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I did my thesis on the argument from design post-Darwin. A lot of interesting discussion centers on how to reconcile the generalized principle of mediocrity wi

I did my thesis on the argument from design post-Darwin. A lot of interesting discussion centers on how to reconcile the generalized principle of mediocrity with the apparently low probability of a life-supporting universe existing (in terms of how fine-tuned basic constants have to be for it to happen). Some people try to end-run around this with anthropic arguments (which better writers than myself have pointed out are fallacious when applied this way); others try to build on QM and a many-worlds approach to posit that a universe like ours is possible and thus must exist (and in fact a large number of them, similar but each slightly different, must exist). And some turn not to the Judeo-Christian literal-biblical-reading everything-created-in-six-days idea of "God", but to the general idea that our universe might be the product of intelligence. And a lot of that work focuses on simulation arguments, which solve the seemingly-improbable "tuning" of our universe's physical constants by saying that they were in fact tuned by some intelligence for a particular purpose. That purpose need not be to produce us, or anything resembling us (perhaps we are simply a side effect of a set of constants that produce some other result that's actually of interest to the simulators), and might be as banal as "to see what happens when you plug in these values for the constants", but the purpose would nonetheless exist. There's also a line of reasoning which comes out of that and says that once such a capability exists, suddenly our own universe does not appear so unlikely. All it takes is one universe, somewhere, with constants providing the ability to simulate other universes (which is more general and thus more likely than constants providing the specific configuration of our own universe), and you get to add not just simulations running in that universe, but simulations running in simulations running in simulations... and so on all the way down. At which point the number of universes which exist and support intelligent life grows dramatically, possibly even rivaling the number of universes which exist and do not support intelligent life. Though on a completely different tack there are people who've run with the idea that singularities fire off big bangs of their own, producing new universes not visible from ours, and posited a kind of natural selection principle based on that: universes which give rise to singularities will have more "offspring", so universes which give rise to singularities should be more common than universes which don't. And since one easy way to get singularities is through organized clumping of matter which can then undergo gravitational collapse, and that same thing is what allows us to exist, it's not so unlikely to see our universe.

DonaldFisk 10y ago
I have a number of points to make. The Many-worlds interpretation of QM does not mean that different universes have different fundamental constants. If that were the case, the fundamental constants could change in value each time a quantum measurement took place. The universe might be infinite in extent (e.g. Einstein-de Sitter) even though at any time you can only see a finite part of it, so even though the probability of life in any galaxy might be vanishingly small, as long as it's finite you can expect life to emerge somewhere. Supposing our universe is a simulation, possibly running inside another simulation, etc. At some level there still must be a ground reality in which the first simulation was made. So, there needs to be at least one level, which appeared out of nowhere, or always existed, in which computers can be built to run the simulation. I'd rather not have to repeat the same points I made in an argument I had here previously, as no one seems to change their mind about these things, but I can't see any way that NPCs in a virtual reality/simulated universe can be conscious - even though they might appear to be - so I think that if we're in a simulation, consciousness must be based in the universe which is not a simulation. It might be possible for the fundamental constants (and, indeed, the laws of physics) to be fine-tuned, but only in a simulation, by its programmers. The idea of a creator God (of any non-simulated universe) has no explanatory power. All it does is hide complexity inside something supernatural. How would this god appear out of nothing?
- ubernostrum 10y ago
  The Many-worlds interpretation of QM does not mean that different universes have different fundamental constants. It's more generally accepted now that the values of the constants were contingent on conditions in the very early universe. This doesn't mean that a fork off of, say, our world right now would get different constants, but that in the early-universe time period there would be forks getting different values, which then evolved completely differently. In this view we exist in one which happened to get the "right" constants. The universe might be infinite in extent (e.g. Einstein-de Sitter) even though at any time you can only see a finite part of it, so even though the probability of life in any galaxy might be vanishingly small, as long as it's finite you can expect life to emerge somewhere. We don't have evidence of the universe being infinite in extent, though. So, there needs to be at least one level, which appeared out of nowhere, or always existed, in which computers can be built to run the simulation. Again, the claim in the simulation argument is not "uncreated universes are impossible". It's that "an uncreated universe capable of giving rise to simulations is a less specific requirement and therefore more likely to occur". The idea of a creator God Which I explicitly said I wasn't talking about. For someone who's tired of repeating himself you sure seem fine with making me do it.

DonaldFisk 10y ago

I have a number of points to make. The Many-worlds interpretation of QM does not mean that different universes have different fundamental constants. If that were the case, the fundamental constants could change in value each time a quantum measurement took place. The universe might be infinite in extent (e.g. Einstein-de Sitter) even though at any time you can only see a finite part of it, so even though the probability of life in any galaxy might be vanishingly small, as long as it's finite you can expect life to emerge somewhere. Supposing our universe is a simulation, possibly running inside another simulation, etc. At some level there still must be a ground reality in which the first simulation was made. So, there needs to be at least one level, which appeared out of nowhere, or always existed, in which computers can be built to run the simulation. I'd rather not have to repeat the same points I made in an argument I had here previously, as no one seems to change their mind about these things, but I can't see any way that NPCs in a virtual reality/simulated universe can be conscious - even though they might appear to be - so I think that if we're in a simulation, consciousness must be based in the universe which is not a simulation. It might be possible for the fundamental constants (and, indeed, the laws of physics) to be fine-tuned, but only in a simulation, by its programmers. The idea of a creator God (of any non-simulated universe) has no explanatory power. All it does is hide complexity inside something supernatural. How would this god appear out of nothing?

ubernostrum 10y ago
The Many-worlds interpretation of QM does not mean that different universes have different fundamental constants. It's more generally accepted now that the values of the constants were contingent on conditions in the very early universe. This doesn't mean that a fork off of, say, our world right now would get different constants, but that in the early-universe time period there would be forks getting different values, which then evolved completely differently. In this view we exist in one which happened to get the "right" constants. The universe might be infinite in extent (e.g. Einstein-de Sitter) even though at any time you can only see a finite part of it, so even though the probability of life in any galaxy might be vanishingly small, as long as it's finite you can expect life to emerge somewhere. We don't have evidence of the universe being infinite in extent, though. So, there needs to be at least one level, which appeared out of nowhere, or always existed, in which computers can be built to run the simulation. Again, the claim in the simulation argument is not "uncreated universes are impossible". It's that "an uncreated universe capable of giving rise to simulations is a less specific requirement and therefore more likely to occur". The idea of a creator God Which I explicitly said I wasn't talking about. For someone who's tired of repeating himself you sure seem fine with making me do it.