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To extend this even further... ~This~ morning Joe rolled a dice, and it came up 1, so he hosted a board-game party. During the party Joe hints that the die he
by mjewkes 10y ago
To extend this even further...
~This~ morning Joe rolled a dice, and it came up 1, so he hosted a board-game party.
During the party Joe hints that the die he rolls may be very large, but stops short of outright saying so.
Joe also refuses to say whether he rolls the die every morning, or if it was just this morning.
The interesting questions are:
How big is the die?
How often is it rolled?
Does Joe do anything at all if he rolls almost anything other than a 1, or does he just lie in bed?
If the very large die is only rolled once, and all non-1s are very boring, then it is remarkable that we're here.
- whack 10y ago"Does Joe do anything at all if he rolls almost anything other than a 1, or does he just lie in bed? If the very large die is only rolled once, and all non-1s are very boring, then it is remarkable that we're here." That's a very interesting point you raised, and I was thinking about this as well. If the universe only "exists once", and life is very unlikely but it still came to be, then it does seem remarkable. However, this is based on the presumption that life is non-boring, and all other potential universes devoid of life are boring. This seems like a very subjective presumption. Clearly we are biased towards thinking that our own existence, or the similar existence of "life" is special. But a skeptic would claim that from a purely scientific perspective, there's no reason to believe that a universe without life is any more boring than our universe.
- putzdown 10y agoWell, but there is something fundamentally and essentially special about conscious minds. A universe that is complete unperceived is, first of all, harder to even imagine than it first appears and, second, would be neither boring nor interesting, since both of those words, and all other assessments, only have meaning within the context of conscious perception. So I would affirm the presumption that "life", in the sense of the existence of conscious minds, is non-boring and universes devoid of life are either boring, or inconceivable.
- enkid 10y agoSpoken like a conscious mind
- mjewkes 10y agoLife aside, in a slightly different universe, it's unclear whether space or chemistry or atoms would even be possible: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe To quote neutral milk hotel, "how strange it is to be anything at all"