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Such kind of information turns very improbable event to very probable. The issue is, as I pointed out, that it works for anything and produces the same result.

Such kind of information turns very improbable event to very probable. The issue is, as I pointed out, that it works for anything and produces the same result. Anthropic arguments literally consist of stating that "P(A|A) = 1". Which of course is true, but what does that actually tell you?

acqq 8y ago
> The issue is, as I pointed out, that it works for anything If you find it used "for anything" you can point to such cases where it is improperly used. When it is used for the case where we genuinely don't have enough information to claim any "probability" then it is simply a more colorful statement of that fact: that there is really nothing actually measured and known based on which any other statement than "we know exactly one example that such outcome is possible because we live in this outcome" is honestly impossible. You may psychologically not like that fact, but when there is no more data, it has to be admitted that there is no more data to claim anything else than that. Maybe the following can help you: Imagine you find yourself in the middle of the desert, in all directions you see only sand. People today know that every desert ends somewhere, but that's based on the fact that enough people don't live in the middle of the desert, so you must imagine that you are the very first person that ever existed and that you find yourself in the middle of the desert. While moving around the place, looking for any signs, you may or may not find the proofs about something else in the distance. But you can genuinely be in the phase where you see only sand and can't conclude anything about the existence of, for example, the rivers or the sees. The way I see it, the message is not "give up any attempt to learn more about the Universe you are in" the message should be "sitting around and inventing stories doesn't help: you have to move and actively search to find out more." The humanity was for a while good in inventing stories that sounded comforting but were completely unsupported, but we have actually in the last 100 years found the exact and provable signs about much more of our Universe than ever in our history: think about it: 100 years ago nobody knew that there exists anything more than one galaxy: ours. Today we can actually claim that there are one hundred billion galaxies in our Universe. And that most of them move away from ours. And we can calculate very precisely when all of them were on "one place": around 13.8 billion years ago. I'm always so glad that I live in this point of history to be even able to learn about that.(1) If you want more answers, support the science which looks for the answers -- there have to be serious investments in the real experiments for finding out more because easily reachable information is already found. And the humanity sadly invests more in military equipment than in science. And a lot of what we've learned we have learned from the projects that are less "sexy": you don't have to have many humans walking on the moon to learn more about the moon, for example: using robotic probes is all that we need today. But you should also not realistically expect the answers that are behind the limits of what's reachable for us. In the example of the first human in the desert, he can reach some land behind the desert, but being just a first human, walking there, he surely won't walk on the moon. He can however look at the moon and the changes in the shades from the sun on different places on the Earth and develop the idea that the Earth is also round. And that's how scientific discovery works: carefully doing enough experiments to be able to conclude something that was before unknown. 1) to reestablish the perspective for the day-to-day events, search for "Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy"
- ubernostrum 8y ago
  Anthropic "answers" are used precisely to tell people they should "give up any attempt to learn more". They proclaim trivially that since X happened, the probability of X having happened is 1, therefore there is nothing in need of further explanation, so would you please stop now? I should mention at this point that my degree is in philosophy, and my thesis was on the argument from design post-Darwin. Much of it consisted of exploring how various people -- not at all religious people! -- have been struck by the seeming improbability of our universe full of complex structured arrangements of matter and energy (including us) and sought explanations beyond "God must have done it". I had to read Barrow and Tipler's door-stopper of a book on the anthropic principle as part of that, along with criticisms of anthropic arguments, and came away convinced that the anthropic principle is at best a tautology possessing no explanatory power.
  - acqq 8y ago
    > would you please stop now? I should mention at this point that my degree is in philosophy That explains, thank you. > Anthropic "answers" are used precisely to tell people they should "give up any attempt to learn more". I don’t see any support for that claim and I claim the opposite and I’ve already elaborated my claim.
    - ubernostrum 8y ago
      Anthropic arguments are brought up when someone notices the seeming improbability of the universe we observe around us, and whenever someone suggests that it's worth digging into that to figure out if there's a deeper reason for it. Why, out of all the possible values they could have taken, did the fundamental constants of our universe take the specific values we observe, and which happen to give rise to complex accumulations of matter and energy? We know of nothing -- yet -- to suggest those particular values were necessary. We know that even tiny changes to those values produce a very different universe in which significant accumulations of matter and energy don't occur. So the particular universe we observe around us appears to be staggeringly improbable. The anthropic argument says "well, we observe it, therefore it happened, therefore don't bother digging any more because that explains that". And it's incredibly unsatisfying. (I should note Barrow and Tipler did go further and proposed a variety of anthropic principles, some of which border on religious, but I'm talking here mainly about the base anthropic argument, as trotted out way back at the start of this comment chain) There are people who look for deeper theories in which the particular conditions we observe do fall out as necessary. There are people who work on multiverse theories where it's inevitable that at least some universes will have conditions amenable to complex accumulations of matter (and thus to conscious observers). There are even people who've gone way out there proposing theories of natural selection applied at the level of whole universes, where arrangements of the constants that help a universe "reproduce" more (usually through forming singularities) are also coincidentally ones which require complex accumulations of matter. There's a whole wealth of things out there to think about and explore. But anthropic arguments tell us to just shrug our shoulders, say it's totally unsurprising that a seemingly-so-unlikely thing happened, and stop trying to explore. (and, of course, they do it in a away that's suspect from both a logical and a probability standpoint)

acqq 8y ago

> The issue is, as I pointed out, that it works for anything If you find it used "for anything" you can point to such cases where it is improperly used. When it is used for the case where we genuinely don't have enough information to claim any "probability" then it is simply a more colorful statement of that fact: that there is really nothing actually measured and known based on which any other statement than "we know exactly one example that such outcome is possible because we live in this outcome" is honestly impossible. You may psychologically not like that fact, but when there is no more data, it has to be admitted that there is no more data to claim anything else than that. Maybe the following can help you: Imagine you find yourself in the middle of the desert, in all directions you see only sand. People today know that every desert ends somewhere, but that's based on the fact that enough people don't live in the middle of the desert, so you must imagine that you are the very first person that ever existed and that you find yourself in the middle of the desert. While moving around the place, looking for any signs, you may or may not find the proofs about something else in the distance. But you can genuinely be in the phase where you see only sand and can't conclude anything about the existence of, for example, the rivers or the sees. The way I see it, the message is not "give up any attempt to learn more about the Universe you are in" the message should be "sitting around and inventing stories doesn't help: you have to move and actively search to find out more." The humanity was for a while good in inventing stories that sounded comforting but were completely unsupported, but we have actually in the last 100 years found the exact and provable signs about much more of our Universe than ever in our history: think about it: 100 years ago nobody knew that there exists anything more than one galaxy: ours. Today we can actually claim that there are one hundred billion galaxies in our Universe. And that most of them move away from ours. And we can calculate very precisely when all of them were on "one place": around 13.8 billion years ago. I'm always so glad that I live in this point of history to be even able to learn about that.(1) If you want more answers, support the science which looks for the answers -- there have to be serious investments in the real experiments for finding out more because easily reachable information is already found. And the humanity sadly invests more in military equipment than in science. And a lot of what we've learned we have learned from the projects that are less "sexy": you don't have to have many humans walking on the moon to learn more about the moon, for example: using robotic probes is all that we need today. But you should also not realistically expect the answers that are behind the limits of what's reachable for us. In the example of the first human in the desert, he can reach some land behind the desert, but being just a first human, walking there, he surely won't walk on the moon. He can however look at the moon and the changes in the shades from the sun on different places on the Earth and develop the idea that the Earth is also round. And that's how scientific discovery works: carefully doing enough experiments to be able to conclude something that was before unknown. 1) to reestablish the perspective for the day-to-day events, search for "Everything Is Amazing And Nobody Is Happy"

ubernostrum 8y ago
Anthropic "answers" are used precisely to tell people they should "give up any attempt to learn more". They proclaim trivially that since X happened, the probability of X having happened is 1, therefore there is nothing in need of further explanation, so would you please stop now? I should mention at this point that my degree is in philosophy, and my thesis was on the argument from design post-Darwin. Much of it consisted of exploring how various people -- not at all religious people! -- have been struck by the seeming improbability of our universe full of complex structured arrangements of matter and energy (including us) and sought explanations beyond "God must have done it". I had to read Barrow and Tipler's door-stopper of a book on the anthropic principle as part of that, along with criticisms of anthropic arguments, and came away convinced that the anthropic principle is at best a tautology possessing no explanatory power.
- acqq 8y ago
  > would you please stop now? I should mention at this point that my degree is in philosophy That explains, thank you. > Anthropic "answers" are used precisely to tell people they should "give up any attempt to learn more". I don’t see any support for that claim and I claim the opposite and I’ve already elaborated my claim.
  - ubernostrum 8y ago
    Anthropic arguments are brought up when someone notices the seeming improbability of the universe we observe around us, and whenever someone suggests that it's worth digging into that to figure out if there's a deeper reason for it. Why, out of all the possible values they could have taken, did the fundamental constants of our universe take the specific values we observe, and which happen to give rise to complex accumulations of matter and energy? We know of nothing -- yet -- to suggest those particular values were necessary. We know that even tiny changes to those values produce a very different universe in which significant accumulations of matter and energy don't occur. So the particular universe we observe around us appears to be staggeringly improbable. The anthropic argument says "well, we observe it, therefore it happened, therefore don't bother digging any more because that explains that". And it's incredibly unsatisfying. (I should note Barrow and Tipler did go further and proposed a variety of anthropic principles, some of which border on religious, but I'm talking here mainly about the base anthropic argument, as trotted out way back at the start of this comment chain) There are people who look for deeper theories in which the particular conditions we observe do fall out as necessary. There are people who work on multiverse theories where it's inevitable that at least some universes will have conditions amenable to complex accumulations of matter (and thus to conscious observers). There are even people who've gone way out there proposing theories of natural selection applied at the level of whole universes, where arrangements of the constants that help a universe "reproduce" more (usually through forming singularities) are also coincidentally ones which require complex accumulations of matter. There's a whole wealth of things out there to think about and explore. But anthropic arguments tell us to just shrug our shoulders, say it's totally unsurprising that a seemingly-so-unlikely thing happened, and stop trying to explore. (and, of course, they do it in a away that's suspect from both a logical and a probability standpoint)