Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

The arguments to fine-tuning are utterly remedial. I can't believe that no one in their orbit ever brought up the anthropic principle [1]. We are not randomly distributed over possible universes; we are embedded in a universe that is by definition capable of supporting our existence (and indeed giving rise to it). It doesn't matter how stupidly improbable it is. Observer effect is off the charts!

Second, in evolution, the entire chain of reproducing life forms from the first replicator to now is a series of stupidly improbable happenings. But it's not just that they're stupidly improbable all in a row (i.e. multiplied together), but they are one by one and selective; lots of stupidly impossible things were tried (read: bad mutations), and they all died out. We're left with good stupidly improbably things, one after the other. Evolution of life forms is governed by a tuning process (copy, mutate, select), why couldn't universes also be?

Who writes these kinds of articles? None of the ideas posited here are new, and in fact, they've been argued over for decades, sometimes even centuries. I find it hard to believe the proponent of these ideas is ignorant of the most basic criticisms.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle

It's absurd and frustrating. This is something I wondered about as a child and subsequently immediately realized we are observing from a biased perspective. It's not as though we have millions of independent universes to look at and they're all perfect for the formation of life.

While I don't disagree with your reaction to the article in question...

"[The atrophic principle] tends to be invoked by theorists whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the observed facts." - Roger Penrose

Isn't the anthropic principle just the most recent god-of-the-gaps argument - i.e. a de facto mystery explanation of things we can't otherwise explain...?

I suppose that (to me) if or when the multi-verse theory becomes a falsifiable theory AND is empirically validated, then awesome we have the explanation pre-baked (the anthropic principle).

But until then, there doesn't seem to be grounds to say it's 'remedial'.

But curious for your thoughts, it's not my area of expertise beyond a layman's interest.

None of the ideas posited here are new

That's comes with the 'general purpose nerd messageboard' territory, it's in some way true for almost everything posted. It's got lengthy caselaw:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

The anthropic principle has equal explanatory power to “because it did.” Making up a story about a cosmic crow shitting out the universe has equal explanatory power and it at least offers a reason.

And obviously we know the crow shit it out because if it didn’t we wouldn’t be here!

Also you failed to explain why the universe is organized such that random processes exhaustively explore the state space of potential configurations such that you’re here to say it did. Why was there a quantum field to be in a vacuum state to begin with? Or whatever the leading explanation for the beginning of the “lol so random” cosmology is.

Remedial indeed.

The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique. The space of possibilities is larger than the number of atoms in the universe. And yet there is no why for the wrinkles on the back of your hand. Nothing chose it. Nothing is perfect about it. Not every improbable thing was chosen.

The anthropic principle doesn't explain a goddamn thing! It rejects the notion that we need an explanation for some things, because they could as well as been randomly chosen and we'd still be here all the same with absolutely no why whatsoever.

> The pattern of wrinkles on the back of your hand is absolutely unique.

It also solve zero real-life problems, but the presence of structures like DNA and self-replicating cells does solve a problem, i.e. they fit inside something much larger than itself, requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created.

> requiring compounded infinitely improbable samples of luck to have been created

Not sure what you mean here. Evolution doesn't work by rolling all the dice at once and only selecting a winner if all the dice match some magic string. Evolution is a selective tuning process; it works (figuratively) by rolling all the dice at once and keeping the dice that do match the magic string and then re-rolling the rest[1].

[1] Of course that's not how evolution actually works. It works by selecting very tiny slightly different versions of things in a biased way. Those biased versions of things just happen to be things that can make more of themselves, and so the system automatically selects for things that good at self-replicating and surviving. Evolution doesn't jump all over the place with infinite improbabilities, it is actually a very systematic and even somewhat predictable exploration of the fitness landscape.

>Also you failed to explain why

Simply: Reality doesn't have "why"s. Reality has forces and fields or equivalent systems.

Where did forces and fields or equivalent systems come from?

If your answer is some variant on "just because" then you don't have a better theory than some kind of necessary causality or contingency, in fact you have a mere absence of contemplation altogether.

I never imagined "don't think about it" as being the metaphysical basis of the scientific enterprise though and it's hard to imagine science getting as far as it has if it were.

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