Hacker News Reader

Comment by retrac | Hacker News Reader

That's a variation on the anthropic principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle Maybe a kind of observer bias. If the universe weren't seemingly-perfectly balanced to allow emergent complexity in matter, we wouldn't be here to point out how seemingly-perfect it seems. (If you subscribe to a multiverse interpretation, perhaps most of the infinitely many other possible universes are dead and void.)

View on HN

I'm not very sympathetic to the view that we're very lucky to be in this universe. That said, there is an interesting response to the anthropic principle response, which I'll mention here just because I think it's interesting to think about what's wrong with this objection:

Suppose you and I were living in a totalitarian state. The state decides that you and I are to be put to death. They drag us into a field, and a shooting squad of several marksmen surrounds us. They all fire - but miraculously, every single one of them misses us.

I then turn to you and say, "Wow, the odds that all of those bullets missed us by sheer chance are so incredibly low. Clearly, it wasn't by chance - they must have coordinated to ensure they missed us, intentionally."

You then turn to me and say, "No, that's silly. It's simply that if any of the bullets had hit us, we wouldn't be around to talk about it."

Your line of reasoning here doesn't seem to be very compelling. Why?

A small note: the anthropic principle doesn't make us "lucky" to exist in a universe that supports life, quite the opposite. The probability of life coming to existence in a place (universe, celestial body, whatever) that doesn't support it is zero. The fact that we exist in a place that supports life is simply due to the probability of it happening here is >0, therefore we're here only because statistics determines that we can't be anywhere else. It's not luck, it's simply a statistic outcome.

Yes, right. Maybe you misread me, I meant to say that I'm skeptical that we're lucky because I'm sympathetic to the anthropic principle response. I then go on to play devil's advocate.

Ah, I misinterpreted that.

An interesting point.

How about the universe kept starting and collapsing/crashing in an infinite loop until by chance the electron and the proton had the exact charge and the universe as it is now could go beyong the initial stage and could continue?

( Ok this feels like a trial an error of somebody playing universe ).

I could see why a charge imbalance prevents life from forming, but why would it also collapse the entire universe?

How about the universe that quantum-emerges in a truly random sequence of quasistates which disintegrate immediately, and once in a while it happens to be the state that includes "your" "memory" of the previous ones. I mean chronologically from your perspective, they don't even have to appear in order.

By an amazing coincidence, this particular "frameset" is logically consistent and pretty boring, so you have no intergalactic empires, no magic, and no job.

Essentially dust theory from Permutation City. I've thought about this a lot.

If perception emerged directly from chaos like that, wouldn't you expect to perceive chaos, rather than a rich world built upon billions of years of evolutionary history?

I don't think there's "rather than" in this idea. You surely will perceive every state that is perceivable at all, but time and continuity have no meaning here. Specific history is just an image that always exists only for an instant. Eventually that universe might enumerate all states, so they'd form all sorts of sequences, but that's coincidental.

Sure, such a universe would create all states, but if perception from chaos were possible, then there would be overwhelmingly more chaotic states to perceive than sensible ones, so you would expect to find yourself perceiving chaos.

I think perception cannot exist without a robust evolutionary history to build upon, which is why you perceive something sensible.

It depends on what we see as "perception". Imagine in our regular universe model, the "perceptor" quickly switched between all creatures just like a CPU core switches between all busy processes. That wouldn't invalidate any of the creatures/processes "experience" and wouldn't mix them (ignoring cache, processes aren't that isolated really). All these processes are transient states of the same physical CPU core.

Back to the chaotic universe, the "perceptor" switches between the states, every state is a complete picture. Yes it does see more chaotic states, but they don't leak into each other, including through expectations. There's no memory outside of a state that it could accumulate and experience continuously. Eons of state changes pass between two attoseconds, but there's no way to remember.

That's what I mean by perception. In-frameset perception obviously has to be continuous to make (or not make) sense.

That would still make the human brain an exceptionally rare state, compared to all the other chaotic states the perceptor perceives.

This particular human brain refuses to believe that the perceptor perceives anything when selecting a chaotic state. If you'd like to hear chaos' opinion on the matter, please pound on your keyboard for a while.

Sssshhhh, you’ll summon all the simulation people out of the woodwork!

It is however, not an unreasonable one. The main problem with the anthropic principle is if you use it to justify adding free parameters to models which don't otherwise have any physical meaning, and then tune them so they correct out the problems, wave your hands and say "it must be this way because if cannot be any other".

This made me think - is a concept like most even defined for infinity?

Not a mathematician, but if there's a computable limit, then why not? E.g. most integers aren't powers of 2, cause lim(n to inf: n / 2^n) = 0

Probably a cheeky response but certainly!

We can say most positive integers are greater than 5. Or most real numbers are irrational. Half of all integers are even — even though there's just as many of both!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com