random set of self consistent laws.
This raises even more questions. Why are there any multiverses with any laws at all? From where did the stuff in the multiverses come from? What initiated this chain of multiverse creation, or why is it inevitable?
A bootstrapping theory would explain why anything is inevitable, or why there is something rather than nothing. Otherwise it is just a low-level physics theory.
You can always keep asking the question ‘why?’ At some point, either you have just accept something as fundamental, or the answer justifies itself, or you have an infinite regress of whys.
Only very low-level ontological questions meet this criteria, like "why is there something rather than nothing," but even then, I am open to the possibility that there are reasonable explanations for these things that we just can't articulate yet.
Asking "why" is begging the question, though. Maybe there is simply no reason behind it. They change because they change.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-mathematic...
Why modus ponens? [0]
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achi...
There is no reason the universe needs to follow an internally consistent ruleset (although so far our measurements seem to find it to be, quite precisely).
To snitch an example from mathematics, consider formal logic and set theory. These are oft considered the epitome of rigor, enough so that they form "the foundation of modern mathematics." However, when first begining to study these fields, one encounters a sort of philosophical conundrum, "How do you even state the rules if you start from literally nothing?" You can write them on a piece of paper, but without some system of processing, all those rules end up as just ink on paper. The standard terminology for just such a system is "metalogic."
Anyway, at first blush it seems like any such metalogic is inaccesible to mathematical inquiry, but we can use a trick to "lift" the metalogic and logic one layer up. For example, we can (using some metalogic) start with standard Zermelo-Frenkel set theory (ZF), and then ask ourselves, "Is this ZF powerful enough to iplement a version of ZF within itself?" In other words, if ZF is too weak to implement ZF, then clearly out metalogic must be something stronger and more complicated.
Fortunately, it turns out that ZF can implement itself just fine, and in fact, there are much simpler (read weaker) logics also capable of implementing ZF. Said another way, the bare mininum needed to write a program capable of verifying ZF proofs is quite bare and minimal, indeed. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, this line of inquiry has ended up discovering pretty nifty proofs of previously intractible problems. It also has practical implications for proof verifiers and the like (see Metamath[0]).
So, by analogy, I read this article as saying something similar about the metaphysics of our physics. I.e. it turns out that there are some really simple rules capable of generating the complex physics that is the Standard Model. How much can we whittle down the metaphysics? What does that say about our universe?
How comes there are not millions of different quark types? Why not 5180 fundamental forces? Going smaller nature becomes simpler.
It is hard to express but I have always felt this universe has a complexification ability, where at every level it seems possible for simple rules to lead to complex outcomes.
Don't things have to stop somewhere, otherwise there's an infinite regress ("turtles all the way down")?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinitary_logic
with which you can prove a theorem by assuming it in the first place, using infinitary (or circular) proofs and an algorithm to transform these proofs into usual proofs.