Paul Davies has written a curious op-ed that has been blithely published by the New York Times. I’m not sure why the NYT saw fit to publish it, except that Davies does have a reputation as a popularizer of physics, and as something of an apologist for deism; they certainly couldn’t have chosen to print it on its merits. His argument is the tired and familiar claim that science has to be taken on faith, so it’s just like religion. I recall hearing variants on this back in the schoolyard, usually punctuated with “nyaa nyaas” and assertions about each others’ mothers, and while we may not have said much about science, the principle was the same. Citing a false equivalency is a cheap argument, but not very credible.
Davies lost my respect for his thesis early on, from the first sentence actually, but I’ll focus instead on this claim from his second paragraph: “All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.” Perhaps this is where not being a physicist has the virtue of a different perspective, because I can say without reservation that he’s completely wrong — in a historical science like evolutionary biology, we have no problem when we encounter a phenomenon that isn’t orderly or rational, and that has all the appearance of haphazard meaninglessness. We’re accustomed to seeing simple chance as a strong thread running throughout biological history.
Pattern and order are important too, of course, but when looking at the appearance of some particular feature we have to be prepared for the possibility that it is not a consequence of some orderly progression — perhaps it just happened that way. I can’t imagine that my physicist colleagues* are any different, and that they would be horrified to discover that physical order was “rooted in reasonless absurdity”. That would be interesting. If that is the way the universe is, that is what science will try to grapple with (admittedly, we might have serious difficulties grappling with total chaos, but no one claims that science can have answers for everything). That Davies seems to believe that order must rule everywhere and at every level is a stronger presupposition than is warranted by a scientific approach, and sounds remarkably theological…and I don’t think Davies would object to the charge of theology, although he clearly thinks the only good science fits his theological model.
But then Davies does have this notion that that the concept of physical laws is derived from Christian doctrine — that science is rooted in attempts to define the actions of a supernatural lawgiver who imposes a kind of universal consistency on everything. As a historical argument, and as a psychological description of the way the minds of people like Newton worked, I can go along with that; but as an assumption that this expectation of a universal order must reflect a universal reality, I disagree. If the laws of physics were subtly different in Egypt than in Greece, we would have developed an empirical physics that took that into account; that certain laws are constant everywhere is just what is, as empirically determined by scientific observation. A geologist, a biologist, an anthropologist, and a historian will also be able to tell you that there are many things that are quite different between Egypt and Greece, and yet variation does not mean those sciences fail.
Alas, Davies also brings up the anthropic principle, that tiresome exercise in metaphysical masturbation that always flounders somewhere in the repellent ditch between narcissism and solipsism. When someone says that life would not exist if the laws of physics were just a little bit different, I have to wonder…how do they know? Just as there are many different combinations of amino acids that can make any particular enzyme, why can’t there be many different combinations of physical laws that can yield life? Do the experiment of testing different universes, then come talk to me. Until then, claiming that the anthropic principle, an undefined mish-mash of untested assumptions, supports your personal interpretation of how the universe exists and came to be is a self-delusional error.
I’m also always a bit disappointed with the statements of anthropic principle proponents for another reason. If these are the best and only laws that can give rise to intelligent life in the universe, why do they do such a lousy job of it? Life is found in one thin and delicate film on one planet in this mostly empty region of space, and even if there are other fertile planets out there, they will be nearly impossibly distant, and life will be just as fragile and prone to extinction there as here. Even on this world, all of the available environments favor bacteria over scientists or theologians, and said scientists and theologians have existed for only about 0.00001% of the lifetime of this universe, and are prone to wink out of existence long before we can get rid of one of the zeroes in that number. If I wanted to argue for a position on the basis of the anthropic principle, rather than trying to pretend that we live in a Goldilocks universe, we should be wondering how we ended up in such a hostile dump of a universe, one that favors endless expanses of frigid nothingness with scattered hydrogen molecules over one that has trillions of square light years of temperate lakefront property with good fishing, soft breezes, and free wireless networking.
Maybe Davies has faith in science, but I don’t. I take it as it comes. I have expectations and hypotheses, but these are lesser presuppositions than what is implied by faith—and I’m also open to the possibility that any predictions I might make will fail. Perhaps if Davies weren’t so obsessed with equating his religion with his science, he wouldn’t be blind to the fact that most scientists don’t see his god in the operation of the universe.
*I see that at least one of my physicist colleagues agrees — Sean Carroll’s reply makes the same point. If you want more perspectives than that, Edge is compiling contributions, and Mark Hoofnagle, Janet Stemwedel, and Dave Bacon have weighed in at Scienceblogs.
PZ, I both agree and disagree with you. I do think that science takes it as written that the universe proceeds according to lawful regularity, but this is not a matter of faith. It’s more like a logical axiom. Such an assumption, however, is the opposite of faith: it is not dogmatic, but tentative, and it could easily be changed if evidence indicated that it needed to be. However, evidence never has.
Inconsistency in religious propaganda techniques is funny to watch. Davies calls science faith, but at the same time prominent religious folk argue that religion is not based soley on faith. Christians really need to get their stores straight; they dodge back and forth faster than a politician.
*sigh* I remember reading what was basically Davies’ article in the LA Times Sunday section. When I was 11 years old. It seemed dubious, even then.
You know what’s changed? These things used to make me want to tear up the newspaper–now they make me want to throw my laptop across the room!
I just slogged through the editorial, and immediately clicked over here for some sweet rationality. That’s another difference, nowadays, at least these things don’t exist in a vacuum based on what folderol a particular newspaper chooses to print & ruin my Sunday breakfast.
The Edge link doesn’t work.
Paul Davies says,
Bollocks. People are eager to propose reasons why the laws of nature are the way they are. The problem is that those propositions can be very hard to test! Consequently, we have a big pile of them, waiting around for experiments which are either elaborate and expensive, if we’re lucky, or impossible outside of a science-fiction story, at worst. What do we do in such a situation? Why, we gather our wits and bluster through on luck and pluck.
And people had been doing science for many centuries before Isaac Newton. Davies should look up a history of the Ionians: Empedocles established the material nature of air, Aristarchus realized that the Earth was not the center of the Universe, Leucippus and Democritus made a very good guess about matter being composed of atoms, and so forth. Platonism and a slave society ensured that Hellenistic science never fully embraced the power of experiment, but what progress they made!
It’s also worth noting that Greek scientists moved within generations from polytheism to positions we’d characterize nowadays as deism, agnosticism and atheism, all before the first word of Christian gospel had ever been set on parchment.
Which accomplishments of Isaac Newton do we remember today? Other than a few historians of science, who pays attention to his fumblings with alchemy or his dream of mapping the floorplan of the Jerusalem Temple? Does anyone care that he had a couple books of astrology — perhaps read, perhaps not — on his bookshelf?
No. The legacy of Newton, the discoveries we now call “Newtonian”, are his accomplishments as a scientist, accomplishments which endure not because they hew to his heterodox, anti-Trinitarian religious faith, but because they help us understand the natural world.
It pains me to be so disparaging, but I have to call Paul Davies an excellent example of faith making a smart person say stupid things.
PZ….
You being a biologist and all, I’m surprised you don’t consider the obvious answer to this, the really important part of Mr. Davies article:
“In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency.”
I think fractals provide a clue to the answer. Patterns that exist in the micro are also found in the macro. A given bit of life has within itself self-organizing ability. We non-scientists, and maybe you too, call it DNA.
I can dispel with an external god by making the claim, which I -think- is supported by empirical observation, that the universe appears to be self-organizing. I need no gods for that, and it addresses Mr. Davies’ complaint. Any claim beyond that, that the unviverse appears to be self-organizing, requires proof. Of which there is none.
To finish Mr. Davies thought:
“In other words, the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency. The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research. But until science comes up with a testable theory of the laws of the universe, its claim to be free of faith is manifestly bogus.”
“The specifics of that explanation are a matter for future research.”
I think if we really looked for the DNA of the universe, we’ll eventually find it. And don’t propose that dark matter horseshit to cover the lack of real discovery – that falls into the “god did it” category, to me.
What “Dark Matter horseshit”?
There is actual evidence for it’s existence now.
Typical apologist BS.
Assert that science must explain everything all the while assuming their god exists and offering no credible evidence what so ever.
But beyond that, what does the anthropic principle even tell us? “If the conditions of the universe were different, then life might not ever have arisen.” In other words, if things were different, then things would have ended up differently. Well, duh! But so? The fact that reality takes a particular path through a myriad of possibilities tells us what, exactly? If things turn out a certain way, then they were meant to turn out that way? Is that the leap? I just don’t even get what people think the anthropic principle is supposed to demonstrate.
That nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way is the conclusion of science, not a required assumption. The only assumption that science requires is that the likelihood of intelligible order is sufficiently high for it to be worth the effort of searching for it.
“There is actual evidence for it’s existence now.”
Can you send over a teaspoonful?
“Typical apologist BS.”
I’ll assume that’s sarcasm. ;-)
Oh, and by the way, if you think that the External Agency floating out there beyond the Universe which chose our physical laws is an intelligent being, then I have some questions for you:
1. Does this Agency live in a Universe like ours? If so, where did that Universe — call it Heaven — come from? And if not, doesn’t this mean that intelligence can live in an environment unlike our own, with different natural laws — i.e., that the Anthropic Principle is false?
2. Such an Agency would have to be an astonishingly skilled physicist and cosmologist to even plan the creation of a Universe like ours. Doesn’t the mere ability to reason in such a fashion — the ability for memories to persist across time, and all the other such prerequisites — imply that the Agency exists in a medium in which events are not entirely random? How did that medium come about?
3. We can trace the historical development of Christianity with considerable confidence, beginning with storm-god worship in the Fertile Crescent perhaps four thousand years ago. During the Israelite and Judean monarchies, polytheism was gradually supplanted by a “henotheist” view: one God rules supreme in this land, but others hold sway elsewhere. Eventually, the notion of a worldwide deity was articulated (witness the book of Jonah, in which the protagonist flees to the edge of the known world but can’t escape YHWH), and the idea of a cosmic dualism between good and evil beings was adapted from the Persians. Paul of Tarsus wrenched Christianity away from Judaism, Priscillian or one of his colleagues slipped the Trinity into 1 John, and Aquinas “reconciled” Catholic faith with the scientific knowledge recovered from Spanish Arab libraries, making Aristotle a part of Roman dogma until that other troublesome part of ancient science reared its head again with Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei. All this history is about people doing things: the “sophisticated” theology of God as the “essential condition of being” (or whatever) is a product of thousands of years of people making stuff up. Why should we identify the discoveries of science with this one, particular mythological tradition?
I saw the article, and my reaction was somewhere between “bullshit!” and “So what?”
We have to assume that the laws of the universe are orderly, not because of “religious faith,” but because if we didn’t, there would be nothing to talk about. We can’t operate as if the universe were capricious or illusory; there would be no way to deal with such a world. Fortunately, it seems to work out that way.
Davies seems to object to the fact that at some point you just have to say “That’s just the way it is.” in answer to the persistent “Why? I don’t quite understand why that bothers some people so much, but I guess it does. Otherwise, it’s “Turtles, all the way down.”
Davies states “Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe”
Well, no that isn’t clear. Science is NOT founded on the existence of something outside the universe. Man I hate this argument. If you look up the definition of science, you’re not going to see anything about things outside the universe. Your going to get something pertaining to observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena. Why is this so hard to understand?
Thanks PZ for a nice rebuttal.
Why is it that when scientists say “I dunno” or “that appears to be the way it is” – it’s viewed as a failure of science, but when the religious say “I dunno” or “that appears to be the way it is” – it’s a sacrament?
I am a physicist, and I don’t take it on faith that “nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way.” It is manifestly otherwise.
The relevant definition of rational is consistent with or based on reason; logical. If only it were! Ever heard of quantum mechanics? It’s clear by now that nature does not conform itself to our mental capabilities. We are forced to invent new, counterintuitive logics at every turn.
Rather than intelligible, I’ll consider the stronger statement that nature is lawful. It can’t be intelligible if there isn’t a structure to understand, but assuming there is a lawful structure doesn’t mean we’re capable of understanding it. I take lawful to mean that there exist some local physical invariants, which can be expressed in terms of equations of motion or extrema conditions. This does not preclude there being unlawful, or random processes as well.
Do we physicists take lawfulness on faith? Some might, but I don’t. It can be considered a hypothesis, just like any other statement. It just happens to receive overwhelming support from experiment. It is difficult to conceive what it would mean for there to be no lawfulness, or how life or cognition would be possible in such a universe, but that doesn’t matter. If you want to ponder necessary conditions for reason and disappear into a solipsistic hole of Kantian metaphysics be my guest. Davies appears to be blind to the difference between a belief, or a working hypothesis, and faith. But he has bigger issues.
One of our two pillars of theoretical physics, quantum field theory, is manifestly non-deterministic and unlawful (the part Von Neumann called the R-process). We don’t like it, but have been, for now, forced to accept it. One would think Davies would be aware of this fact, but it seems to manifestly contradict his assertion about the nature of science. So is he stupid, dishonest, ignorant, or some combination of the three? Can we design an experiment to find out?
Hmmmm, Davies needs a devil to make sense of things! I better go find one so I can try to see things his way.
Alas, Davies also brings up the anthropic principle, that tiresome exercise in metaphysical masturbation that always flounders somewhere in the repellent ditch between narcissism and solipsism.
lol… PZ thinks that the observed reality is “metaphyiscal masterbation”.
He must also equate his ignorance of the facts to reality… ;)
Another point is that the religious implicitly admit that faith is undesirable when they make these arguments. They are just disguised tu quoque fallacies: “Well, okay, I am irrational! But so are you!” “I know faith is bad, but you have it too, so you’re bad too!”
Guess that’s what PZ was getting at with the “nah nah nah” comment.
I’m glad somebody was able to put a more eloquent spin on this. The only thing that could come to my mind was “SCIENCE DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY,” which, while somewhat satisfying to yell at my monitor, doesn’t address Davies’ misconceptions *quite* as well.
Ric, I like the description of scientific first principles as a “logical axiom” that can be edited rather than an article of faith. That really crystallizes the distinction.
Hey, #9
Not a teaspoonful, but a picture.
I think the foundation underlying science is that occurrences can be explained, not that it is always orderly and rational. It’s not a faith, you just don’t take our words for it. It is based on observations and testable hypotheses.
This is such a frustrating oped because there is a thin veneer of actual point in it. This guy obviously just read The God Delusion and decided it was necessary to use his feeble command of the philosophy of science, and I do mean feeble, do dispute the objective rationality of science. But really, was the principle of uniformity really the best thing to attack? I mean, why not go for the throat and attack causality. The faith in causality is more of a faith that that in the principle of uniformity. Of course he couldn’t go and do that because regular people believe in causality as well.
To be fair, I think that there is a critique to be made of those who have faith in science. Not scientist mind you, but those non-scientists who place a sort of religious like faith in scientific studies and the like. I think this is a place where scientists and people who really understand science need to start explaining how this stuff actually works. That and the fact that the social sciences are trying to tag along with the hard sciences when they really don’t belong in even close to the same category, and I say that as someone deeply involved in political “science.”
While we’re at it, here’s more from Sean Carroll. It’s the physicist’s version of the point PZ raised in the post above, about the “lousy job” our physical laws do with regard to sustaining life.
See here.
The summer before last, I attended a conference on collider physics. One of the presentations was about how they figured out the charge of the top quark. According to the plain-vanilla Standard Model, the top quark should have a charge of 2/3 (in units where the electron’s charge is -1). However, there was a possibility that the top quark actually has charge 4/3. Which of those choices is preferable on anthropic grounds — i.e., which choice leads to matter, chemistry and us?
Surprise! Either of them would work. We can’t discriminate between options for a fundamental quantity of nature on anthropic grounds. You have to go to the accelerator folks. The data collected at Fermilab’s Tevatron (see arXiv:0709.2665) indicates that the data supports a top-quark charge of 2/3 pretty strongly. Chalk up one more for the Standard Model, but keep in mind that anthropic reasoning got us nowhere.
I love this blog.
I am not a scientist (musician) but I am very interested in science, evolutionary theory, etc.
I find religion to be hilarious and sad at the same time.
People cling to it like a teddy bear or security blanket and try to justify everything in terms of this nonsense that was probably drilled into them as children.
(I am currently raising a four year old with no religious nonsense! except some Saturday/Sunday sleepovers at his Grandparents where he goes to Sunday School. I don’t like this and This will be an argument soon enough.For now Sunday school is really just a babysitter. He wasn’t baptised and I think they think ‘we’ll get some religion into him’.) Not on my watch!
Anyway,
I find the dissections of their(the religious) arguments VERY ENTERTAINING.
Keep it up.
I read a lot but don’t post much as I fear I can’t keep up with you sciency folks!
Gee, that fellow in #16 sounds familiar. . . .
Atoms and planets, etc. don’t “obey” laws, they behave in ways that we describe using the word ‘law.’ So that guy’s whole argument simply rests on the flawed notion of trying to fit the universe into his own inappropriate use of language. Once the idea that the universe behaves in ways we then describe by theory and experiment (as opposed to obeying abstract rules that we apply to the world), you are left when the apparently non-ending question: why do things behave the way they do?
That kind of question should lead him to do more research, make more discoveries…but alas…
Also, I don’t think science really makes the assumption that universe is well-ordered/intelligible….the evidence is pretty clear that it is, from what we already know. So if anything, its just going with the data.
Besides, if the world/universe weren’t reasonable or intelligible in some way, why did evolution apparently select for reasonable intelligence in humans and our relatives? How could an intelligence that uses reason and logic be beneficial in a world thats totally chaotic at every level?
One of our two pillars of theoretical physics, quantum field theory, is manifestly non-deterministic and unlawful (the part Von Neumann called the R-process). We don’t like it, but have been, for now, forced to accept it. One would think Davies would be aware of this fact, but it seems to manifestly contradict his assertion about the nature of science.
The mathematical basis for deterministic quantum mechanics
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2006quant.ph..4008.
Quantum Mechanics and Determinism
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002quant.ph.12095.
Equivalence relations between deterministic and quantum mechanical systems
http://www.springerlink.com/index/HH00377G1073586H.pdf
Quantization of discrete deterministic theories by Hilbert space extension
http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/phys/2005-0622-153937/14765.pdf
Quantum gravity as a dissipative deterministic system
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1999CQGra..16.3263T
-Gerard ‘t Hooft
So are you stupid, dishonest, ignorant, or some combination of the three? Can we design an experiment to find out?”
There is a tendency for some anti-theists to dismiss anthropic fine-tuning (with notable counter-examples like Dawkins and Dennett) based on the reasoning that it provides aid and comfort for theists (and deists) in general and Intelligent Design proponents in particular, and therefore must be suspect. In other words, based on the notion that anthropic fine tuning is inherently tainted with design and theism.
That is a mistaken impulse. True, anthropic fine tuning and a teleological interpretation of Gouldian historical contingency (which together might be called anthropic contingency) are all the IDists have left. The other ID planks are dead letters. The “design inference” is just Paleyism, which Darwin took care of. “Irreducible complexity” is demolished by comparative molecular biology. But anthropic fine tuning is supportable. This is why not only do IDists have a lot riding on anthropic fine tuning, so do theistic evolutionists like Miller and Conway Morris.
However, it is a error to suppose that anthropic fine tuning necessarily lends support to theism any more than the appearance of design in organisms or the intricacy of molecular mechanisms do. In fact, a well-supported and widely accepted naturalistic account of anthropic fine tuning would be devastating to IDist and theistic evolutionist claims regarding cosmological design, as well as teleological thinking in general. (Theism would simply retreat and provide God a different role, of course.) But dismissing the anthropic principle, fine tuning, and cosmological contingency out of hand makes atheists appear insecure and hence gives ammunition to creationists.
True, the premises of the various formulations of the anthropic principle and related ideas might be mistaken. But they are not trivial or absurd, and they ought to be taken seriously. There is something that needs to be explained, something which can’t be waved away by quoting Douglas Adams or Voltaire. Certainly many physicists (Kaku, Susskind etc.) and some philosophers (Bostrom) believe that there is something that needs to be explained. The need to explaining anthropic fine tuning has been one of the driving forces behind the various multiverse and cyclical universe universe models of the last couple of decades of theoretical physics.
It used to be normative to take the state of the cosmos and its laws for granted, to not ask why they are a certain way and how things would be if they were otherwise. That time is past. To blithely dismiss anthropic fine tuning is to concede those questions to theists and other teleologists.
Ric: I do think that science takes it as written that the universe proceeds according to lawful regularity, but this is not a matter of faith. It’s more like a logical axiom.
See here, I disagree. Science, or at least the scientific method, *discovered* the lawful regularity. It was never an axiom beyond a basic, innate concept of causality we all share because as humans that *do* things, we see the results on things that we do things to. In fact, that same innate concept of causality is exactly what the creationists and those like Davies are using to bait people into thinking there must be more, some cause of the universe itself, such that assuming there wasn’t a cause (which is an incorrect assumption about scientific methodology AND atheistic thought) must therefore make science a religion.
The historical reality is that we saw the patterns FIRST – the patterns were already there. We didn’t assume 32 feet / sec^2; quite the opposite. But someone, somewhere recognized that things DON’T fall at different rates (unless they are so light as to let air resistance affect it, though they didn’t use that term yet), and Galileo codified those patterns into mathematical terms. He didn’t assume there was a pattern there – he gathered the data first and the regularity presented itself.
So too, astronomy, geology, and the rest. Each science started by seeing the larger ordered pattern once they could look beyond the tiny amount of data they had from their tiny localized viewpoint. They didn’t assume a regular pattern – they noticed it first and then worked to codify it.
Gee… that Blake Stacy guy sounds stereotypically ignornant.
I agree with almost all of PZ’s post, but I have to admit that I don’t like his rubbishing of speculation concerning the anthropic principle. It’s perfectly legitimate for theorists to argue that life would be impossible if the universal constants were to take on values within particular ranges. Before evolution can take place, a certain amount of order is required. Stable matter, for instance, is absolutely essential.
Of course, science relies on faith in common sense logic, which isn’t anything like religious faith. Davies’ article is simply absurd.
Okay, I posted a bunch of links on scientific papers about deterministic quantum mechanics by G ‘t Hooft so that I can find out if the genius physicist, “efp” is…
stupid, dishonest, ignorant, or some combination of the three? Can we design an experiment to find out?
But they got picked up by the filter…
Blake, so then, henotheism explains why that bugger YHWH is so goddam jealous, in that bible book of his.
It always makes me laugh, that the Xians, etc, don’t cotton on to the fact that a sexually male god that supposedly created us and the universe doesn’t make any goddam sense Sexual function & identity are biological, but the god thing can’t be biological. Talk about the cart before the horse! Why can’t the religiots see that their god thing evolved from its Mesopotamian antecedents? Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.
I agree with PZ’s “false equivalency”, but why do many of the best physicists (i.e. Weinberg, Susskind) use the Anthropic Principle for the Cosmological Constant? Is it to get rid of god by using a brute force style reason? It’s like saying “If the Cosmological Constant were any other size then we would not be here to observe it”. At least it’s better than saying that god caused that Constant. It’s as if they reformulated the Anthropic Principle for the atheist before theists could claim it in their own formulation.
Blake Stacey, please go here and shoot down this physics or quit pretending that some link to a neodarwinian grunt session means anything more than…. groupthink:
http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/guest-post-rick-ryals-diracs-holes-and-einsteins-constant/
Joe, I don’t disagree. You’re exactly right: Thales observed the pattern of eclipses in ancient navigation records and came up with what I call an axiom from this data. I don’t mean it’s an axiom in the way that one would assume a premise for a logic problem absent of content. What I mean is that it has been taken as an axiom by scientists ever since Thales, but you are correct that it did arise out of a discovery. I was trying to intimate this (but not clearly enough) when I said it could be changed.
Also, I am not discussing the specifics of scientific law (32 feet / sec^2 et al.): those are certainly not axioms) but rather the observation that the universe proceeds according to lawful regulation.
Jamie: common sense logic
Ah, but if only logic WERE a “common” sense.
Whoops, when I said “lawful regulation” I meant “lawful regularity.” That makes all the difference in the world. There is no “regulation” in the universe. Typo.
Island, currently the filter grabs anything with more than two links and holds it “for review”. (I suppose it’s an anti-spam tactic.) It’s annoying, but as you can see – there they are.
Yes, Blake, I recognized it too.
NO, NO, NO! #33, your formulation is the anthropic principle! When did it get redefined into the teleological argument that everyone else is here is discussing? The anthropic principle countersthe fine tuning argument.
Blake Stacey wrote:
Hey, that’s what I always say when this subject comes up! But maybe not so succinctly.
BaldApe:
There wouldn’t be anyone to talk about it, either. Life as we know it depends on replication, and if there is no regularity then there can’t be anything that “replicates”, not to mention the need for energy sources etc. So some order is not just a prerequisite of science, it’s a prerequisite of life, and us being able to observe it is not the mysterious part.
I agree with PZ’s “false equivalency”, but why do many of the best physicists (i.e. Weinberg, Susskind) use the Anthropic Principle for the Cosmological Constant?
And what, specifically, is Lenny talking about when he says that “we will be hardpressed to answer the idists if the landscape fails”…? becuase “the appearance of design is UNDENIABLE”… ?
And what specifically is Richard Dawkins talking about when he says:
All appearances to the contrary… the only watchmaker is the blind forces of natuure… albeit deployed in a very special way… ?
Do you suppose that this means that the physics DOESN’T… “look like a fix”… ?
Do you suppose that this means that we should NOT give the first most apparent implication of the evidence… EQUAL TIME… and that we should dismiss the guy that’s standing over the dead body holding a smoking gun because we somehow know without looking that he couldn’a done it… ?
Just don’t call yourselves “self-honest”, nor scientific.
Lack of an alternative.
The anthropic principle countersthe fine tuning argument.
LOL.. anthropic selection from some theoretically speculative multiverse of potential is not a physics “principle”, much less is it a cosmological principle.
The anthropic physics as applied to most natural expectation for a dynamical structure principle is what gets you a *biocentric* cosmological principle.
island, redefine all you want; you can make anything mean anything that way. I’m not claiming it is a “principle” in any rigorous way; that is simply part of the name it was given. It says what it says, and claiming that “the anthropic principle” supports a “designed universe” is to call the fine-tuning argument by the same name as the argument that counters it (how effectively it counters fine-tuning is a matter of debate, though I find it quite satisfactory).
Thank you Kseniya, they finally posted, and now my follow-up is both, out of context… and just plain wrong… ;)
The anthropic principle countersthe fine tuning argument.
To treat this seriously, and at the risk of emboldening the troll, I don’t see that it does. From my point of view the anthropic principle is either a simple tautology or a trivial statement. Of course us being here means the universe is a certain way, but that doesn’t rule out the existence of a supernatural being. The anthropic principle says nothing about *how* the parameters got the way they are and I am very uncomfortable with the SciFi suggestions of multiple universes. Really, is a multiverse of universes the parsimonious solution we’re looking for?
The anthropic principle is grasping at straws.
No, Ms Meyers, I’m saying that the observed for evidence for the expectation of a dynamical structure mechanism, (a true cosmological principle), takes theoretical precedence over all other speculations, until or unless you can prove that the multiverse is real or justified by a final theory or a valid COMPLETE theory of quantum gravity.
It’s fine to use it like RD does to counter equally speculative rants of creationists, but it does NOT supercede the anthropic observation as it applies to the observed universe.
Name calling without a speck of support.
Boy… I’m really not impressed by the irrational belief system of the cranks that hang-out here.
#19 –
“The direct demonstration that dark matter has the properties inferred on the basis of indirect arguments shows that we are on the right track in our quest to understand the structure of the universe.”
That’s what bothers me about this stuff. I think it’s too likely that the equipment has been programmed with assumptions that will return ‘evidence’ that fits the assumptions. But I’m the first to admit that I ain’t no rocket scientist.
No, Ms Meyers, I’m saying that the observed for evidence for the expectation of a dynamical structure mechanism, (a true cosmological principle), takes theoretical precedence over all other speculations, until or unless you can prove that the multiverse is real or justified by a final theory or a valid COMPLETE theory of quantum gravity.
So, until we know everything about this universe we can’t speculate on other stuff. That’s just stupid and not useful.
Boy… I’m really not impressed by the irrational belief system of the cranks that hang-out here.
Maybe you should leave then, seeing as you don’t seem to be helping the situation any.
It will be alright PZ. Don’t let idiots get to you. It seems like you get all worked up over things… I know, I know – despite the accumulation of information over thousands of years, humans havn’t become better thinkers- but you know mountains more than you would have known had you been born 200 years ago! You can be happy about that!
So, until we know everything about this universe we can’t speculate on other stuff. That’s just stupid and not useful.
Um, no, I believe that I mentioned (somewhere) something about EQUAL TIME for the most obvious answer, which is for a biocentric cosmological principle.
This argument is also an infinitely stronger killshot to creationists arguments than anthropic selection ever will be.
It’s also what Davies is talking about.
If you leave, island, we’ll probably see a good 80 or 90% decrease in the amount of crank in the Pharyngula comments. You are very probably the biggest crackpot to infest the comments since the bygone days of Charlie Wagner.
Maybe you should leave then, seeing as you don’t seem to be helping the situation any.
Wait… you seem to have forgotten something about name calling without a speck of support… which continues unabated.
How conveniently dogmatic.
Dustin, prove your assertion or shut your big mouth.
Island, I’ve looked over your blog and the various references you’ve posted, and I’m deeply unimpressed. You appear to have confused the true statement, “t’Hooft has argued that quantum mechanics might have a deterministic basis” with the incorrect statement “Science has established that quantum mechanics is deterministic.”
You’ve used a couple of quotemines along the lines of “the appearance of design is undeniable” to claim that the universe is undoubtedly designed, which is profoundly dishonest. The reason for the collapse of “natural theology” is that the superficial appearance of design in, for example, biological systems, is, on closer investigation, better accounted for by the operation of unintelligent, non-forward looking natural mechanisms than by the operation of an intelligent or forward-looking designer, unless such designer is pathologically perverse.
Finally, the only statement of the “anthropic principle” which has any useful content is this: “The laws of nature cannot be such as to make the universe we see about us impossible.” You cannot, except as an exercise in collossal egotism, make the leap from there to “The laws of nature were carefully picked to allow for the existence of me specifically, me me me me me.”
I find it interesting that arguments from the strong anthropic principle seem to assume the truth of materialism.
Basically they state that with a supply of the basic units of mass-energy, along with a few parameters, all that we know could come to be, including life and mind, etc. If some independent reality were granted to mind then there would be no need to appeal to anthropic coincidences.
So why are you telling us, PZ? You should be telling the Times.
Island: You’re a notorious crank. Go babble somewhere else.
Oh, before I forget, in what possible sense is the most obvious answer for the laws of nature a “biocentric anthropic principle?” It’s a big universe out there and this “life” thing only happens, to the best of our knowledge, in a thin film on the surface of one rocky planet. Even just looking at the solar system, almost everywhere is massively inimical to life.
re the OP: I have personally, while I was at ASU, heard Paul Davies say that he wants to nuke a hole in Mars and look in the crater for buried signs of early life there. I suggested less drastic methods and he said he wanted an answer in his own lifetime. In my book that makes him an egotistical crank.
Even on this world, all of the available environments favor bacteria over scientists or theologians, and said scientists and theologians have existed for only about 0.00001% of the lifetime of this universe, and are prone to wink out of existence long before we can get rid of one of the zeroes in that number.
… as I have grown rather weary of vapid nonsense like Davies’ actually getting column inches, I find myself strangely consoled by this thought. Yes, there will indeed come a day when no one equates (i) the sensible and modest induction that there are, in fact, useful and predictive patterns behind the phenomena we observe with (ii) the arrogant certainty that your personal invisible sky daddy not only exists, but actively listens to and seriously considers your entreaties that your football team will win this Saturday.
Sure, this day may, in fact, coincide with either the swelling of our own primary to a red giant or the heat death of the universe. But hey, for that sorta reward, I can wait.
Davies do indeed read as an apologist most of the time, whether it is a correct interpretation or not. Here he shows the usual confusions and credulity of such.
And as any apologist arguments they can easily be shredded, as Coyne, Krauss and Bernstein did. Carroll takes another tack and uses his “non existence is not among the observed ensemble and therefore isn’t a well posed question” argument, which of course works too.
One can go further and discuss the specifics of Davies confusions. As he touches two of my pet peeves I will pounce on that. (And unfortunately that means I will be repeating myself from many times before. Maybe it’s time to change peeves. :-P)
First, Davies conflates faith (and meaning) between science and religion. The difference is IMO accentuated and kept by the adage that “trust is earned”, meaning that repeatable observations and testable science lends trust while religious faith is just that.
Second, Davies brings up what Colugo calls “anthropic fine tuning” and I call the religious “anthropic argument” in its general sense, whether fine tuning or other implicit uses of a priori probabilities.
The religious disconnect is to juxtapose those two separate questions (meaning and fundamental laws) and pretend that physicists are interested in the later due to the former.
In reality some forms of anthropic principle argues that one shouldn’t make the religious mistake of conflating (possibly small) a priori probabilities with (possibly large) a posterori likelihoods. The weak anthropic principle (WAP) hypothesises that we are likely to find ourselves in a universe where physics makes life likely.
Like it or not, we live in a universe that can be described by some form of anthropic principle (AP). If there is only one possible physics, the tautological AP would still be applicable and has in fact been used for effect. (Hoyle and the carbon-12 resonance.)
Whether something comes out of it in connection with multiverses is another matter, and I wouldn’t want to argue either way as it seems feasible but not, erhm, too likely. ;-)
But I note that creationists aren’t the only ones confusing the matter. Koonin has speculated in a cosmological model for abiogenesis. IMHO his reasoning is confused, as he proposes to explain what he describes as a low likelihood scenario (“a system of a far greater complexity, i.e., a highly evolved one, appears to be required”) while the WAP concerns itself with high likelihoods.
Davies do indeed read as an apologist most of the time, whether it is a correct interpretation or not. Here he shows the usual confusions and credulity of such.
And as any apologist arguments they can easily be shredded, as Coyne, Krauss and Bernstein did. Carroll takes another tack and uses his “non existence is not among the observed ensemble and therefore isn’t a well posed question” argument, which of course works too.
One can go further and discuss the specifics of Davies confusions. As he touches two of my pet peeves I will pounce on that. (And unfortunately that means I will be repeating myself from many times before. Maybe it’s time to change peeves. :-P)
First, Davies conflates faith (and meaning) between science and religion. The difference is IMO accentuated and kept by the adage that “trust is earned”, meaning that repeatable observations and testable science lends trust while religious faith is just that.
Second, Davies brings up what Colugo calls “anthropic fine tuning” and I call the religious “anthropic argument” in its general sense, whether fine tuning or other implicit uses of a priori probabilities.
The religious disconnect is to juxtapose those two separate questions (meaning and fundamental laws) and pretend that physicists are interested in the later due to the former.
In reality some forms of anthropic principle argues that one shouldn’t make the religious mistake of conflating (possibly small) a priori probabilities with (possibly large) a posterori likelihoods. The weak anthropic principle (WAP) hypothesises that we are likely to find ourselves in a universe where physics makes life likely.
Like it or not, we live in a universe that can be described by some form of anthropic principle (AP). If there is only one possible physics, the tautological AP would still be applicable and has in fact been used for effect. (Hoyle and the carbon-12 resonance.)
Whether something comes out of it in connection with multiverses is another matter, and I wouldn’t want to argue either way as it seems feasible but not, erhm, too likely. ;-)
But I note that creationists aren’t the only ones confusing the matter. Koonin has speculated in a cosmological model for abiogenesis. IMHO his reasoning is confused, as he proposes to explain what he describes as a low likelihood scenario (“a system of a far greater complexity, i.e., a highly evolved one, appears to be required”) while the WAP concerns itself with high likelihoods.
Me again.
I remember reading an excerpt from Ptolemy’s Almagest, where he paused in his exposition to ask why one should prefer a scheme that depended largely on circles, as opposed to one that allowed for more eccentricity. He appealed to the experience of the ancients, who observed a) an orderly progression of stars though the heavens and b) the fact that the planets generally descibed parallel tracks through the heavens.
The regularities that formed the basis of Ptolemy’s science were thus observed regularities, not assumed regularities. The fact that he was wrong about some things is beside the point. If this was so in the early days of science, why should it be any different now?
You appear to have confused the true statement, “t’Hooft has argued that quantum mechanics might have a deterministic basis” with the incorrect statement “Science has established that quantum mechanics is deterministic.”
No, my point was made in response to a claim that non-deterministic quantum mechanics is a proven fact.
The reason for the collapse of “natural theology
You obviously did not spend any time at my blog, because I would never make such a lame claim.
You’ve used a couple of quotemines along the lines of “the appearance of design is undeniable” to claim that the universe is undoubtedly designed
No, the universe is not “designed”, and I never claimed anything of the sort. My claim is that the appearance indicates that there is a carbon-life oriented structure principle that gets willfully ignored for the very reasons that Carter was forced to put forth the AP in the first place.
I’ve looked over your blog and the various references you’ve posted, and I’m deeply unimpressed
No doubt, since you apparently understood very little of what you saw.
Island: You’re a notorious crank. Go babble somewhere else.
Blatant lies without support don’t impress me any more than your ignorance of the facts, buddy.
That was hot.
Jesus christ someone likes to post a damn lot.
Nice post and I agree with most of it. Just one minor point:
Because something is repellent doesn’t mean it’s false or true. We all have to live with ugly facts of some sort or another. And unfortunately, solipsism cannot be refuted, although there have been some valiant attempts (and some pathetic ones, i.e. Deutsch).
“The anthropic principle countersthe fine tuning argument.”
To treat this seriously, and at the risk of emboldening the troll, I don’t see that it does. From my point of view the anthropic principle is either a simple tautology or a trivial statement.
So what? That the fine tuning argument can be countered by a tautology is all the worse for the fine tuning argument. That is, the fine tuning argument is trivially fallacious.
Yeah, it’s funny how he’s talking to himself and dismissing criticism of his blog with a “you just don’t understand it” while still insisting that he isn’t a crank.
I’d put dollars to beans that he’s posting in his underwear, socks, and tinfoil hat.
The thing about Hoyle’s “anthropic” prediction of the carbon-12 resonance is that Hoyle took an observation which wasn’t even specific to human life, or life in general — basically, the observation “carbon exists” — and used it to derive a quantitative prediction for something not yet observed (a carbon resonance near 7.65 MeV). He didn’t just say, “We are this way because we wouldn’t be here to ask the question if we weren’t here to ask the question,” a statement which is rather like saying, “Napoleon had to lose at Waterloo, because otherwise we wouldn’t be asking why Napoleon lost at Waterloo.”
(Weinberg also has a technical reason why the carbon-12 resonance isn’t that spectacular; basically, he says there’s more room for “slop” in the agreement than is often acknowledged.)
People like Brian Greene find “anthropic” arguments troubling because, all too often, they don’t follow this track. While it’s perfectly possible that important features of our Universe arose just “because the dice fell that way”, we shouldn’t stop looking for falsifiable predictions. Supposing that the dice did just fall that way, and that another roll could have led to a Cosmos without carbon (for example), what other features of natural law and physical phenomena would we then see?
It seems that Davies has sold his soul to the Templeton foundation. His article reeks of intellectual dishonesty. Since when is “nobody knows why the laws of physics are as they are” a statement of faith? Since when is it equivalent to “God made the world as it is — this I firmly believe”?
island wrote: “Name calling without a speck of support.”
Then you follow up with calling people “cranks”, you say that Dustin has a “big mouth”, the people are involved in a “neodarwinian grunt session” and “groupthink”, you called Blake “ignornant” (misspelling yours) and you started out by calling PZ “ignorant” without a speck of support! Your hypocrisy is astounding.
Oh, and if the only evidence you have for a deterministic version of quantum mechanics is a decades’ worth of papers by a single author , you’re on rather shaky ground.
“We are this way because we wouldn’t be here to ask the question if we weren’t here to ask the question,” a statement which is rather like saying, “Napoleon had to lose at Waterloo, because otherwise we wouldn’t be asking why Napoleon lost at Waterloo.”
No, it’s nothing like that. First, the anthropic principle is that the laws of physics must be such as to allow for there to be creatures inquiring about them — nothing about explaining why we are how we are; quite different creatures could be asking, but the antropic principle counters the claim that no life would be possible without the fine tuning. Second, had Napoleon won at Waterloo, we would be asking about that, but if the laws of physics didn’t make life possible, we wouldn’t be asking why they don’t. Basically, your faulty analogy is based on a complete failure to understand the actual argument.
The anthropic principle does counter the fine-tuning argument, but only if you accept a few other concepts.
You see, it can be stated this way: Life as we know it requires the universe to have these various finely-tuned parameters. However, it is highly likely that if the universe had DIFFERENT parameters, it would support some OTHER kind of life – which would then be life as we know it.
This doesn’t require alternate universes (although they’d take off the “highly likely” part of the phrase, so if you think a multiplicity of universes is more parsimonious than “life in some sense is easy”, you could take that formulation instead) … it just requires that we recognize that if life were different, that would be how we knew it.
So it’s close to a tautology, but not quite – I can envision at least falsifying my formulation of it, though that’d be tricky to do. However, the real role is as an explanation.
I appreciated you post, PZ – especially your concluding paragraph. I want, if for just a few minutes before my comment is pushed above the frame, to bring back into the discussion the distinction between metaphysics and methodology (Dr. Free-Ride mentions that in her response)
When discussing the perspectives of scientists in action, it is important to consider what the practitioners recognize as the foundation of their activities. In the trenches of wet labs, field plots, and modeling suites, there are many more scientists willing to accept the utility of empiricism than a theory of universal existence. Don’t get me wrong: many scientists do nurture their own metaphysical understanding of the universe, but my guess is that the color of those beliefs varies widely between individual. When it comes down to it, I think that most scientists do experiments and leave questions of metaphysics to the philosophers and theologians – often disparaging such questions as useless or without meaning.
The power of science is its methodology of empiricism and the honesty to which testable hypotheses are held to. For me (I’m a Christian), I see no reason to necessitate faith in such determinations.
Careful there, probabilistic chance is still described by orderly distributions.
But yes, contingency is one form of happenstance, that can result from many causes: (initial) boundary conditions, deterministic chaos, not well understood effective descriptions, et cetera. But Davies is concerned with order and he is still wrong.
First, for the reason discussed in the post – we don’t need to pose universal laws as much as the religious bases their dogma on them. (Because without it, who would need a supreme order giver, and who would notice the assumption of order breaking miracles?)
Second, because mathematical theory implies observing volumes of order, for example Ramsey theory:
Volumes of order (such as space-time) would surely be observed, much in the same way that we create volumes of low entropy by dumping entropy elsewhere. Also, in an inflationary cosmology such as ours it is likely that the other volumes doesn’t inflate and are of no consequence.
Careful there, probabilistic chance is still described by orderly distributions.
But yes, contingency is one form of happenstance, that can result from many causes: (initial) boundary conditions, deterministic chaos, not well understood effective descriptions, et cetera. But Davies is concerned with order and he is still wrong.
First, for the reason discussed in the post – we don’t need to pose universal laws as much as the religious bases their dogma on them. (Because without it, who would need a supreme order giver, and who would notice the assumption of order breaking miracles?)
Second, because mathematical theory implies observing volumes of order, for example Ramsey theory:
Volumes of order (such as space-time) would surely be observed, much in the same way that we create volumes of low entropy by dumping entropy elsewhere. Also, in an inflationary cosmology such as ours it is likely that the other volumes doesn’t inflate and are of no consequence.
However, it is highly likely that if the universe had DIFFERENT parameters, it would support some OTHER kind of life – which would then be life as we know it.
For what it’s worth, Ian Stewart put it this way ’round a year ago (in a letter to Nature, 444, 21-28 Dec 2006, p. 100) …
… which I think is a fair enough comment. If you’ve sufficient hubris to go around playing with alternative values for physical constants and entertain those as serious possibilities in the first place, it’s only fair to take it that step further.
And, of course, PZ beat me to it: even while writing on this, he’s way ahead of the game.
In any case, here’s my go at slicing and dicing Davies’ diatribe in which I conclude that physicists have gone a bit nutty locked up with each other in the particle lab, and perhaps need a few beers or a good knock in the head to convince them to tone down the poetic pomposity a bit. It’s confusing the heck out of people like Davies, apparently.
I think it’s too likely that the equipment has been programmed with assumptions that will return ‘evidence’ that fits the assumptions.
Newton’s ideas about mass and gravity are a pretty good basis for assumptions–they’ve worked pretty well so far. When models of galaxies rotating are simulated with what we can account for visually, there is insufficient mass to account for what is observed. Add more “invisible” mass, and simulations match observations. Science doesn’t start with an assumption of black matter, it runs with a testable hypothesis, and there has been better confirmation for it recently than for many other hot topics in astrophysics.
Island has been cast into the dungeon.
Why not instead of playing word games with this anthropic garbage, we just wait for more research to come out?
Its one thing to speculate about this or that, and thats great. But it seems people like Island or whatever are trying to push some kind of loaded ‘interpretation’ onto rather incomplete physics.
I’m a little disappointed that, so far, nobody has cited my ground-breaking discovery in philosophical cosmology, the Misanthropic Principle. (The phrase has, naturally, been coined by many before me.)
I’m saddened even more that island couldn’t come up with a better way to insult me. “Stereotypically ignornant” is OK, I guess, but “ill-tempered illiterate” was better.
There is nothing in principle that requires the universe to exist in such a way as to form intelligent life. There is nothing in principle that insists that humans HAD to have developed. If the universe were to start over again in (almost) the same initial conditions, there’s no evidence that humans would form again.
With this in mind, I have been able to identify only two types of anthropic principles: the “Anthropic Principle” and the “Weak Anthropic Principle.”
Examples of the Weak Anthropic Principle: Out of numerous bodies orbiting the sun, only one is capable of supporting life as we know it: the earth. Therefore we can’t be surprised that we find ourselves on the earth and not on any of the other bodies orbiting the sun.
Out of all the possible stars, only sun-like stars (type G) can support life. (Assume this for the argument; I’m not sure if it’s true.) Therefore, we find ourselves orbiting a sun-like star.
Galaxies exist in many shapes and sizes, but only the thin disk region of giant spiral galaxies can support life. (Again, assume this for the argument.) Therefore, we find our star in the thin disk of a giant spiral galaxy.
There is nothing strange about the weak anthropic principle. The universe has all sorts of environments, only a tiny fraction of which can support life. We can’t possibly find ourselves anywhere other than in that tiny fraction.
The “Anthropic Principle” without the weak adjective is the argument that the universe has certain parameters — perhaps the density of the universe one microsecond after the Big Bang might be one such parameter. If the parameter were outside a particularly narrow region, then life could not have formed, perhaps because the universe would have collapsed on itself or expanded much too rapidly — all the matter would have diffused. The parameter could have been anything, but it just happens to be in the range necessary for life. The Anthropic Principle is the argument that somebody monkeyed with the number to make it precisely this value, in order to allow life to form.
The problem with this argument is that at its best, people are too quick to jump to conclusions. Is it really true that life could not have formed if the parameter were different? Alternatively, perhaps this parameter is a stable value — inflation might have forced the universe’s density to its critical value.
At its worst, the Anthropic Principle is infested with lies. Anyone (such as Hugh Ross) who tells you that quarks would not combine if the strong force coupling constant were 2% off, is full of baloney. Anyone (again, Hugh Ross) who tells you that molecules would not form if the electron-proton mass ratio were a little different, is full of baloney.
There is a third bizarre idea — I might call it the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle — that has slipped in, in defending against the notion that someone designed the universe to make it life-friendly. It violates the truth stated in the first paragraph, by assuming that the universe must have formed to make us while at the same time denying that the universe was designed to make us.
You see, it can be stated this way: Life as we know it requires the universe to have these various finely-tuned parameters. However, it is highly likely that if the universe had DIFFERENT parameters, it would support some OTHER kind of life – which would then be life as we know it.
This doesn’t require alternate universes … it just requires that we recognize that if life were different, that would be how we knew it.
I suppose, I guess I’m just uncomfortable with the use of counter-factuals as part of a principle that is suppose to tell us something meaningful. I guess I just read it and see “if things were different, things would be different.” Which doesn’t seem *useful* to me.
truth machine:So what? That the fine tuning argument can be countered by a tautology is all the worse for the fine tuning argument. That is, the fine tuning argument is trivially fallacious.
The fact that it is a tautology, if it is, is not the reason that it doesn’t disprove the fine tuning argument, it doesn’t disprove the fine tuning argument because it doesn’t tell us why things are the way they are.
Blake, thanks for expanding on why the TAP is just tautological, based on consistency among observations – I felt my comment was too long as it was.
As you say, the stronger AP’s, like the weak AP, is forced on cosmologists and theoretical physicists that doesn’t really like it, or so I hear on the younger generation especially. (IIRC, informal numbers such as 80 % non-antro string theorists have been mentioned on their blogs.) It isn’t desirable if we want to maximize knowledge, as you note.
Btw, you mention falsification. I have been idly thinking on the falsifiability issue, as I have noticed that most people seem to look at this on a single case basis. I.e. it isn’t falsifiable, because any found support, such as Weinberg’s model for the CC or Pogosian et al anthropic prediction of neutrino masses, may later be explained by a fundamental theory.
But it seems to me naively that it could and perhaps should be used over the board. And then, could not any failure to find a high likelihood region consistent with observations be considered a falsification? (And coincidentally point out the necessity for a better explanation.)
And at this point I feel it incumbent to note that I’m not married to an AP. I just find most all possibilities for how fundamental physics turns out intriguing. (With the obvious exception of the religious unlawful scenario, so I trust ;-) that observations continue to support lawful science.)
Blake, thanks for expanding on why the TAP is just tautological, based on consistency among observations – I felt my comment was too long as it was.
As you say, the stronger AP’s, like the weak AP, is forced on cosmologists and theoretical physicists that doesn’t really like it, or so I hear on the younger generation especially. (IIRC, informal numbers such as 80 % non-antro string theorists have been mentioned on their blogs.) It isn’t desirable if we want to maximize knowledge, as you note.
Btw, you mention falsification. I have been idly thinking on the falsifiability issue, as I have noticed that most people seem to look at this on a single case basis. I.e. it isn’t falsifiable, because any found support, such as Weinberg’s model for the CC or Pogosian et al anthropic prediction of neutrino masses, may later be explained by a fundamental theory.
But it seems to me naively that it could and perhaps should be used over the board. And then, could not any failure to find a high likelihood region consistent with observations be considered a falsification? (And coincidentally point out the necessity for a better explanation.)
And at this point I feel it incumbent to note that I’m not married to an AP. I just find most all possibilities for how fundamental physics turns out intriguing. (With the obvious exception of the religious unlawful scenario, so I trust ;-) that observations continue to support lawful science.)
I find it somehow charming that island seemed to think that calling him ignorant was committing the logical fallacy of “the argument from ignorance.”
This is probably a dead thread, but I think it’s worth clarifying:
Island would have a legitimate point if I had made such a claim. I want to make it clear I did not. It is a fact that part of mainstream quantum mechanics, the theory, is non-deterministic. Therefore, one clearly doesn’t need faith in a rational universe to do science. Davies should be smart enough to see the contradiction between his assertion and what physicists do every day. That’s all. Davies has been an embarrassment for a while, and I’m sick of it, so I resorted to a little name calling, and probably deserved some in kind. So be it.
John H. Morrison “The Anthropic Principle is the argument that somebody monkeyed with the number to make it precisely this value, in order to allow life to form.”
“Somebody”? Who, God? No, it does not necessarily imply that. The multiverse/megaverse/landscape and cyclical universe models do not require intentional agency, design or teleology. However, the “observer as constructive agent” models of Davies and Lanza do have those features. Conceivably, there can be non-teleological/intentionalist models that explain anthropic fine tuning without recourse to cyclical or multiple universes.
It’s interesting that a lot of atheists are making the same error as the theists: namely, conflating anthropic cosmology with design. And so they dismiss such an approach as a trivial tautology or crypto-theism.
I really get tired of the “absurdity” argument. Absurdity is a purely subjective, totally human concept, and it’s about as relative as relative gets. One person’s religion is another’s absurdity is another’s politics is another’s sense of humor.
As for the teaspoonful of dark matter: Aw, just mail ’em a black hole.
I really get tired of the “absurdity” argument. Absurdity is a purely subjective, totally human concept, and it’s about as relative as relative gets. One person’s religion is another’s absurdity is another’s politics is another’s sense of humor.
As for the teaspoonful of dark matter: Aw, just mail ’em a black hole.
Davies’ mashes up a whole bunch of stuff in his article. He makes the usual mistakes,
What the early scientists (Galileo et al) did was measure what was then measurable and express relationships between said measurements as mathematical functions. These results, in turn, allowed them to measure a greater variety of phenomena and with more accuracy. 350 years later and this snowball effect has allowed us to study, scientifically, everything but the smallest gravitational effects and the most complex of physical systems. That we’re fantastically successful is just a raw fact. No scientist need assume that this will continue to work until we have everything in the bag. But if you do hope that the last hold-outs of mystery will eventually fall, you’re hardly expressing much faith; we’ve come a long way in a short time.
This is a version of the problem of induction. We have two theories, call them T1 and T2, T1 is, say, General Relativity, and T2 is Davies theory that T1 might not hold at time t+1 as it does at time t. T1, of course, makes its own claims for what happens at t+1 (succinctly: it holds). T1 is one of our most highly-regarded broadly-confirmed scientific theories. T2 is, scientifically speaking, Davies’ ability to imagine the future. What Davies’ is claiming (and what the problem of induction claims generally) is that the theory embodied by his imagination should have precedence over our best confirmed scientific theories. Fiction trumps science! That makes perfect sense if you’re an Empiricist philosopher because you take something like sense impressions to be fundamental. But to a scientist, no faith is required to see that this is a deeply ludicrous assertion.
His other two points about the nature of physical laws and the anthropic principle are equally insipid.
I think that Hoyle got a bit lucky, but there was something to his argument from the fact that “Carbon exists.” The problem is that carbon only forms in stars, through three helium-4 nuclei colliding at once and sticking together. That’s an extremely unlikely event, because of the strong repulsion between the positive charges.
The existence of an excited state of carbon, equal in mass to the three helium-4 nuclei, makes the reaction more likely to occur. He predicted such a state before it was discovered.
Reality is a bit more complicated of course. If helium-4 couldn’t fuse to carbon at that point, the core of a star would continue to shrink until something stopped it. If the core didn’t become a white dwarf first, fusion would eventually occur. That is a big IF; the core is almost a white dwarf by the time the helium flash occurs in smaller stars.
If fusion occured only at that more compact state, probably a helium nucleus would immediately grab the carbon nucleus, producing oxygen instead. Carbon then could never form in stars. (That’s what happens to deuterium: as soon as a deuteron forms in a star, a proton grabs it to form helium-3.)
There is also the question whether carbon might form in supernova explosions.
The excited state is 7.7 MeV above the ground state of carbon. When calculated from the mass of three helium nuclei, the energy is 7.3 MeV. That means a certain range is allowed to help the reaction along. There’s no reason to believe that 7.7 MeV is right on the edge, and probably values on both sides of 7.3 MeV work. A 1-MeV range (say 6.8 MeV to 7.8 MeV) is probably allowed.
The energy states known before Hoyle’s work were ground, 4.4 MeV, and 9.6 MeV. A strange thing is that the higher states are farther apart than the lower states. Usually, the higher the energies, the closer they get. So we should expect a state between the 4.4 and 9.6-MeV states. Its energy should be E satisfying:
E – 4.4 MeV < 4.4 MeV
9.6 MeV – E < E – 4.4 MeV
These two inequalities lead to 7.0 MeV < E < 8.8 MeV. (I hope that the less-than signs get through.) This low-precision calculation suggests that right from the start there was a fifty-percent chance of finding an excited state within the range needed to drive the reaction.
Fifty-percent is far from fine-tuning.
Coathangrrr: Actually, the claim is “If things were different, they’d be normal.” It’s not incredibly explanatory, but it’s an argument that helps identify the fallacies in those various probability calculations.
And as John H Morrison pointed out, the Weak form of the Anthropic Principle provides a potential explanation for reasons why the Copernican principle might break down.
It’s interesting that a lot of atheists are making the same error as the theists: namely, conflating anthropic cosmology with design. And so they dismiss such an approach as a trivial tautology or crypto-theism.
How does anything you point out have to do with arguing that the anthropic principle is a tautology? I certainly don’t conflate the anthropic principle with design and I view it as a tautology.
I think Davies’ underlying idea is that one can’t discover a truth, empirically or otherwise, unless one first believes there is truth to be discovered. The assumption that some statement can be true about space-time or a subset thereof is a necessary presupposition that the scientific world view shares with other, less fashionable approaches.
From my perspective, the wonder is how much bile that observation inspires.
Even if they turn out to be wrong, fine tuning-based arguments (that’s what has been conflated with design, coathangrrr, not the obvious observation that the universe has anthropic properties) have spurred investigation of the anthropic “wiggle room” of physical constants, inspired speculation about alternative fundamental particles and physical laws, clarified the implications of various multiverse models, and generated predictions about the nature of the cosmos. So whatever the future verdict of science, this approach have been quite useful.
A research program can be useful – rather than trivial or absurd – even if some of its guiding premises are incorrect. It remains to be whether fine tuning arguments are correct or not. But their utility has already been demonstrated.
The biggest opponents of fine-tuning arguments, it seems to me, are anti-string theory physicists.
but no one claims that science can have answers for everything
Oh, creationists demand that all the time.
Maybe it’s all just a dream, “a blot of mustard or an undigested bit of beef”, as Ebenezer put it.
I thought it was “a bit of underdone potato?”
In any event, whose dream would it be?
PZ wrote:
Be careful. You and Davies both may have just stepped on a rhetorical land mine that you’ll both later regret. Both you and Davies are using the word “faith” in a pejorative sense, like it’s automatically a bad thing. Faith is only bad when it’s gotten through bogus means, when it is dishonestly earned the way modern religion tries to earn it.
Is there something necessarily wrong with faith? In a way I do have a kind of “faith” in science but that is a faith that has earned its credit while religion’s checks have been bouncing since I was in grammar school. Religion is in a deep promise-debt and has no faith-credit left for me.
What you have are habits of thought that work for you.
The key word there is “implied.” Now who really implies this? Davies I think is misusing the word “faith” and missing his own point when he compares religion and science this way:
I’ve always considered the meta-laws and the universe to be one and the same so I don’t quite grasp who Davies is talking about. I suppose both could change. It’s not “faith” that makes me think in terms of meta-laws, but rather a habit of thought that I can’t break unless I can find a better habit of thought. It’s easy to claim you have a better way to think of things, but show me what that way is or I’m not going to believe you. My faith in “meta-laws” wasn’t earned bogusly (something Davies incorrectly implies), it was earned because it has worked for me, it was earned the same way Newtonian Physics earned its place even though it isn’t entirely right. How are Davies’ ideas about “the laws should have an explanation from within the universe and not involve appealing to an external agency” meaning anything more or supposed to change my habits of thought?
And do Davies ideas seem a little too close to endorsing things like Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret”?
For those that want to ascribe faith to science:
What do you think would happen if/when experiment demonstrated that a science book was wrong? The book gets tossed.
What do you think would happen if/when experiment demonstrated that the Bible was wrong? The book gets tossed?
@ #102
Apples and oranges. A particular science book might be tossed if its theories were demonstrably wrong. To compare with the Bible you have to ask if the scientific approach itself would be tossed out if it could be demonstrated invalid.
The immediately leads to the following questions:
1.) What test could invalidate the scientific *method*?
2.) What would we fall back on if it failed us?
The problems answering those questions are very similar to the problems with *invalidating* the Bible or any other religious text.
Sure methodological naturalism — the assumption that miracles are not so common that they make everything unpredictable — is a required assumption for science. Fortunately, however, it is itself a testable hypothesis, and it is being tested in every single observation (whether of an experiment or not).
It’s not faith. It’s a scientific hypothesis. :-)
Ehem.
We can see where the luminous matter is.
We can observe gravitational lensing and calculate from it where the matter is — light or dark.
The difference is dark matter.
It’s not rocket science! :-)
If you must, call it “trust”. (Rhyme not intended.) But see above.
Sure methodological naturalism — the assumption that miracles are not so common that they make everything unpredictable — is a required assumption for science. Fortunately, however, it is itself a testable hypothesis, and it is being tested in every single observation (whether of an experiment or not).
It’s not faith. It’s a scientific hypothesis. :-)
Ehem.
We can see where the luminous matter is.
We can observe gravitational lensing and calculate from it where the matter is — light or dark.
The difference is dark matter.
It’s not rocket science! :-)
If you must, call it “trust”. (Rhyme not intended.) But see above.
Davies’s apparent equivocation on the meanings of “faith” seems a little odd given that, in his previous writings, he has been quite clear about the difference between belief justified by repeated observation and unevidenced belief the holding of which is promoted as a virtue.
He is right, however, to emphasise that whatever underlies our observable Universe, whether a god or some fundamental structure of laws or a chaos from which order has emerged, is deeply mysterious. He is also right to point out that both an infinite regress of cause and effect and an uncaused First Cause are equally unsatisfactory – not that our intellectual frustration is necessarily an argument against either – although it is hard to see how his suggestion offers a third alternative.
I also think it is wrong to accuse him of being a Christian apologist. He described his own beliefs in the Preface to The Mind Of God as follows:
That sounds to me more like an agnostic position. He does not subscribe to any of the conventional faiths because there is no persuasive evidence for the truth of their claims but he does believe there is more to reality than the “brute fact” of its existence which needs to be explained. He also believes that intelligence such as ours – but not necessarily us – is an inevitable outcome of the way the Universe is ordered. I tend to agree – the fact we are here is evidence for that – and, like him, find that the possibility that conscious intelligence is somehow ‘written’ into the structure of the Universe is an extraordinary and fascinating notion. This is far from meaning “Goddidit” but it does suggest that there is something very, very strange going on here.
Hey, cool. It turns out I just answered the first question of comment 103 before I saw it! :-)
Hey, cool. It turns out I just answered the first question of comment 103 before I saw it! :-)
David,
With respect I’d have to disagree that you’ve answered the question. One cannot observe something that one has already concluded cannot happen. A “miracle” would only be interpreted as resulting from a previously unknown phenomenon. This is the major presupposition on which historically documented “miracles” are excluded as data.
More a deistic one. Less pantheistic than Einstein’s.
This would require such intelligence to arise very often. To prevent our case from happening, it would have been sufficient if, for example, just one kilometer-sized rock had fallen anywhere on or close to Africa anytime within the last few million years.
More a deistic one. Less pantheistic than Einstein’s.
This would require such intelligence to arise very often. To prevent our case from happening, it would have been sufficient if, for example, just one kilometer-sized rock had fallen anywhere on or close to Africa anytime within the last few million years.
Then replace the word “miracle” by “random”. If stuff appeared and disappeared randomly out of/into nothing, and randomly fell up, down, or neither, if random things became magnetic at random and stopped being magnetic at random, and so on, then the scientific method would have some trouble. (And not just because there probably wouldn’t be anyone who could use it.)
Then replace the word “miracle” by “random”. If stuff appeared and disappeared randomly out of/into nothing, and randomly fell up, down, or neither, if random things became magnetic at random and stopped being magnetic at random, and so on, then the scientific method would have some trouble. (And not just because there probably wouldn’t be anyone who could use it.)
Virtual particles appear and disappear at random. Sounds like a great description of quantum reality.
“The problems answering those questions are very similar to the problems with *invalidating* the Bible or any other religious text.”
Luckily, as long as you continue to assume that you exist, those questions are pretty much irrelevant, and invalidating the claims of the Bible are a fairly pedestrian affair (presuming that anyone will admit to them actually meaning anything certain and verifiable in the first place).
If ones desire is, however, to simply eradicate any possibility of empirical knowledge whatsoever so that we might as well believe the Bible as the WeeklyWorldNews, then I guess, you have a point.
Unfortunately, it’s a point not unlike “ha, I’ve knocked over the chessboard and scattered the pieces, NOW YOU CAN’T BEAT ME!”
David Marjanović wrote:
What is the difference between “faith” and “trust”? Are they not synonyms?
Would you use “trust” in the same pejorative way that PZ and Davies use the word “faith”?
Not so much the possibility of empirical knowledge as the Enlightenment’s idea of epistemological certainty, a *really bad* idea that’s polluted our conception of religious faith and scientific knowledge.
Also, as you alluded to… agreeing on what the Bible means to say is far from a “pedestrian affair.”
PZ:
“why can’t there be many different combinations of physical laws that can yield life?”
There can. The problem is that given the range of possible physical parameters that we currently think is possible, virtually no combinations of those parameters result in a unverse with any long-lasting structure at all, let alone life.
The many different combination of physical settings that can yield life is almost unimaginably outnumbered by those combinations that can’t.
This is why a multiverse idea can be helpful. If we believe that all the universes with that range of parameters really exist, then there is no mystery about why the carbon-based life forms are in the one of the universes that support carbon-based life forms! However, if you assume no multiverse, it is surely a problem as to why the parameters are within such a small range of what they might be.
Just my 2 cents, Blake’s in the running for the next Molly if only from the comments on this post.
Arguably, the one law that seems to govern existence is duality. So based on dialectal materialism, when two perspectives (faith and science) appear antithetical, it might be more productive to adopt a more middle-ground stance:
God and Buddhism.
Dahan (#115):
Check the list. ;-)
You are a champion PZ. Thank you for writing this response.
That’s a new low, even by the standards of threads on the anthropic truism and its many related non sequiturs.
To sight the supernatural as any sort of cause is to suggest that there is something outside of everything.
Go ahead, read that ten times without laughing. I dare you.
Tony Jeremiah: No.
Completely no. I haven’t followed your link, so there could be some validity there, but your argument fails miserably.
Sometimes there are two stances and the correct stance is in the middle. (the germ theory of disease – since there ARE some diseases not caused by germs) Sometimes the correct stance is only one of them. (plate tectonics! pretty sure that one’s right exclusively compared to the dominant paradigm before it), and sometimes the correct stance is something else entirely.
And more often, there’s more than two stances, and many are crazy, and the correct stance is nowhere near the middle.
The point is: “Oh, there’s two sides, the middle must be right” is WRONG, and that reaction is precisely what many deceptive types count on to get their goals accomplished.
Arguing by dialect[ic]al materialism, if we are presented with two options (kill all the homosexuals, let all the homosexuals live) then we should choose a middle ground: kill half the homosexuals. Obviously, we let the women live, because lesbian sex is much hotter.
…
OK, I feel kind of icky even typing that as a joke, but I’m gonna hit “Post” anyway.
Two opposite conclusions: 1) The laws simply are what they are, there is no point in asking why; 2) We should ask why the laws are what they are.
http://www.edge.org/discourse/science_faith.html
This is the crux of the debate, not teleological implications or trivial truisms.
These positions seem to come with a lot of ideological, philosophical, and psychological baggage, but they shouldn’t. Laws of physics are like any other phenomenon: we should ask why, not just accept them as given. To do the latter is to shut off inquiry. Physical laws may be as mutable, contingent, historical, and localized as other natural phenomena. (Smolin says he has no use for the anthropic principle, but that is because his particular multiverse theory allows for it to be replaced with the mediocrity principle. Smolin understands that our universe’s laws call for an explanation.)
I think a lot of the hostility to asking why is due to a reflex against anything that smacks of teleology and theism. Don’t be afraid. I am rest assured that investigation of these questions will not lead to God, or even to Davies or Lanza-style observer construction.
Sean Carrol: “The final possibility, which seems to be the right one, is: that’s just how things are. There is a chain of explanations concerning things that happen in the universe, which ultimately reaches to the fundamental laws of nature and stops. … It might be amusing to contemplate how things would be different with another set of laws, but at the end of the day the laws are what they are.”
Lee Smolin: “Science can proceed, even when faced with the questions of “Why these laws” and “Why these initial conditions”. We just have to adopt a strategy that leads to predictions testable by real experiments.
Biologists used to ask, “Why these species?” They found they could answer it if they gave up the idea that species are immutable and accepting the idea that species and their characteristics are contingent outcomes of the dynamical process of natural selection. In physics the evidence points to the same conclusion.”
I am surprised that I have not found a response which figured out the obvious fallacy in Davies’ argument. Here it is:
It was said that laws of physics exist and was asked why do these exist(the way they are) or where do they come from. These question are on the same logical ground as the question “why does god exist? where does god come from”. To even approach the later questions the existence of god is assumed which is where the fallacy lies since the laws of physics are verified/tested(at least to some extent), not just assumed.
In mathematics there are two issues that are addressed while introducing/discussing a new concept/entity. One is that of existence and the other is that of properties once the former is established. The comparison of two different concepts/entities is irrelevant if one concept/entity is proven to exist and the question is about why it exists, while the second entity/concept’s existence itself is not proven(the word is “evidence” for science).
Mr. Davies said “Clearly, then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too.”
It can be noted easily that while the existence of physical laws is not in doubt(being verified day-in and day-out), the source is a mystery. On the other hand the existence of god is in doubt which makes the comparison irrelevant. The proper comparison would the source of the laws and the source of god, for the later, existence is assumed.
To make matters clear god’s existence is on the same logical ground as Santa’s existence, but is the existence of physical laws on the same logical ground as the existence of Santa?
>>”There is actual evidence for it’s existence now.”
>>Can you send over a teaspoonful?
Do you want a videotape of the evolution of humans too?
You can twist the usage of the same word (“faith”, in this case) far enough to use it for 2 different things (the faith of the woo-tard or the faith of the scientist that gravity works) – that allows you to achieve the ridiculous, i.e.:
– Nothing is better than a good steak and mashed potatoes
– Bread crumbs are better than nothing
Therefore bread crumbs are better than a good steak and mashed potatoes.
If scientists have “faith” it’s a very different kind of faith from what the religiotards have.
Say, I was looking at the review of one of Davies’ books on Amazon (“worth reading for yuks?” ‘Naaah’) and noticed the description says the “athropic principle” is about how unlikely it is that the universe is right for human life.
Is that really what the “anthropic principle” is all about? I thought that it was basically reasoning backwards from our own existence. Wasn’t it Hoyle who reasoned that there must be a process that allowed stars to produce heavier stuff than helium (or whatever it was) and reasoned that “since we’re here, that must happen.”
In other words, I thought the anthropic principle was just reasoning based on “given this set of conditions” (we’re here) “it must be possible to have this set of conditions occur” The fact that humans are apparently here (though I’m not so sure about the rest of you) doesn’t mean that this is the only universe in which life could arise – it just means that we’re here and we can reason backwards from that, that this universe can support humans. Personally, I think it’s perfectly possible that something we’d consider “life” (albeit amazingly weird to us) could come about in a universe with different natural laws and a different duration. How long does a universe need to exist to produce life? Not that long, as universes go, right?
PS – forgot to say: since Hoyle reasoned using the anthropic principle, he was able to do observations to prove his reasoning was, in fact, correct. He didn’t stop simply at “we are here, therefore…” — he backed it up with experiment. Something the religiotards consistently forget to do, for reasons known only to them.
That’s not much of an explanation. Scientists rightly accuse religion of “giving up”, and yet here they are doing the exactly same thing. If someone asks why the sky is blue, should the answer be, “that’s just how things are?”
If you can’t explain something, perhaps a better response is “I don’t know”. Our descendents 1000 years hence may have a different answer.
Marcus:
“Personally, I think it’s perfectly possible that something we’d consider “life” (albeit amazingly weird to us) could come about in a universe with different natural laws and a different duration.”
Yes, it is possible. But current ideas of how the natural laws could vary would mean that for the majority of values (particularly of the cosmological constant) you don’t even get anything like physical structure, let alone life.
Steve99:
Two comments: 1) We do not know that the physical constants can take values other than those we observe; the type of universe we’re in might be the only possibility. 2) Assuming that physical constants of the universe could have taken different values, the AP addresses this nicely: if the constants were different, something other than us might be here wondering about them, or if they were such that no intelligent life could form, then the universe would be here w/o anything wondering about it. No matter how unlikely any combination of values is, any existence at all is predicated on the actualization of some combination of them, and so it might just be that ours is the extremely improbable reality that came to be. I find it helpful to think of it this way: if you were to roll a 10-sided die one thousand times, you observe some sequence of rolls, the probability of which would have been 0.1^1,000 or 1 x 10^-1,000 (really, really small), yet you would have just witnessed this extremely unlikely event happening.
Colugo, we should certainly ask why. We just need to be prepared to accept what is as what is should we be unable to proceed any further, and what we most certainly should not do is to grant any respect to the present form of the theist argument of fine-tuning.
“We do not know that the physical constants can take values other than those we observe; the type of universe we’re in might be the only possibility.”
Sure, it might. But that is a big assumption. It reminds me of when people generally assumed there was only one world.
“Assuming that physical constants of the universe could have taken different values, the AP addresses this nicely: if the constants were different, something other than us might be here wondering about them, or if they were such that no intelligent life could form, then the universe would be here w/o anything wondering about it.”
Would this be the same AP that Myers dislikes so much?
“No matter how unlikely any combination of values is, any existence at all is predicated on the actualization of some combination of them, and so it might just be that ours is the extremely improbable reality that came to be. I find it helpful to think of it this way: if you were to roll a 10-sided die one thousand times, you observe some sequence of rolls, the probability of which would have been 0.1^1,000 or 1 x 10^-1,000 (really, really small), yet you would have just witnessed this extremely unlikely event happening.”
I don’t think that is helpful. Just about all current scientific thinking relies on the fact that we occupy a typical place in reality. If we are an unlikely but special case, that is not inevitable (as it would be in a multiverse model), then that goes against current scientific principles.
J Myers: “we most certainly should not do is to grant any respect to the present form of the theist argument of fine-tuning.”
I agree that we should be prepared to be unable to proceed further (but I don’t think we are there yet). However, I fail to see what is necessarily theistic (or deistic, or otherwise teleological) about fine-tuning. Just like “selfishness,” “selection,” “memory,” “architecture” and so on when applied to biology need not imply intentional agency, “tuning” need not either. I wish some words weren’t as loaded with associations as they are, but what can one do.
I suspect that the more these issues are investigated, the less they will give comfort to and embolden theists, particularly creationists – whichever side of the anthropic/fine-tuning debate prevails. This is Paley’s watch all over again. It needs to be faced head on, not taken off the table.
Colugo #27 says, “But dismissing the anthropic principle, fine tuning, and cosmological contingency out of hand makes atheists appear insecure and hence gives ammunition to creationists.”
That’s ridiculous. I’m an atheist, a physicist AND I do NOT dismiss the Anthropic Principle “blithely” or “out of hand”. I dismiss the idea that it has any explanatory power, AND I reject the nonsense that supposes doing so concedes ANYTHING to quacks, either in religion or science or in just the plain, generic, unaffiliated lunatic variety.
The fact that objects and organisms that require particular environments to exist just happen to be found in those environments is not in dispute, but there is nothing profound in it either. That so many attribute this “coincidence” to some “principle of fine-tuning” is nothing but teleological rubbish run amok.
I don’t care a flying fish if you and other proponents of the Anthropic Principle think that those who reject it feel that it’s “tainted with design and theism” and that such rejection “provides aid and comfort for theists (and deists) in general and Intelligent Design proponents in particular, and therefore must be suspect.” I do not reject it on YOUR “reasoning” at all. I reject it on mine. Your interpretation and “reasons” are ludicrous.
I (and many other physicists and scientists in general) reject the basic premise that underlies the idea, that unless an interaction is “observed” by something we are pleased to call “CONSCIOUSNESS”, then that interaction or event cannot be said to actually have taken place.
Therein lies the whole trouble, for the proponents of ANTHROPIC reasoning obviously prefer to qualify the term “observer” as being synonymous with “human being” – typically the arch-observer in the form of a scientist – because they are “conscious”.
This notion is nothing less than a reflection of pure, unadulterated, gratuitous, shameless, self-indulgent, ANTHROPOID conceit. (At least they put a fair name to it, but it doesn’t endear them much). Such conceit is typically incapable of listening to the countless overtures of those who have tried to correct them. They obviously haven’t listened. They won’t listen. They really DO think that they are somehow special and constitutionally different from other “inanimate” material objects. The trouble is that the proponents cannot abide the idea that what they will insist on identifying as “inanimate objects” can carry out “observations” with as much alacrity as what they require of “conscious entities”.
A principle of mediocrity – universal equipollence amongst all force-carrying material and energy particles, which covers both supposedly distinct “animate and inanimate” or “unconscious and conscious” entities – provides more than sufficient justification, consistent with quantum mechanical considerations, for the idea that interactions can in fact occur without the observational assistance of clever anthropoids whose heads are a great deal bigger than the universe that contains them.
This, of course, makes perfect sense to anyone who admits that the universe has existed for a quite a long time indeed without any help from humans, as PZ reminds us. And, if multiverse or many-worlds ideas ARE real, none of them need to have their existences restricted by the absence of clever apes who happened to blink in and out of existence on a small and decidely unspecial planet amongst trillions in one of them.
It’s fascinating how Anthropicists – like their religious counterparts – now indict “non-believers” as faith-enablers by pinning their very own conceits onto them. But THIS argument here? THIS one takes the cake. This has got to be one of the pinnacles of anthropic thinking. Now they’ve managed to brand people who REJECT Anthropic and Fine-Tuning nonsense as aiding and abetting the cause of theists and IDiots. Naturally, the Anthropicists and Fine-Tuners aren’t doing any such thing themselves by hanging onto that old rotten bone.
Now I’m absolutely sure the world is going utterly, stark-staring mad. Once a significant fraction of our precious scientists go nuts, we’ve all had it. We will very likely not survive for long. Poor models of reality upon which any organisms must rely, whether conceptual or genetic, rarely if ever do over any sustained period. Take THAT very real possibility, and shove that up into your Fine-Tuning arguments as far as you dare. Then take a good long hard look at it and see how it comes out. No, it’s not supposed to be pretty, but then, what makes you or anybody else keep thinking that the universe owes us anything? Snobbery, of course.
Arnosium Upinarum: “The fact that objects and organisms that require particular environments to exist just happen to be found in those environments is not in dispute, but there is nothing profound in it either.”
Following through on that reasoning, doesn’t that imply a larger space of physical laws? Either a multiverse, a cyclic universe, or a wider (initial?) range of possible laws within our universe?
Anthropic Principle + Mediocrity -> our universe’s laws are merely a subset of laws
“shameless, self-indulgent, ANTHROPOID conceit.”
A conceit of the suborder of Primates consisting of platyrrhines and catarrhines? Just funning with you.
Don’t confuse the participatory anthropic principle (observer-constructing quantum wooliness) with the more general argument about anthropic fine tuning.
“Once a significant fraction of our precious scientists go nuts, we’ve all had it.”
Right, a lot of scientists give credence to these and similar views – Linde, Hawking, Kaku, Susskind, Dawkins … Shall I list more? That’s right, they’re all nuts.
I agree that “anthropic,” like “fine tuning” is loaded with unfortunate affective associations. How about “sapient principle”? No improvement, is it? The problem with “lithic principle” and similar satiric formulations is that they do not sufficiently narrow the conditions.
The problem with “lithic principle” and similar satiric formulations is that they do not sufficiently narrow the conditions.
Why should the conditions necessarily be narrowed? If it is the case that most changes in the laws of physics would obliterate rocks as well as humans, then the anthropic principle reduces to the lithic principle. There’s no way to narrow the conditions just to humans or to sapient life.
Nice posts, Colugo.
We shouldn’t allow creationists to co-opt the anthropic principle. The weak version, in fact, argues against design…if, 10,000 years from now, SETI hasn’t picked up any signals, and chemists still haven’t come up with simple replicators, you still don’t have much of an argument for a designer.
The funny thing is, they way they do that can be described by statistics. The lightest particles appear most often and live longest before disappearance. And those that aren’t their own antiparticles appear and disappear strictly in pairs. Regularity all over. Which is why quantum physics is still math (horribly complicated math, but still in principle calculable).
(Oh, man. Caledonian would have torn you to teeny tiny shreds over that one.)
I thought not. But then I’m not a native speaker, and in German we have only two words where English has three (belief, faith, trust), so I may have misinterpreted something. Or worse, I may have unjustifiedly generalized from the way some, or even most, native speakers use it.
No.
I have followed it, and indeed, here’s an example of a mistake:
Tsss. In most religions there is no omnipotent and omniscient deity and no judgment. For starters, the Sumerians believed that everyone’s shadow goes to the underworld to live in darkness and depression and eat mud for all eternity — no matter what one had believed in and no matter what one had done.
In general, the idea that the truth lies in the middle is a logical fallacy. Often the existence of two (or more) opposing hypotheses means there’s evidence for reality lying at one extreme and evidence for reality lying at another extreme, but none for it lying in the middle. (Never mind the cases where reality lying in the middle is a logical impossibility.)
Yes, except that — despite his own conviction of the contrary — he wasn’t using the anthropic principle at all. He was using the observation that carbon exists.
The funny thing is, they way they do that can be described by statistics. The lightest particles appear most often and live longest before disappearance. And those that aren’t their own antiparticles appear and disappear strictly in pairs. Regularity all over. Which is why quantum physics is still math (horribly complicated math, but still in principle calculable).
(Oh, man. Caledonian would have torn you to teeny tiny shreds over that one.)
I thought not. But then I’m not a native speaker, and in German we have only two words where English has three (belief, faith, trust), so I may have misinterpreted something. Or worse, I may have unjustifiedly generalized from the way some, or even most, native speakers use it.
No.
I have followed it, and indeed, here’s an example of a mistake:
Tsss. In most religions there is no omnipotent and omniscient deity and no judgment. For starters, the Sumerians believed that everyone’s shadow goes to the underworld to live in darkness and depression and eat mud for all eternity — no matter what one had believed in and no matter what one had done.
In general, the idea that the truth lies in the middle is a logical fallacy. Often the existence of two (or more) opposing hypotheses means there’s evidence for reality lying at one extreme and evidence for reality lying at another extreme, but none for it lying in the middle. (Never mind the cases where reality lying in the middle is a logical impossibility.)
Yes, except that — despite his own conviction of the contrary — he wasn’t using the anthropic principle at all. He was using the observation that carbon exists.
Funnily enough, there are probably ways to make humans and rocks but not carbon impossible! Imagine a carbon-rich planet, with a core of silicon carbide, a mantle of diamond, and a very thin crust of graphite, with an atmosphere of methane and carbon dioxide. Life? Unlikely, when all elements heavier than carbon (and perhaps lighter than carbon as well) are so scarce. Complex life? On a planet without plate tectonics and the kind of climate etc. that follows? Highly improbable.
A carbon-rich planet was discovered a few months ago. Fiddle with Hoyle’s example, and you get more carbon in the universe, so that most or all planets are carbon-rich. No rocks, no humans, but still carbon!
Sagan was wise. Perhaps even wiser than he himself noticed.
Funnily enough, there are probably ways to make humans and rocks but not carbon impossible! Imagine a carbon-rich planet, with a core of silicon carbide, a mantle of diamond, and a very thin crust of graphite, with an atmosphere of methane and carbon dioxide. Life? Unlikely, when all elements heavier than carbon (and perhaps lighter than carbon as well) are so scarce. Complex life? On a planet without plate tectonics and the kind of climate etc. that follows? Highly improbable.
A carbon-rich planet was discovered a few months ago. Fiddle with Hoyle’s example, and you get more carbon in the universe, so that most or all planets are carbon-rich. No rocks, no humans, but still carbon!
Sagan was wise. Perhaps even wiser than he himself noticed.
Oh yeah. On the “In all religions (apart from Buddhism) God is the Judge of the Dead” nonsense, I forgot the most blatant example: IIRC, in Islam the judge is Jesus, but Jesus is not the Son of God in Islam. Here’s merely the prophet Isa. :-Þ
Oh yeah. On the “In all religions (apart from Buddhism) God is the Judge of the Dead” nonsense, I forgot the most blatant example: IIRC, in Islam the judge is Jesus, but Jesus is not the Son of God in Islam. Here’s merely the prophet Isa. :-Þ
David Marjanović, OM (#137):
Can we call that the “organic principle”, or would that be stretching too far? :-)
@121 (Michael),
The basic view of dialectical materialism is that of arguing opposites toward a middle. The complicated view is that it is a process of developing a thesis (first position), antithesis (second position), and synthesis (truth of opposites), which itself becomes a new thesis. I think it was meant more as an approach to address philosophical rather than empirical contradictions. Western thinking is fundamentally dichotomous, in contrast to Eastern thinking (such as Buddhism) which is more holistic and seemingly better at dealing with contradictions. Example, I believe the Japanese have strong spiritual beliefs which don’t appear to impede their science. So it might be interesting to examine their culture to see how that works.
@122 (Blake)
In continuing with dialectical materialism as described to Michael, no one needs to be killed. Given the logic would be something along the lines of 100%, 50%, 25%, 0%.
Davies lost my respect for his thesis early on, from the first sentence actually, but I’ll focus instead on this claim from his second paragraph: “All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.” Perhaps this is where not being a physicist has the virtue of a different perspective, because I can say without reservation that he’s completely wrong — in a historical science like evolutionary biology, we have no problem when we encounter a phenomenon that isn’t orderly or rational, and that has all the appearance of haphazard meaninglessness. We’re accustomed to seeing simple chance as a strong thread running throughout biological history.
DING DING DING!
This is why, of all the sellout and/or brainwashed “scientist” types that get paraded in front of us by the creationists as “scientists who favor creationism”, the vast majority are usually engineers or computer scientists or some other suchness. Very, very few are actual honest-to-goodness no-bullshit biologists.
…in German we have only two words where English has three
glauben and trauen? what is the difference in emphasis there?
To me as well “trust” sounds more earthly and focused than “faith”, but on the other hand “In God we trust”?
Early humans likely saw the world as chaotic, then observed patterns, and finally utilized them. We operate on the methodological assumption that these patterns will persist – and so does Davies. Or else he wouldn’t take it on “faith” the fact that his opinion piece would get printed in the paper for us to read it.
But if he wants, I could deny that he ever wrote that opinion piece, because it’s only a belief of mind and not a fact witnessed by me. Yes, and let’s let Scott Peterson out of prison, too. Nobody saw him kill his wife Laci, after all. That a good idea, Paul? Of course I only have faith that anyone else will read what I’m writing (if indeed I am writing anything – maybe this is a dream… maybe I don’t exist… maybe…)
/snark
#16 “island” said:
[PZ] Alas, Davies also brings up the anthropic principle, that tiresome exercise in metaphysical masturbation that always flounders somewhere in the repellent ditch between narcissism and solipsism.
[island] lol… PZ thinks that the observed reality is “metaphyiscal masterbation”.
He must also equate his ignorance of the facts to reality… ;)
Hey island, How does the anthropic principle: if things were different – things would be different = observed reality?
How many configurations for different universes have you tested?
Where are the results published?
Inquiring minds want to know!
I haven’t read the whole thread yet; I hope I’m not repeating others too much.
Cheers,
Ray
To me as well “trust” sounds more earthly and focused than “faith”, but on the other hand “In God we trust”?
Putting the word “God” (as if any others either don’t exist or are mere pretenders to the title… as if) on filthy lucre always seemed to me to be a joke about trust, in its sense of credit-worthiness, as if Gob were the platonic ideal to which mere mortals could never be bothered to aspire. Thus, In God we trust… All others pay cash.
steve99 said:
Our current scientific thinking relies on the fact that we occupy a typical place in our Universe. Our Universe may be quite special as universes go. Or not. But that has absolutely no bearing on the observations we make inside of it. No scientist I know has ever claimed that we occupy a typical place “in reality.” How the hell could they possibly determine such a thing?
@142) I don’t care what ‘dialectical materialism’ or any other such pomo nonsense says.
The fact of the matter is that when there two positions strongly held by their adherents, sometimes one position is right, sometimes the other position is right, sometimes some intermediate is right, and sometimes something completely different is right.
HOWEVER, the simple fact that there are two positions which are strongly held tells you nothing about where the truth is. You cannot, as a general rule, “split the difference” and hope for a high rate of accuracy.
Well, having faith that my floor will still be there in the morning is different from faith in the Tooth Fairy, or the Sky Fairy for that matter. The former is an expectation that previous experience is a guide to expectation. The latter is an assumption that the imagined is real. You know: if I can imagine a sky-blue-pink unicorn, then one must exist.
@149
Re: HOWEVER, the simple fact that there are two positions which are strongly held tells you nothing about where the truth is. You cannot, as a general rule, “split the difference” and hope for a high rate of accuracy.
**I think I need to add a couple more comments to make my point not be interpreted too literally. My background is in psychology and the social sciences, and so any comment I make is coming from that viewpoint. I’m aware of a number of controversies in my area that fit well with the idea of an intermediary stance being a more accurate position. The most famous one is the rather old (around 300 years) nature vs. nurture controversy, which for the most part, has been resolved toward a theoretical stance called interactionalism which suggests that both genes and environment interact to influence development. However, there are variants on interactionalism. As examples, one methodological approach (twin studies) attempts to identify how much do genes and environment contribute to development; the other is more concerned with how genes and environment interact. The other one that is still a long way from being resolved is the monistic vs. dualistic views of the mind-body problem. I have no idea whether a middle stance will be the ultimate explanation for this controversy, but the trend towards the most controversial (philosophical and epistemological) ideas appear to point in that direction.
Other examples…
I am a little less familiar with the details of the dominant controversies in the other disciplines, but it seems to me that as examples: physics is trying to resolve whatever contradictions that exist with relativity and quantum mechanics in the form of string theory? Thus might make string theory essentially a middle ground stance. However, apparently there are about 5 string theories, and, it is still elegant speculation.
I assume that the modern synthesis view in biology is a combination of the ideas of Darwin and Mendel, that reconciles macro and micro evolution. Which essentially makes the modern synthesis an intermediary stance of the two perspectives.
So based on what I’ve said above, I assume that this science/religion dichotomy (a very old one which won’t seem to go away easily) will reach some intermediary position in the future. This is more of an observation of where these arguments seem to go overtime rather than, necessarily, an advocation of where it should go.
A vehement belief in one point or another certainly doesn’t seem to be productive given the research on in-group, out-group biases and group polarization effects.
My background is in psychology and the social sciences, and so any comment I make is coming from that viewpoint.
–John Brockman
Wow, sorry I missed all the action. Coupla points:
PZ, everyone:
I don’t have the NY Times, so did Davies actually reach the point where he equated all of science with faith? Wilkins didn’t mention that on his analysis of it over at ‘Evolving Thoughts’, instead focusing on the logical errors that he saw in Davis imputing lawfulness as a property of the universe. By the way, that analysis was excellent.
Island:
Questioning the intelligence and sincerity of Blake Stacey earns you no points with me, though it does put you in rare company. The last person to characterize Blake thusly, if I recall correctly, is the ID ‘journalist’ Denyse O’Leary. Which means, in all likelihood, that your current disposition (PZ’s dungeon) is well-earned.
Blake Stacey:
Yes, #122 was funny, but icky. I feel the same way agreeing with you, but I’m going to post this comment anyway.
Colugo:
I concur with the position that you’re staking out. Einstein once said something to the effect that the greatest mystery of the universe is its’ intelligibility. I don’t have faith in science, but I do think scientists should attempt to go where the mystery is, rather than punting on hard problems. Good on ‘ya.
This reminds me of something Carl Sagan said in Cosmos: that we appear to live in an ‘in-between’ universe, where things change (and are thus interesting), but apparently change in regular, lawful ways (and can thus be investigated). This is a pleasant state of affairs, for Carl goes on to remark, “We can do science, and improve our lives.” I get the feeling, however, that they are some here who would regard some possible outcomes, if true, as something less than an improvement.
Kristine:
The standards of proof that are appropriate in a legal proceeding are different from those used in science, another reason for my distaste for the DI lawyers and their patron saint, law professor Philip Johnson. I don’t mind the snark in and of itself, but it is worth noting that (in the absence of evidence for multiple universes) the various ends that anthropic reasoning can be put to (scientific and otherwise) tend to have a little more force than an argument to a jury. Crime is commonplace, but as far as we know there is only one universe. In a way, the lawfulness of the universe is the only way we can even hope to build evidence of the sort that can be used in a criminal trial.
I asked “What is the difference between ‘faith’ and ‘trust’? Are they not synonyms?”
David Marjanović wrote:
Actually you were right the first time. They’re not the same in English because Christians (from the dawn of the New Testament) have loaded the word “faith” with extra meanings and this is how people like Davies manage to play a shell game with the word “faith,” making an well earned ‘trust’ come off like an unearned ‘faith.’
There are about 5 meanings for faith, a couple of which are synonyms for trust.
They are:
1) Confident belief in the truth, value, or trustworthiness of a person, idea, or thing.
2) Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence because it is magically given by God/Holy Spirit.
3) Loyalty or allegiance, as in “keeping faith with one’s supporters.”
4) “Faith” is often used as a synonym for Christianity itself in America.
5) The body of dogma in any religion, as in “the Muslim faith.”
Only the first definition is a direct synonym for “trust.” “trust” can be a term of art for 3.
I asked “Would you use ‘trust’ in the same pejorative way that PZ and Davies use the word ‘faith’?” David answered: “No.”
The meaning we want to attach that is “pejorative” is usually 2, “a belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence because it is magically given by God/Holy Spirit.” 4 and 5 are also negative, “pejorative” aspects for atheists. But you have to get explicit about it or else you’ll fail to communicate.
Well said, Scott. I was struck speechless.
I wouldn’t say that Davies equates “all of science with faith” but he comes pretty close. Allow me to indulge in a little *cough* quote-mining:
“…science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way… And so far this faith has been justified.” [emphasis mine]
“…to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin.”
“The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational.”
“… both religion and science are founded on faith — namely, on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws…”
“…very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place… Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.”
And so on. Here’s a link to the whole piece:
Taking Science on Faith by Paul Davies
I think I have anger management issues…because when I came across Davies’ op-ed my blood-pressure increased and I wanted to punch not only Paul Davies but also the New York Times’ editors who gave it the “thumbs-up,” as well as all of the people who caused it jump to the top position on the “most e-mailed” list yesterday.
Paul Davies, you ignorant slut.
I’m not a scientist — I don’t even play one on TV — but I think there is something wrong with nearly every sentence, maybe every clause, every phrase in Davies’ op-ed — literally. The most detestable part is the smugness, the condescension, the…the… “scientists, myself excepted, think they’re so clever and superior, but I’m going to kick over their dogmatic ant-hill and then sit back with a smug smirk and watch them scurry and climb all over themselves in a panic” tone of the whole thing.
Second most detestable thing about the op-ed: through an utterly childish and wholly dishonest abuse of the English language, Davies tries to make it seem that there’s no difference between scientific beliefs and religious doctrines — no difference between, say, atomic theory and the belief that communion bread literally turns into the body of Jesus. Do you see? Do you see why I want to punch him…and them? They’re MAKING me hate — I have no choice, do I? I mean, what other option does a sane, reasonable human being have in such a situation?
Paul Davies, the word “faith,” when used in a religious context, does not mean the same thing as when you use it to describe what scientists do. OK? When a religious person says they take a given proposition on “faith,” they don’t mean that they tentatively accept said proposition because they and a long line of other responsible, careful academics have firsthand acquaintance with certain observable facts of the physical world that are consistent with a given hypothesis, which hypothesis has been repeatedly tested and never, thus far, shown to be wrong and which, the instant a fact is observed which IS inconsistent with it, will be considered problematic and possibly rejected or revised if the inconsistency cannot be resolved. They generally mean something along the lines of, “My pastor told me this,” or “I read this in my magic, ancient book, and therefore I believe it and will continue to do so no matter what.” OK? You foul-smelling troll. You wanker of huge proportions. You…you…bad, and not-very-good-at-all person. I bet you’re ugly. I wish I could sue you for emotional distress. You’re as cuddly as a cactus, You’re as charming as an eel, Mr. Davies, You’re a bad banana, With a greasy black peel. Not to mention a pusillanimous pustule of piffle. And did I mention that you’re an ignorant slut? I think I did, but it bears repeating, you ignorant slut.
Steve99:
It certainly would be, and I would never make it. As we’re discussing an unanswered question, we need to be aware that this is one potential answer (if we found this to be the case, all the marvel about our seemingly improbable circumstance–which motivates the theists’ fine-tuning argument–would evaporate). It would be just as errant to assume that this is not the case; we just don’t know at this point.
No, it seems it wouldn’t be. I’ve always gone by Stephen Hawking’s definition; from the glossary of The Universe in a Nutshell: Anthropic Principle: The idea that we see the universe the way it is because if it were any different, we wouldn’t be here to see it. What PZ (and others, prior to post #33) discuss is more along the lines of the fine-tuning argument, for which the name “Anthropic Principle” has been co-opted (evidently, rather successfully). The fine-tuning argument claims that the (supposed) low probability that the physical constants would take values that they did (thus permitting our existence) is best explained by an intentional agent “tuning” them specifically to enable us to exist. The AP as I recognize it is IMO an excellent counter to this claim; sure, perhaps the universe might have taken any of a nearly infinite number of histories, but since we exist, it obviously did not take any that were incompatible with our existence. If it had, we wouldn’t be here. The present state is no more evidence of a “tuner” than any other state would have been; this one just happens to be the one that happened, analogous to the number sequence in my dice-rolling example.
I’m not clear on your last paragraph–can you elaborate?
Colugo, the fine-tuning argument as I have encountered it is described above, and it is inherently theistic, though I see you are using “tuning” in a manner that does not imply a “tuner”; under your definition, I agree completely with your post #133.
Mike L, spot on, LOL!
@152,
Somewhat off topic, but nonetheless..
If you’ve watched the Mission to Mars series on the Discovery Channel, you’re most likely familiar with the types of challenges astronauts chosen for the maiden voyage to Mars are predicted to face. The most interesting comment I heard while watching the show was that while the technical sciences (biology, physics, chemistry) will make the mission technically possible, the Achilles heel will be the psychological makeup and corresponding social interactions of the crew during the approximately 2 year voyage. Namely, will the chosen astronauts (male and/or female) be able to make the trip without the inevitable weaknesses of human nature creating a problem? In which case, the majority of the comments (probably including mine) are most likely irrelevant for dealing with this next major step in human exploration.
On a more personal perspective note, I for one wished that the world functioned a bit more like Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek vision. A ship full of experts in different expertise areas (ok, well admittedly, counsellor Troi was a bit useless), different ethnic backgrounds, and followed an ethical code much like the Prime Directive. To me, when I see the word “God” it registers in my brain as Prime Directive.
Not that largely Freudian, Thanatos-like view of God.
Colugo #135 (C): “Following through on that reasoning, doesn’t that imply a larger space of physical laws? Either a multiverse, a cyclic universe, or a wider (initial?) range of possible laws within our universe?”
Sure, it implies this. Have I said I didn’t think so? Why do you assume me incapable of “following through on that reasoning”? Because I reject the Anthropic arguments which spuriously claim to be a feature of such ideas? You would be very wrong if you think that. At the risk of dismaying some who over-associate these concepts and worse, over-identify with them, I happen to be one who can find no theoretical reason for rejecting ideas such as the many-worlds interpretation. I think that interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests nature visits EVERY contingency allowable within any particular arena regulated by a specific configuration of physical laws. That we appear to be restricted to one outcome (at a time, so to speak) and cannot observe any of those myriads of other branches has primed many investigators for other legitimate theoretical ideas which are posed by a theoretical investigation of extra dimensions that can’t (yet) be confirmed by observation, namely, the idea that our universe is but one embedded in a multiverse. NONE of this whatsoever requires the Anthropic Principle (AP).
C: “Anthropic Principle + Mediocrity -> our universe’s laws are merely a subset of laws.”
No, you need not invoke the AP at all in order to arrive at that conclusion. One only needs to admit that “observation” can be performed by objects other than human beings, which was the main point in my response, the point which you have so carefully chosen to avoid in yours. I can understand that. It doesn’t take much of a reassessment along those lines to realize that the AP is on exceedingly shaky ground.
C: “A conceit of the suborder of Primates consisting of platyrrhines and catarrhines? Just funning with you.”
Hah hah. I wasn’t using the term in any biologically technical way, as you well know. But are not the noses on all thus referred to impressive?
C: “Don’t confuse the participatory anthropic principle (observer-constructing quantum wooliness) with the more general argument about anthropic fine tuning.”
Oh, I’m not confused, I assure you. I know full well the arguments involved, complete with the distinctions and many equivocations. Anthropic fine-tuning DOES stem quite directly from “observer-constructing quantum wooliness”, inflates it to the size of a universe (that’s investing the macroscale with the quantum-behavioral features of the microscale) and then, somewhere, right out of the blue, *POOF*, declares that the PARTICULAR universe we find ourselves in is the way it is BECAUSE we are here.
That’s the basic rusty hinge upon which all AP gates swing (versions from the Strong to the Weak APs and the cute stuff in between). That’s where the proponents first got the idea of tackling problems by working backward from conclusion to premise, as an exercise in what fruits such reversed logic might bring. Unfortunately, they got carried away with it and gave a mere method the status of Principle. And all of that huge expenditure of effort on this nonsense simply because the originators neglected to explicitly define what they meant by the word “observer”, and bandwagon interpreters have mindlessly cleaved onto the idea that participatory observership requires a conscious observer, for example, as in the collapse of a wave function. The question that remains utterly unaddressed by the advocates of AP is this: just how do they know that unconscious inanimate objects aren’t performing observations? Where do they get that idea from?
C: “Right, a lot of scientists give credence to these and similar views – Linde, Hawking, Kaku, Susskind, Dawkins … Shall I list more? That’s right, they’re all nuts.”
Hey, it’s been known to happen. (If you like, I will modify my definition of “nuts” and grudge you a “Weak” form of it, more like the definition of “not even wrong”…but, if you don’t mind, I still like “nuts”…and it IS justifiably applied to anything that resembles dogma more than science).
Go ahead, if it will give you comfort, list all you can stomach. But saying that a lot of scientists give credence to an idea is not a compelling argument for that idea. There are lots of scientists who think that certain ideas that enjoy a fair consensus are rubbish, and AP is one of these. It isn’t a popularity contest, as you and others who have posted here evidently think. The history of science is replete with episodes involving ridiculous notions championed by very smart and distinguished minds. For a while. Smart people can be wrong and quite stubborn too. (Witness, for example, how the luminaries who formulated and/or supported the Copenhagan Interpretation for decades stubbornly resisted the interpretation Hugh Everett proposed in his “Many-Worlds” hypothesis). Yet some of them have been known to be flexible enough to have reconsidered their stance after having been exposed to new evidence or better theoretical ideas.
I happen to be one who openly expresses skepticism for a hypothesis if I can see no compelling evidence for it, and especially if it contradicts already well-established principles, like those AP inevitably impinges upon, under the general cause-and-effect purview of thermodynamics and the arrow of time, etc: We are here because the universe is the way it is, not the other way around. This simple conclusion is amply proved by a preponderance of evidence that the universe has existed for a far longer period of time without us than with us. It is a simple (yet evidently, for some, startling) fact: we do not contain the universe; the universe contains us. All we can possibly contain are fallible models of it.
But guess what? All those most fundamental mundane little nuggets of mediocrity – you know, like photons, electrons and quarks and such – have been around for very nearly every bit as long as the universe itself. So perhaps you can formulate a version of the “Anthropic Principle” that accomodates them and THEIR supposed “interests”, because they’ve had much more to do with constructing “our” universe, and have been at it far longer, than we have.
Curiously, so the much-vaunted AP reasoning might go, they seem to have “constructed” a universe that is obviously consistent with our flash-in-the-pan appearance much later. What can these fundamental particles have been thinking? Weren’t they happy without us? We are here because the fundamental particles, in their abject loneliness, arranged for it? Give me a break. The AP reasoning stinks wherever and however applied, because it is, at heart, teleologically wormy.
Any way you try to accomodate these considerations, you will either end up with such a monstrous pile of ad hoc presumptions, or end up with a “Principle” which is so weak and diluted as to vanish from sight altogether. That is all critics have been trying to say for years. Who needs it? What aspect of theoretical consideration seriously founders from its lack? Almost none of the Anthropicists listen. they’ve been too busy breathlessly gabbing about their nonsense to listen. Besides, it’s too precious a public-relations gimmick for them to consider surrendering it so easily…there MUST be another dozen pop-books-worth of life in it. Oh, and look: how naturally it fits in with theistic notions! I don’t know whether to think this cunning or just plain vulgar.
C: “I agree that “anthropic,” like “fine tuning” is loaded with unfortunate affective associations. How about “sapient principle”? No improvement, is it? The problem with “lithic principle” and similar satiric formulations is that they do not sufficiently narrow the conditions.”
You see? You demand human consciousness FIRST, then whip up another candidate name for the Principle (“sapient”) containing exactly the same error, THEN declare it wasn’t much of an improvement. (Pardon me while I indulge in a brief groan).
Here’s the essential problem in a nutshell: the problem is that you are presumptuously insisting that conditions be NARROWED, whereas the solution to your dillemma, such as it is, is to DILATE the definition of observership to INCLUDE all the entities that can interact with each other (making copious “observations”) without ever requiring the assistance of a human observer.
How hard can that possibly be? How difficult can it be to forego an idea based on a subtle but spurious distinction and allow quite robust concepts such as self-organization and other processes, both determinstic and non-deterministic, that spontaneously lead to order and complexity as well as, yes, the role of gloriously pure chance, take care of all of the locally mundane circumstances? After all, AP advocates can’t be very cosmopolitan if they run around and declare how finely tuned the universe in one tiny place and one place only is to humans without giving a proportional tip of the hat to how finely tuned the universe, in a vastly larger number of places, is to rocks or electrons. Judging from their fabulously rich abundance, the universe is obviously very much more “finely-tuned” to them than it is to us.
If it will serve as a balm, consider EVERYTHING that is “inanimate” to be invested with “consciousness”. (As a mantra, may I suggest, “Electrons are people too…” – repeat 300 times daily). You’ll just have to live with the consequence of being rendered relatively unspecial in a universe that was arranged by fundamental particles, forces and fields whose collective influence on the whole, in the form of a wide variety and huge population of inanimate objects and systems more massive and energetic than thee, utterly dominate your own very tiny contribution.
But don’t be sad, be glad! The fact that you are permitted by the “laws” of physics to exist in this particular universe along with lots of other wonderful junk that has nothing whatever to do with you is reason enough for celebration. The converse PREMISE – that the universe and its physical laws are somehow contrived by conscious human observers – is simply not an avenue towards any explanation of the origin and configuration of a universe which prevailed for over 13 billion years without the slightest help from humanity. In a stupendously vast majority of branches of the many-worlds AND multiverse scenarios, humans never appear. In the very tiny minority of those in which they do, such as ours at the present time, they last for less than a cosmic eyeblink. None of those universes, including ours, requires humans to sanction their existence or, by their absence, disavow it. Thinking so is a conceit, and that level of conceit IS nuts.
I haven’t read Sean Carroll’s piece yet, but it strikes me that, if the universe was as deterministic (“order”) as Davies seesm to suggest, there would be no need for a probabalistic theory in physics such as quantum mechanics. Nor would there be an unceertainty principle.
After reading Susskind, his version of the anthropic principle for cosmology turns out to be another addition for the atheist toolbox.
@Tycho: you claim that “One cannot observe something that one has already concluded cannot happen.” Why not? If I conclude that the house can’t possibly fall down, and then it falls on me, am I magically prevented from perceiving that I now have a pile of rubble instead of a house?
(Witness, for example, how the luminaries who formulated and/or supported the Copenhagan Interpretation for decades stubbornly resisted the interpretation Hugh Everett proposed in his “Many-Worlds” hypothesis
Wow, people disagree on two totally unsupported interpretations of observations. What a surprise. Of course the ones who don’t agree with your interpretation are nuts.
Victor Stenger at Talk Reason makes the argument that a single universe runs afoul of Occam’s Razor by postulating an arbitrary and unnecessary limit of 1 to the number of universes. That limit itself is the unparsimonious entity. After all, we have the existance of one universe known – more than one isn’t multiplying entities, it’s repeating a single entity that is known to exist in at least one case
“What is the difference between “faith” and “trust”? Are they not synonyms?”
I would argue that, in other contexts such as religion, people cling to faith far more tenaciously than they will work to maintain their trust of something or someone.
Sam:
Ha. By extension, the value of 6.67 E -11 for the gravitational constant is also an arbitrary limit. Just because this is among the narrow range of possible values actually observed under experimental conditions shouldn’t rule out wildly different values! In other words, I don’t think much of Stenger’s argument.
After all, we don’t posit a limit on the number of entities observed just by the act of observation, and extradordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The claim that there is one universe known to exist is not an extraordinary claim, and is certainly supported by a very large number of claims. The existence of a multiverse is an extraordinary claim for precisely the opposite reason. It is not enough to bask in the beautiful mathematics of another untested notion, string theory, and observe that some versions demand a multiverse. At some point, we need some actual evidence…right?
Maybe the various detectors on the LHC, going on-line as we speak, will shed some light on the present paucity of data for both string ‘theory’ and multiverse scenarios. Right now, their main scientific virtue with respect to origins is not that they ‘explain’ anything, but that they in principle supply a naturalistic redoubt for cosmogenesis. In the meantime, we do have one universe known to exist and we do not need to posit a theological redoubt in order to ask why it has the properties that it does.
Davies goes too far in equating the axioms of science with the dogma of faith, but that says nothing about the utility of the anthropic principle or the apparent ‘fine tuning’ of certain parameters. Scientists should be free to propose testable hypotheses drawn from different metaphysical axioms, as long as they test them and let the chips fall where they may.
It seems to me that the Anthropic Principle is largely a matter of fish insisting that the universe must be made of water or they couldn’t exist.
My college roommate earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry. In his learned opinion, “scientists are the most arrogant people in the world.” According to him, they think that because they are scientists, they know more about everything, even when they are woefully ignorant about other topics. Scientists, he feels, are the worst people to ask about the history of science or the philosophy of science.
The article by Mr. Myers is a great example of his thesis. (Many of the replies to this article are even better illustrations of his slightly jaded proposition.) Mr. Myers is blatantly ignorant of even the most basic principles in the history of philosophy. He proceeds on the foolish assumption that uniformity of nature is an empirically testable claim. But the atheistic philosopher David Hume exploded that idea centuries ago. (No doubt those sneaky church-people put him up to it.) Any university undergrad majoring in philosophy or even in intellectual history should be able to tell you as much.
When Mr. Myers is able to articulate a solution to the egocentric predicament or the problem of induction, then perhaps he can claim that science is not based on authority claims. Until then, he is stuck with the fact that science depends on presuppositions which in the nature of the case cannot be proven by science.
Mr. Myers has a kind of naïve child-like reverence for trial and error. This is where not being a biologist is helpful: Trail and error does not always produce the best results. There is no guarantee that good ideas will be tried, and no guarantee that the trial will accurately distinguish good results from bad.
There is much, much more that could be said, from the refutation of the empiricist theory of concept formation to the breakdown of the analytic-synthetic distinction. But there’s not much point. Mr. Myers and his herd do not have the background to follow the argument.
That post from Mr Knight is in the running for an award for the most pompous bit of ignorant arrogance in a comment.
It’s pretty clear he didn’t even understand a thing I wrote, since I certainly do not claim that “uniformity of nature is an empirically testable claim”.
Myers is a positivist? That’s news to me, or it isn’t news, and you’ve just propped up a straw man.
But is he ignoring the most basic principles of philosophy? I mean, that is what we’re talking about here. Are there even basic principles of philosophy? The abundance of petulant wankers like yourself makes me think that there aren’t any — there are just good philosophers, and bad ones.
It amazes me that you think you can preen yourself over your freshman’s understanding of Hume, even though you clearly aren’t familiar with Popper or his response to Hume. The scientific method of conjectures and refutations is the response to the problem of induction. You seem to be the one who is confused about the consequences of Hume’s philosophy, since you seem to think there is some method which can offer claims and test them in a manner superior to Popper’s method all while avoiding a hasty induction. Unless, of course, you actually have such a method. If you do, I’m just dying to hear it.
John Knight:
The “uniformity of nature is an empirically testable claim”?
Well, of course that’s false, if by ‘nature’ one means the whole enchilada of the Cosmos.
If by ‘nature’ one means that we can look for a result in an individual case that is consistent with past models, then it’s definitely true—though often trivial.
Let’s consider the case, however, of your smug (but somehow still broadly-brushed) brief that scientists “are the worst people to ask about the history of science or the philosophy of science.” Ignoring the fact that a philosopher of the first water pretty much trashed Davies’ piece in far more detailed terms, isn’t it true that (all things being equal) that scientists as a group are superior? I mean, there is such a thing as selection for ability, and I know many scientists who have the mad writing and research skills to do passable work in pretty much any branch of the humanities, should they choose. I have yet to meet, however, any humanities or English Lit major who could teach a high school physics course, much less calculus. Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure such birds exist, but I haven’t found them yet, I infer they are rare birds indeed. Personal anecdote inclines me, therefore, to write off your rhetoric as misplaced faux intellectualism coupled with a serious case of science envy.
But that would be premature, wouldn’t it? After all, the real problem here is that a legitimate scientist (Paul Davies) went slumming in philosophy-land without thinking things through. So you have a point after all, but I think you should put Davies through the mill before nailing PZ and others’ for criticizing Davies’ views.
And speaking of which, Knight Errant, since you’ve basically popped into this thread in media res just to nail PZ’s philosophical shortcomings, what is your ‘take’ on Dr. Davies’ apparent equation of science as practiced with faith? That’s a pretty tall drink to swallow all in one gulp, especially with a dash of Hume. So I invite you to demonstrate that you’re not a dilettante with a surface acquaintance with philosophy, and defend some position with respect to the Davies article that triggered the whole thing.
Otherwise, Knighty-Knight.
Davies has been a mild crank of sorts for a while now. I have a book of his where he claims that quantum mechanics refutes material. There’s a load of [deleted].
Blake Stacey (#42): which shows an unfortunate lack of imagination on the part of W. etc. We don’t even know if the “constants” are such, really, hence what mechanisms would vary them. And even if they did, there is still nothing to explain: the improbably happens all the time. This is why I find all the attempts to do more than Boltzman’s explanation of the arrow of time to be somewhat odd. Sure, it would be nice to do more, but maybe it is a brute fact …
coathangrrr (#46): See above – in a naturalistic universe, the probability that the “constants” support life GIVEN that we are here is unity. This is true regardless of how improbable the constants are (if they can vary at all). Or put another way – we are adapted to the universe, not the other way around.
efp: What’s irrational about stochasticity, given that there are laws of chance?
Tycho: Presuppositions can be justified by their consequences. Science’s metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions have massively more consilience than their alternatives.
Ian H Spedding FCD: Why is an infinite regress bad? (After all, that’s what our science tells us, bastardizations of the big bang theories not withstanding.)
Blake Stacey: Yes, after all to be pedantic, not all compounds of carbon are regarded as organic (e.g. the three carbon oxides, the various carbon sulfides, etc.) It is generally derivatives of hydrocarbons that are called organic.
And wow, another troll who thinks that we are all ignorant of philosophy. Here’s a hint to those guys who seem to have about a B level knowledge of phil 101: practicing scientists know more epistemology than you do. (And I say that as someone trained in the philosophy of science.)
“If I wanted to argue for a position on the basis of the anthropic principle, rather than trying to pretend that we live in a Goldilocks universe, we should be wondering how we ended up in such a hostile dump of a universe, one that favors endless expanses of frigid nothingness with scattered hydrogen molecules over one that has trillions of square light years of temperate lakefront property with good fishing, soft breezes, and free wireless networking.”
I guess you’d go with Chomsky’s Principle of Malevolent Design (MD)?
If you liked hemorrhoids, lower back problems, schizophrenia, acne, fallen arches, migranes and clinical depression, you’ll love an empty wasteland of a universe filled with endless vacuum and mind-shattering distances!
Reasonable deists would at least fall back upon the demi-urge.
Mr. Myers writes: “I certainly do not claim that ‘uniformity of nature is an empirically testable claim.’ ”
Mr. Myers wrote: “that certain laws are constant everywhere is just what is, as empirically determined by scientific observation.”
It is rather entertaining to imagine a scientist who goes “everywhere” to test Newton’s Third Law. Combined with the claim that science would be interesting if the universe were “rooted in reasonless absurdity,” well, you can understand my amusement.
The whole thing is made even more hilarious by the wildly inaccurate assumptions made by Dustin, by Scott Hatfield, and by Keith Douglas. It’s kind of nice to wake up to discover that I am an English lit major and a devotee of David Hume who couldn’t teach high school physics or calculus, who has never heard of Karl Popper, who suffers from science envy, and who knows less about epistemology than the average practicing scientist. It’s rather pleasant to be all those things, if only for a few fleeting moments.
The entertaining part being the notion that this is how testing should be done.
Like I said, you aren’t reading very carefully. That laws are constant everywhere we look is an observation. If we find a place where the laws are different, that will be an observation, too, and we’ll deal with it if it happens. It is not a statement of what is, but a statement of what we know so far…and that’s all science can deal with.
I don’t think you get to accuse others of “wildly inaccurate assumptions” when you seem incapable of reading what is plainly written and make insane assumptions on your own. Get over yourself, Mr Knight.
Having skimmed the op-ed, some of the Edge rebuttals, and read through your post PZ, I’m a little confused. I watched Paul Davies “Beyond Belief” presentation at the 2006 conference and I’ve read his “Cosmic Jackpot” book. While he may be generally considered a nutter, and I don’t know nearly enough about physics to judge his arguements there, it seems like we’re generally missing the point of his philosophical argument.
He is not saying, “religion and science are based on faith, so there is a God”. He’s saying that physicists treat the laws of the universe like they are supernatural, outside of the universe. He thinks he has a better idea, about the laws being software or something run on the hardware of the universe. He claims this is testable, because of fuzziness in the early universe.
The op-ed makes this same general point, but doesn’t get into details about his idea. Its basically a primer for the book, where he goes on to refute things like the anthropic principle and a “god dunnit” explanation to the universe.
I think the worst we can say about this op-ed is that its a poorly written attempt to get a more general, more religious, audience to buy his book. Which in my opinion wouldn’t be a horrible thing.
I believe there is an attempt to broaden the conditions for the likelihood estimates to tangible such in the form of so called environmental principles. The Causal Entropic Principle is such an objective attempt.
Ironically, it is pretty much “the lithic principle”, as dust maximizes the causal entropy and so the likelihood.
If we should go by elegance, Smolin’s evolutionary principle wins. As for evolution the local probability is all that matters, so it is well defined here. But as for evolution there is still no global measure, and so it seems to result in the same problem as the weak AP anyway.
Correct or not, it is still described thusly, see J Myers explanation in comment #157. I prefer to distinguish the tautological consistency AP from the weak AP myself. There is a barrage of different formulations of varying strength, from consistency up to teleology. But beyond the weak AP we tread into woo-woo land.
I believe there is an attempt to broaden the conditions for the likelihood estimates to tangible such in the form of so called environmental principles. The Causal Entropic Principle is such an objective attempt.
Ironically, it is pretty much “the lithic principle”, as dust maximizes the causal entropy and so the likelihood.
If we should go by elegance, Smolin’s evolutionary principle wins. As for evolution the local probability is all that matters, so it is well defined here. But as for evolution there is still no global measure, and so it seems to result in the same problem as the weak AP anyway.
Correct or not, it is still described thusly, see J Myers explanation in comment #157. I prefer to distinguish the tautological consistency AP from the weak AP myself. There is a barrage of different formulations of varying strength, from consistency up to teleology. But beyond the weak AP we tread into woo-woo land.
Sigh. 2nd time asked, still not a whack at it.
According to the AP principle of blogs, the likelihood is that the question is ill posed. :-)
But wouldn’t an eternal inflationary cosmology provide a more evident global arrow?
And you can currently hand wave away the asymmetric initial conditions if they bother your concept of arrow origination, either by noting that the upper bound on the world lines looking back in time can be moved back indefinitely, or by noting that all it takes is to get one inflationary region going however improbable it was.
Times arrow may be a broken symmetry, but it is broken to make a point. Anything that stops everything from happen at once is fine by me. I’m more curious why left-right symmetry was broken. There is something sinister here.
Sigh. 2nd time asked, still not a whack at it.
According to the AP principle of blogs, the likelihood is that the question is ill posed. :-)
But wouldn’t an eternal inflationary cosmology provide a more evident global arrow?
And you can currently hand wave away the asymmetric initial conditions if they bother your concept of arrow origination, either by noting that the upper bound on the world lines looking back in time can be moved back indefinitely, or by noting that all it takes is to get one inflationary region going however improbable it was.
Times arrow may be a broken symmetry, but it is broken to make a point. Anything that stops everything from happen at once is fine by me. I’m more curious why left-right symmetry was broken. There is something sinister here.
Alas, Davies also brings up the anthropic principle, that tiresome exercise in metaphysical masturbation that always flounders somewhere in the repellent ditch between narcissism and solipsism. When someone says that life would not exist if the laws of physics were just a little bit different, I have to wonder…how do they know? Just as there are many different combinations of amino acids that can make any particular enzyme, why can’t there be many different combinations of physical laws that can yield life? Do the experiment of testing different universes, then come talk to me. Until then, claiming that the anthropic principle, an undefined mish-mash of untested assumptions, supports your personal interpretation of how the universe exists and came to be is a self-delusional error.
This is the kind of sloppy putdown that anti-AGW skeptics put out against AGW, saying that temperatures rise and fall and why assume the current warming is due to mankind etc. Look, the issue of specifically how life-friendly the laws and constants are (especially alpha) has been carefully and almost exhaustively explored and documented by investigators like Barrow and Tipler in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle etc., and there are ways to get a handle at least (so what if it’s not perfectly clear cut?) on just how fine-tuned they need to be. That claim wasn’t just an idle boast, and PZ gives us that clear indicator of a trolling hack here: Instead of even taking any interest in checking things out, he just throws out a derogatory red-meat bit of trash like any talk-radio bully (Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and their ilk, to which he is fully equivalent in approach.)
BTW, #164: Well, if the number of “universes” doesn’t have to equal one, then what limits what sort of realm they can be? Doesn’t that open up a can of worms of the modal realist sort, since what is to limit “universes” to anything at all like this? Why not then, heavens and hells, the reification of the Warner Brothers cartoons, and even an ultimate being like God him/herself? Once you unleash existability, it’s a madhouse.
Ah, so Barrow and Tipler have solved the measure problem, have they? Funny, didn’t notice that in the literature. Nor did anyone else, I suspect.
That would be the laws of physics. And you’re taking others to task for sloppiness…
Martin, I don’t think they should need to rigorously find and characterize the entire probability space in which “universes” could be picked from, they went over issues like what range alpha needed to be in, to allow life (and estimated of course.) Much of what the did was to reference the huge amount of previous work in the subject, I suggest you don’t really know how to evaluate that as being the explanation for not “noticing that in the literature” (why don’t you consult their references, it’s easy enough to get ahold of AFAIK.)
Your last point is *totally* off – “the laws of physics” is taken to mean, the rules applying to our universe and defining its character as such. The idea of modal realism etc. is that all possible descriptions or “possible worlds” exist – that has nothing to do with the laws of a given world, or even a class of such presumptive laws like “the landscape” of string theory etc.
Which doesn’t mean a damn thing without a measure.
Depends on what you mean by ‘Universe.’ Multiverse models tend to involve large manifolds with causally disconnected ‘Universe’ patches. On this manifold, a single set of laws produces different low-energy physics in each patch through spontaneous symmetry breaking.
On the other hand, if Stenger was talking about something completely different, then your point may hold. But given that Stenger is a physicist, I doubt it.
I have to say that having glanced at the article, I have a fondness for the Causal Entropic Principle. Having dust heated by stars increases entropy production. But living systems really maximize entropy production. Maybe entropy maximization is the principle that is responsible for our universe’s physical laws and initial conditions, ironically providing it with an anthropic, even telic, illusion.
http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050142&ct=1
Recall that I did not sign onto any variant of the Anthropic Principle; I asserted that it ought to be taken seriously and it has been a useful line of investigation. Smolin, Weinberg, Rees, Hawking, Kaku, Linde are definitely tuning (they disagree on the fineness) influenced; even the “lithic principle,” “entropic principle” and other refutations are due to there being an AP/tuning argument to provide an alternative to.
I don’t understand “science speak,” so I may be completely misunderstanding what’s being suggested by Neil B. and Colugo, but are you guys suggesting that the anthropic principle might be — just MIGHT BE — evidence for god? Whether or not you are doing so, there are numerous problems with this line of reasoning.
The argument (in layman’s terms) seems to be:
The laws of physics could have been any one of a gazillion trillion different ways. Only an infinitesimally small number of those ways would have supported life. Therefore, since life occurred, it is much more likely than not that there is a god that WANTED there to be life and so fine-tuned the laws of physics to allow it.
Is that fair description of the argument?
First, one could always be stubborn and say, “Well, it’s just an incredibly unlikely coincidence.” And this may not be as intellectually dishonest as it might seem; as unlikely as such a coincidence might be, it might be no more unlikely than the existence of some type of body-less agent (since bodies presumably only came about AFTER the life-friendly laws were in place) with the ability to manipulate matter in the necessary ways. How would one even begin to conceive of and account for such an agent, especially considering all the evidence we have that agency only comes about under certain rare conditions after billions of years of evolution?
Second, even if the reasoning in the argument were sound, it would not necessarily point to a single entity that anyone would want to call “god” or even have much interest in, let alone celebration for or adoration for or love or worship, etc., for. Strictly speaking, all that would be required is SOMETHING with the ability to manipulate matter in certain ways that humans do not yet understand (we may figure out how to do so ourselves someday). Whatever that something might be would not have to be one (could be more than one), would not have to be eternal (could have a finite past, a finite future, or may already not exist anymore), would not have to be all-powerful or all-knowing, certainly would not have to be loving/caring/good, could be wholly amoral or immoral, would not have to grant anyone an afterlife, would not have to be a million other things that human beings want god to be. In fact, there is literally — LITERALLY — an infinite number of natures such a being(s) could have, just so long as it (they) had the ability and willingness at some point in the past to fine-tune the laws of physics in such a way as to allow life to arise. That something(s) would not even have to have foreseen what the first living cells would eventually evolve into. Maybe the something(s) was only interested in producing bacteria, and once it (they) produced it, it (they) took some of the bacteria and left the scene, leaving the leftover bacteria to take their own merry course here on earth. Come to think of it, the something(s) might have not been interested in life at all; maybe it (they) was interested in some OTHER thing that was only possible within the parameters of the life-friendly laws of physics. In other words, even if valid, the anthropic argument would no more support the existence of “god” than it would any of an infinite number of other possibilities.
Third, there is a human-centric bias built into the argument which, as far as I can tell, invalidates it. It divides all of the gazillion trillion ways that the laws of physics MIGHT have been into two categories: life-friendly and non-life-friendly. It IMPOSES meaning/significance onto these categories. But to do so is wholly artificial and arbitrary. The gazillion trillion possible ways physics might have turned out could be just as easily divided into ANY OTHER two categories where one category is infinitesimally unlikely and the other almost guaranteed. For example, the ways physics might have turned out could be divided into the two following categories: those that would have produced the hottest 3 possible-universes, and those that would not have. So there would be a 3-in-gazillion-trillion chance of one of the heat-friendly physics occurring and a near certainty of the not-as-heat-friendly physics occurring. If, then, one of the hottest 3 universes had come about would that then be evidence for a heat-friendly god? In other words, the chance that ANY SINGLE set of physical laws had of occurring was just as remote as any SINGLE one of the life-friendly ones. Given that one set was going to occur, why is a life-friendly set any more remarkable than a non-life-friendly set? Only because we are imposing “remarkableness” onto such a set because it favors us and other things that we find remarkable (i.e. other life forms). The only reason we think it’s remarkable that one of the life-friendly ones occurred is because we’re looking at things through human eyes. Imagine that a group of people pitches in to buy some lottery tickets. They buy the same number of tickets as there are life-friendly possible ways the laws of physics might have been (for simplicity’s sake, let’s say that number is 1,000). The possible lottery numbers range from 1 to a gazillion trillion. So, the group of people has a 1,000-in-gazillion-trillion chance of winning. They end up winning. Does that mean that there is a god who favors them? No, because someone HAD to win — why not them? It’s no more remarkable that THEIR group won than it would be if some other group had won. It’s only remarkable FOR THEM, because it’s THEY who won. Just like it’s WE who won in the universe lottery, and so we think we we’re favored.
And there are other problems that have been mentioned by others. There could be many universes, and so it’s not so unlikely that one would allow life. Maybe universes come and go, sequentially, each having slightly different physics, and ours is number gazillion trillion in that sequence. A life-friendly physics would have been just a matter of time, then.
Also, I’m not sure this applies, but who knows how much space there is where our so-called “life-friendly” physics obtain? For all we know there could be a virtually infinite amount of such space that this physics has to “work with” (so to speak), and yet planet earth may be the only infinitesimally small point in all of that space where life arose, making that “life-friendly” physics seem not so life-friendly after all.
Lastly, as hinted at above, all evidence we have suggests that it took billions of years for minds to come about. All evidence we have also suggests that mind is always, 100% of the time as far as we have observed, inextricably “tied” to a body. So how could there be a mind without a body, especially one that can manipulate the physical world? And if “god” has a body, then how could that body have come about? The life-friendly laws of physics would have had to exist before the embodied god that supposedly created those laws.
Like I said, you aren’t reading very carefully.
Funny, I came to the same conclusion about you. Is it possible that you don’t realize that Davies is describing the uniformity of nature? Is it possible that you don’t realize that Davies is raising the problem of induction?
Apparently, it is.
Hello? Anybody home?
MartinM: I always had the impression that “multiverse” proponents were talking about literal “other universes” and not regions of ours. Maz Tegmark explicitly is indeed talking about genuine separate other worlds, he is a modal realist (look that up in Wikipedia.) (And, how does anyone find the metalaws that decide the likelihood of various laws of physics anyway? We sure don’t do experiments showing different laws on display in the lab: more evidence of some hypocrisy among scientists about such frontier claims.)
Mike L: You did a good job of summarizing the theistic/deistic anthropic argument, and that’s pretty much what I think. Your challenges aren’t bad either, I just don’t find them convincing – the point is, it’s all just speculation anyway regardless of whether you gravitate to a pro or con position. It can’t be proved in any case, and we just spin various supporting notions. You do have some misunderstandings I think, such as thinking that “God” would be able to “manipulate” matter – setting fundamental laws is deeper than manipulation, it is getting behind the foundations as it were – no “hands” involved. It doesn’t need a body: look at the vacuum producing virtual pairs (and ironically, why would you think creating anything needs a body, if you don’t think that’s how it got here yourself?) So the real difference is: you likely believe in some “brane” or “false vacuum” or stringy sea or whatever that birthed all this without having a “purpose” and I think that something even more fundamental containing ideas or purpose in some sense made it like this for a reason connected to conscious existence (maybe because that seems like “birthing” more like itself in small measure, yes the corny idea of “children of God.”
As for arguments about our being in one of the lucky friendly univeses, I used to think that could be a reasonable expectation from there being many possible worlds actually existing. But after looking at concepts of modal realism (see Wikipedia, and start worrying if “exist” can even be rigorously defined) and thinking in very absract terms (such as existential selection – why would some possible worlds exist and not others, etc., which is the very creme de la creme of high-end philosophical theology) – I began to worry about all the messy worlds that could be described but would be messy and chaotic even if we got this far in them. Below is the little summary I made at Cosmic Variance in the fascinating (and better informed per the physics as such) thread “Turtles Much of the Way Down”:
Greg, it’s not that hard to cast doubt on Tegmark’s hypothesis of (apparently) radical modal realism (or at least, of “mathematical structures.”) As I’ve said before, the number (roughly) of describable universes (“possible worlds”, PWs) is much larger than the number of nice clean ones with simple and continued laws of physics. In other words, there are many more PWs with sloppy laws of attraction like 1/r^2.1223 and not even consistent between particles or in time (since we can describe that – I just did!), or filled with “electrons” of slightly or greatly varying masses, etc. Well, even if we have to “find ourselves” in a PW conducive to life, the chances are that even then, many features would still be sloppy, and not elegant “laws of physics.” Even worse, once we got to this point, there are many more PWs where things wouldn’t continue as they had before (just like many more toss-regimens of coins where, having gotten to 50 heads in a row out of 100 tosses total, there are more where the remaining tosses vary in all kinds of ways than the one which continues to come up heads, etc.) And don’t tell me, as some did hereabouts, those aren’t really “mathematical structures” since I guess they aren’t continuous functions I guess: matrices are real math, and unrelated numbers, and there’s Fourier analysis which can handle one function spliced onto another or chunks of unrelated hills and valleys, etc.
Our being in a “nice elegant universe” is absurdly unlikely from the point of view of wild pan-realism for PWs, so I say there’s “Management” of some sort, regardless of just what sort of thing that is.
Now of course, this is not a proof anymore than the various counter-arguments are disproofs. We are just spinning tales in metaphysics, and that’s regardless of whether you take the “pro” or the “con” or “meaningless/etc.” position. That’s something so few of the partisans here appreciate.
Neil, yeah, I just used “manipulation” as a kind of shorthand for something more accurate that would have required more words. I realize it doesn’t do justice to the creation of laws of physics.
Anyway, the more I think about it, the weaker I find the anthropic argument. Actually, it’s beyond the word “weak” — there’s just no substance there at all. It really strikes me as not essentially different from the lottery. Any SINGLE outcome was just as astronomically improbable as any other, including the one that actually occurred. It seems no different than someone winning the lottery and claiming that because the odds were so small the he/she would win, there MUST have been a divine purpose involved. But someone HAD to win, and any other SINGLE outcome would have been just as improbable. I really don’t see any substance to the argument at all. But, anyway, no one is going to change anyone’s mind I don’t suppose, but it was good to get a little feedback to an extremely late post. Cheers.
Anyone?
Mike, and here I come rather late myself: Your analogy is inappropriate. The whole point of the anthropic principle is a universe having laws very narrowly just those needed to support life. That is a difference in *kind* between one kind of universe and another. OTOH, for you to win a lottery instead of me is just one person rather than another, but we’re both persons, and also there is the relative “It’s *me” thing which is not an actual distinction you can *describe*.
John Knight, you could try talking to me, but I may not check here much.
“tyrannogenius”
Neil wrote: “Mike…Your analogy is inappropriate. The whole point of the anthropic principle is a universe having laws very narrowly just those needed to support life. That is a difference in *kind* between one kind of universe and another. OTOH, for you to win a lottery instead of me is just one person rather than another, but we’re both persons…”
The analogy holds, because what KIND of outcome occurs is completely irrelevant: what matters is that each outcome is just as improbable as each other outcome, regardless of what “kind” of outcome it is (a universe w/living things vs. lifelessness vs. lifelessness with characteristic A vs. lifelessness with characteristic B vs. a universe with living things that suffer constantly throughout a brief existence vs. a universe with living things that are like angelic beings floating around in a constant state of bliss, etc., ad infinitum).
No, Mike, the anthropic mystery is by definition about why what happened is life-friendly rather than not, considering the tiny chance of *that* happening (assuming we understand the “chances” at all!) It’s like, there are 999,999 rooms with no one in them and one with a person. The lottery picks the room with the person to dump the money into, and he’s the one who can “appreciate” it – isn’t it funny, that it went to him instead of “going to waste”? Hey – either you get it, or you don’t; I can only keep rewording and defending the same point so many times.
Thanks Neil.
I just find it funny that once I point out that PZ has written this long article based on a misreading of Davies, everything goes silent.
“Hey – either you get it, or you don’t; I can only keep rewording and defending the same point so many times.”
Funny, that’s how I’ve felt through this whole pointless exchange.
Let me try this approach. You’re selecting a characteristic of one of the possible universes that all the others don’t have (namely, life-friendliness). A universe with that characteristic happened to occur. You then say, wow, that was so vastly improbable because only 1 (or a few) out of an astronomical number had that characteristic; therefore, there must have been a god that WANTED it so. BUT YOU COULD PICK OUT ANY UNIQUE CHARACTERISTIC THAT ANY ONE OF THE OTHERS HAD AND SAY THE EXACT SAME THING!
Each possible universe is unique in some way, otherwise you couldn’t count them as different possible universes. For example, let’s say one of the possible universes is the only one of the bunch that would have had an average temperature of 10.394578 degrees Celsius. By your “logic,” if that universe had occurred (or ever occurs in the future), such an occurrence would be evidence that there’s a god who must have WANTED a universe with that average temperature, because the odds of that universe coming into being was 1 in some astronomical number. Your whole argument centers on the vast improbability of some outcome, but ALL THE OUTCOMES WERE JUST AS VASTLY IMPROBABLE!
And if you say, but it’s the KIND of outcome that was so vastly improbable, well you could just as easily divide the possible universes up into some other “kinds” using some other arbitrary characteristic (varying amounts of light, temperature, temperature fluctuation, the top speed of the fastest moving object, AD INFINITUM) in such a way that any given “kind” of universe would be as vastly improbable as a life-friendly kind. Then, once again using your “logic,” any outcome would be evidence for a god that favored that kind of outcome.
And by the way, even if the anthropic argument were valid (which it’s not), there are still the insurmountable problems I mentioned before: it would no more support the existence of “god” (in the sense of that word that you want) than it would any of an infinite number of other possibilities (some of which I outlined above). And it’s still true that there could be MANY universes for all we know, or maybe universes come and go, sequentially, each having a different physics, and ours is number gazillion trillion in that sequence.
Mike, I think it’s pitiful that you think the existence of feeling, intelligent entities is no more remarkable or “worthwhile” than some tinny arbitrary physical property? To appreciate that the universe is friendly to *life* is the whole point, and yes, either you get it or you don’t. If you don’t, then I think you are a very shallow person.
As for the idea that there may be many universes with different “laws of physics”, well, that is possible. However, note that we have no evidence for them (and I thought that “rationalists” were so tight on that issue). Also, if there can be more than this type of world, *where does it end*? Once the bounds of exist-ability are unhinged, does what exist even have to remotely resemble a universe with laws of physics at all? It could be heavens and hells, gods and devils, or even some ultimate form of reality we might as well call “God” – who knows what – a real can of worms.
PS – When you said, A”nd by the way, even if the anthropic argument were valid (which it’s not)…” what in the world do you mean? That not only do you have arguments about it, but can talk as if you *know* which is true? Huh.
Interesting objective and scientific comments a lot of you make. The emotions are not involved at all, that’s great. We have to stay objective here.
Seriously stop sucking your science-thumbs now.
Interesting objective and scientific comments a lot of you make. The emotions are not involved at all, that’s great. We have to stay objective here.
Seriously stop sucking your science-thumbs now.
You may be interested in this response to Myers’ views on the fine tuning of the universe:
http://letterstonature.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/fishing-while-the-world-burns-a-fine-tuned-critique-of-p-z-myers/
Nothing like coming to the party a couple of years late…
Well yes, a scientist straying out of their discipline is always an easy target for criticism, and my, didn’t you just baffle Myers with science. Woot! However, equally well physicists have no business being smug about their understanding of biology, philosophy, or theology and to be fair, PZ’s blog was a response to an article that was straddling the same sort of awkward multi-disciplinary ground. The problem with Davies’ article is the same as the philosophical position of many of his popular science books (and yes, I’ve read a few), where you have a lot of sound exposition of physics, but tied in with it is also some very handwaving quasi-religious justification of his cosmological views.
The main argument you make in your fine-tuned-critique is good but seems to be prone to a failure of imagination. You rightly point out that some relatively small changes to the initial conditions and physical constants of this universe would result in it being devoid of the familiar cosmology, physics, and chemistry that underlies the biology of life as we know it.
But that is not what PZ Myers asked, which was, “why can’t there be many different combinations of physical laws that can yield life?” You have not addressed that question, which is, what other possible permutation of starting conditions (if these could possibly be permuted, which is not really known) would permit viable conditions for analogues of the cosmological, physical, and chemical properties that might underpin a completely unfamiliar form of life? I don’t think it’s just sufficient to say that tinkering with our universe’s parameters would result in conditions inimical to life of the kind we are familiar with (e.g. one obvious example popularly cited, by Martin Rees among others, is the relative strength of the strong nuclear force giving rise to the distribution of chemical elements in the universe).
The answer may be that the number of combinations of physical laws that result in life is vanishingly small, thus strengthening the anthropic principle, but if the probability is non-zero, then that doesn’t equate to a convincing demonstration that other life-supporting fine-tuning aren’t possible.