But, whatever the deficitif that stumbling block were not in the way, I would have done better (and maybe I will next time). Is Carroll not missing Douglas Adams puddle argument? The universe doesnt have to exist in order not to care. An interesting argument and one that adds to the fine body of work that attempts to prove or disprove the existence of an omnipotent interferer.
Carroll is a fluid and eloquent speaker, anticipating and then answering his audiences objections before theyre even uttered. Where is the fine tuning in the distance of the sun from the earth? So it could be given the word God to refer to it and no atheist can prove otherwise to such a naming. It may be that the conditions in our universe are, in fact, the only possible conditions, and we just havent found the correct model yet. (notice, I removed the dear Lord from the beginning of that prayer). Apparent fine-tunings may be explained by dynamical mechanisms or improved notions of probability. Until you do, you really have no idea how probable or improbable this universe is. Well, obviously he didnt t think he could do both he could only do one or the other. However heres a thought, perhaps atheism is only acceptable to persons who live a fulfilling and comfortable existence, -for whom work, for example, is more akin to a hobby. Kudos on the organizers for starting to include nonbelievers, who, after all, probably have something more substantive to say. Fair enough, but if Adams isnt addressing cosmological fine-tuning, then Carroll cant be faulted for ignoring him. My own objection slips in between that one (why constraints) and Seans #1 (unknown constraints) as I see the religious finetuning argument as mistaking prior probability with posterior likelihood (mistaken constraints). #3 is best stated as: It doesnt tell you it cant. I read about this book on Seans blog and I cant wait to read it. When I asked Sean if he was going to turn the lectures into a book, which I believe is expected, he said he already had. The Universe, as I understand it, is even more fine-tuned to make black holes than it is to make hydrogenand, at long enough timescales even the black holes evaporate. So the observable universe didnt just happen; it is either picked out by some general principle, perhaps something to do with the wave function of the universe, or its generated dynamically by some process within a larger multiverse. And we think (if we are thinking clearly) perfectly plausible and often true chains of reasoning. (1.5) Anthropic principle + nothing else. If you witnessed a priest raping a child in the name of a god, you wouldnt hesitate to call 9-1-1, at the very least. You can unsubscribe at any time and we'll never share your details to third parties. [Conditional] probabilities (approx): No.
We find that inflation is very unlikely, in the sense that a negligibly small fraction of possible universes experience a period of inflation. Id imagine the replies are not being typed directly into the comment box on the site for this to be happening. Hmm Ive been running El Capitan since it was released without that problem. How do we have any more control over our own conduct than a robot has over theirs? But it IS one of the biggest and most interesting open problems in modern cosmology. Im got Use smart quotes and dashes checked in my keyboard preferences. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1449240174198-2'); }); "The tuning required for some of these physical parameters to give rise to life turns out to be less precise than the tuning needed to capture a station on your radio, according to new calculations," says Miriam Frankel, who authored the FQXi report, which was produced with support from the John Templeton Foundation. It could be that there is no conspiracy at all," says Sloan, whose research is also featured in the report. didnt take a year off, hed be out of university sooner (true) and also he may have a smoother move into the academics of university, while hes in the groove of school and have retained what he learned better than taking a year off. In fact, he says that any positive value of the constant would tend to decrease the fraction of matter that forms into galaxies, reducing the amount available for life. Or even life of any kind. Is that a Wiki for home brewers? What reason allows is the very special group behaviour that the selfish theory denies. Maybe they do the same for him. Do you have that? Well done! Many people here seem to be thinking only of ways to cut off the god inference. Here are his five arguments (in his words) why the FTA doesnt prove theism: He goes on in his post to explain his own intentions and to dissect Craigs responses. This was my attempt to debunk the triple alpha process as a fine tuning argument. We use the invariant measure on solutions to Einsteins equation to quantify Thats just the issue for physics and cosmology: with all the work that has gone into string theory, we cant find a model that doesnt look like this, that doesnt have the free parameters. Not a good way to start the year. Carrolls presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique. Indeed, it may well be the most precious thing there is about being human, for it defines who we are as individuals. If God had finely-tuned the universe for life, it would look very different indeed. A somewhat stronger argument for God would be to say that theres a zero probability things naturally happened the way they did, but I think the real problem is assigning prior probabilities to a scenario where we have no comparable scenarios to figure out what the prior probability should be. I might try to fix it at some pointtoo busy with other things right this moment, though. So the mere existence of the issue presupposes its resolution. it is very unlikely that a stone will tumble the way it does during an avalanche. That is why the law recognizes diminished capacity for those who cannot understand the effects of their actions. Snippet: since we know that the best of the theories developed so far allow about 10^500 different universes, anybody who argues that the universe must have same properties everywhere would have to prove that only one of these 10^500 universes is possible.Can we return back to the old picture of a single universe? Does he mean that the expansion rates will be different in different places in a multiverse, and somewhere it will be the expansion rate of our early universe? PERIOD. The Universe is what it is, and its up to us to make of it what we will. Get weekly and/or daily updates delivered to your inbox. What is free about it? The content is provided for information purposes only. My son recently had to decide between All that feels like were freely hopping from one alternate universe to another, willing all sorts of realities to manifest with reckless an unconstrained abandon. Certainly, organisms can live at extremes but to say that the universe is fine tuned so that some as yet undiscovered bacteria can eke out a meagre existence on Mars is almost laughable. Id like to point out that, setting aside the fine tuning therefore Jeebus nonsense, there really is a valid fine tuning problem within scientific cosmology, for which we dont know the correct naturalistic explanation. I refuse to relinquish exclusive possession of moral responsibility to the religious. The few moral nihilist I know all seem to be consequentialists; they have no other means to justify their actions. You wont like my compatibilist take on free will, but maybe Ill convert you! But here in Safari they arent being inserted. http://darwinskidneys-science.com/2015/07/01/does-carbon-production-in-stars-reveal-design-in-nature/. making decisions because for the most part, no important part of our decision making relies on this purported illusion. I would argue that Carroll is right in his opening statement where he says Im not sure there even is a fine tuning argument.. So P(datum given H1)=1. That isnt my understanding of the fine-tuning problem. Although most religious people do bring humans into the fine-tuning argument, more rational people can still wonder why the universe is capable of producing intelligent life of any kind. Over the last few decades, the subject of fine tuning has attracted some of the sharpest minds in physics. These constants are balanced in such a way that life has evolved at least once, in one small part of the Universe. Technically, the posterior probabilities are robust to the prior. Im left scratching my head something we dont yet know the answer to is called wait for it a problem! What use free will, of any flavor, in such deliberations? The slow gives way to the fast. I think most physicists realize that the laws are also in play. Its a continuation of a very long-standing discussion. (1 part in 10^60 different), then no life as we know it. The report then outlines arguments that fine-tuning is an illusion, noting that life may take a very different form than naively imagined, and that if multiple physical parameters are considered to vary simultaneously, it could alleviate any apparent fine-tuning problems. Possibly, but in order to do it, three conditions should be met: One should invent a better cosmological theory, one should invent a better theory of fundamental interactions, and one should propose an alternative explanation for the miraculous coincidences., ..[O]ur observed universe is highly non-generic, and in the past it was even more non-generic, or finely tuned.. He explains the motivation for the multiverse quite well. (3) Life is not as unlikely as it appears. Here Sean is responding specifically to the fine tuning implies God argument, and doing so eloquently. This is the idea that the constants have been fine-tuned by some unseen omnipotent being who has set them up in a way that maximises the amount of life that form. I think that theres an even more basic problem with the fine-tuning argument: it depends on the starting assumption that humans are special. But we play our parts and read our scripts, discovering from within as the play unfolds what our true natures reveal themselves to be. I think Barbara is right that even if there were a very low prior probability that things ended up this way, thats not an argument for God. (Using the mail interface with the built-in Mail.app.). What the Universe is really and truly fine-tuned foris to turn everything into nothing. We have an illusion of freedom, yes, but its the freedom of the puppet to love its strings. Because then you cant really argue that most possible universe give rise to nothing. Maybe hes discovered how to blunt his personal arrow of time, but is keeping the secret to himself. Yes, Ralph, I agree. So what value of the cosmological constant best encourages galaxy and star formation, and therefore the evolution of life? And inflation might end up playing a crucial role in the story. Or fast to slow. The most natural interpretation of the measure The physics suggests this doesnt work though.
But it is very unclear how that impacts the fine tuning argument. [Carroll considers this his most important point. This is related to the difference between prior and posterior probabilities. In FQXi's in-depth report, Frankel explores the complex history of research on fine tuning, including potential explanations for itsuch as those derived from string theory and the multiverse frameworkand assesses proposals for experimentally testing these explanations directly and indirectly. So, really, the assumption to challenge there is the model, not the prior.
. the unique ability of persons to exercise control over their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/, the unique ability of A ROBOT to exercise control over their conduct in the manner necessary for moral responsibility, it would seem unreasonable to say of a person that she deserves blame and punishment for her conduct if it turned out that she was not at any point in time in control of it.. Here are five ways data can transform your business. "Stars can continue to operate with substantial variations in the fundamental constants," says Adams, whose work is featured in the report. How could I not do my best? To be honest, Ive never found the puddle argument very persuasive. What a wonderful statement on the question of what is free will, and the illusion of experiencing it. I know that if I hit someone with a crowbar I will hurt or even kill them, so if I do it I have a moral responsibility for that action. But, whatever tomorrow may bring, I shall have no choice in the matter. If you ask a winner of such a lottery, they wont know how many tickets were sold. Intelligent life. Another idea is that there is some deeper law of nature, which we have yet to discover, that sets the constants as they are. Every year, the equation (and thus the universe) gets less and less elegant, while Carroll stays the same. The multiverse is a perfectly viable naturalistic explanation. Yours look smart, at least in the email I got. Today, Page says this idea is potentially falsifiable and says we already have evidence that does the trick. He must die. . or, by Foundational Questions Institute, FQXi. Without that it gets nowhere. That lectureship, originally endowed to promote the study of natural theology (the observation of nature as evidence for God), hashad some prestigious honorees. Not once did I ever hear my son appeal to his magical contra-causal powers when he explained his thinking on the subject because, of course, that didnt play at all, nor could it contribute at all, to solving the real world problems When we talk about fine tuning on websites such as this or in debates with WLC, we mean fine tuning as an argument for god. Which means, as Carroll said, we have no idea whether there really is a fine tuning problem or not. I recommend the Andrei Linde article at the Edge link that I posted just above, since Im obviously not expressing this well. I think Greg Kusnicks comment above about finding a good explanations is a much better way to state it. Do you think that a highly aggressive lowlife with poor impulse control (and drug addiction to boot) who beats someone to death during a robbery has the same capability of foreseeing his actions as you, and therefore has the same moral responsibility as you? In stark contrast, though I see vastly more complexity and sophistication in the decision-making process than there is in a thermostats operation, I see no freedom in either. religion is disprove as real by anthropology, we have to stop acting like it has anything on par with other areas of science. No magic. But in any event, I dont think your criticism of my crude Bayesian analysis is correct: If the stated model is assumed, then the single data point is highly informative, because a universe with life is so vanishingly unlikely under H1 and the stated model. What else does morality mean to an atheist other than a due consideration for the welfare of other sentient beings? So instead of directly creating life, God simply sets the conditions to maximise the chances of it forming. Discover special offers, top stories, Assume a lottery where the winning payout is a predetermined amount, independent of how many tickets are sold. Whats more our brain changes as it develops throughout life, a childs brain thinks in a different way than a teenagers brain, and a teenagers brain differs from an adults brain. There do not seem to be many parameter values that lead to anything remotely stable. Why is that? But, after a few minutes reflection I dont mind that they must suffer for their sins. Im off to see the fireworks! We all experience the phenomenon of imagining different potential futures, freely flipping in our minds from the expected results of one option available to us to another.
The decision-making process your son went through is very real and very important. Rehab no! 10^100 types of universe. Ive never liked this argument either. All the models that we have come up with so far (such as string theory) seem to look like this: Model: By the anthropic principle, the probability of the datum is 1, regardless of the number of universes: The equation E=mc^2 doesnt tell you that the constant C could have other values in other universes. The alternative is finding a better model that just doesnt allow all the possible universes, doesnt have all the free parameters, and says that any possible universe looks like our universe. (2) There is a better model for how universes are built, that does not have all these free parameters, in other words, the conditions in our universe fall out of the model quite naturally as the only valid solution. Now how much that measure is reasonable (it _is_ invariant) is arguable at a guess. And its true. Various scientists have calculated that even the tiniest of changes to these constants would make life impossible.