Either.
While I know you don't care, it is incorrect to categorize ID as a scientific movement at all because it is fundamentally negative. It provides no scientific hypothesis to replace evolution.
I don't think that all are out to replace evolution. In fact, I know that most organizations believe that evolution happens.
Okay, cool, apologies for misunderstanding.
No problem.
Simple: even if you accept that the constants could be different (which I don't, necessarily), and that there might be a system of physical laws with "nice" constants, why couldn't the inhabitants simply imagine all the other potential universes--including universes like ours, where tiny changes in constants could possibly wipe out their type of life? And why on earth should the universe care what constants we have assigned to it?
But that isn't really meaningful in this kind of discussion. What constitutes "remarkable precision" in a discussion about possible worlds?
This is where you lose me. First you are talking about constants in our universe and then trail off into others? Our constants are constant...I don't accept they can be different. While your analogy is fitting for the potential multiverse theory, I don't see it relating to our universe's fine tuning in itself. We know how stars form, we know that the stars are the reason we could evolve. If we take the stars as our base, we are staying within the parameters that allow for prediction or probability to be calculated. We don't need the possible other universes to compare because we are using our own system and speaking of the conclusion for this universe alone. We know from the research that the constants are specifically measured and we know what happens with star formation and how that affected life on earth. So if we work out the probability using these parameters we are calculating the chances of life on earth to evolve. I don't see where the necessity of other universes comes in? What affect does that have on determining the tweeking of our own constants in this universe to the outcome of life?
And anyway, you are assuming that it is in fact the constant that is the "pure truth" of the universe, but it's just a number in our model. If we split up the number in our model, does the constant change?
The constants are not based on just any ole numbers. These numbers are very exact in reflecting the properties themselves. We use these "numbers' to calculate all kinds of studies and if they were not what they are and consistently what they are, we could not come out with the same outcome throughout the different experiments they are being used for. That is why it is so amazing that our universe can be actually "known" mathematically, is that it is mathematical in nature.
Constants are necessarily constant, so we have no evidence that these parameters could be any different.
We can't know know for certain that they could have been different and still have a universe let alone life, however, we can change them mathematically. Since we know the mathematical formula for the constants we can change them mathematically to determine the results of that change.
If we are going to speculate that they could, why must we constrain our speculation to changing constants?
I haven't speculated that they could change at all. I am saying that they can't be changed and if they were, in the mathematical models that reflect the actual numbers of what they are they would affect the outcome. We know that the numbers of carbon have to be certain or life couldn't have formed so if this number is changed by tweeking the constants that work to form carbon we find that life couldn't have formed.
That may or may not be true. My impression was that nobody working on the Higgs boson thought it would solve fine tuning--I think the fact that the Higgs boson falsified a lot of string theoretic assumptions actually has more to do with the fact that much of string theory is precisely an attempt to "undo" what we see as fine-tuning and is therefore very sensitive to changes to the actual model. But of course if the real universe in fact has a perfect mathematical model, there is no reason why that model has to be "robust" to change like a good scientific theory would, since it is universally true and can never be falsified.
Exactly, it is universally true. That is my point. It is fine tuned. It is universally impossible in this universe to change the constants and using that uniformity and consistency we can actually change those in the model to show what would occur if they were not what they are in actuality.
I'm not disputing any of this and I've heard all these arguments before. What I think is going on above, and what I think is the only way that anyone can be convinced by a fine-tuning argument, is that scientists are falling in love with their models to the point that they forget that they are not "true" (necessarily, anyway).
What is not true? That constants stay constant? That they can't be reflected accurately in numbers? I don't know what you are implying here.
And in forgetting that, we have seen the rise of unified theories of everything that interact with "our" universe as little as possible and mostly deal with some unseen and as-yet-unverified realm (one that it is entirely possible we will never be able to verify).
I totally agree.
We're talking about universes entirely outside the realm of our experience, unbound (apparently) by the universal laws we have observed elsewhere. As such, it seems to me we can imagine whatever we want. So because this is a metaphysical question, the only studies I could conceivably have to look at are model-theoretic studies. And I'd accept an argument that even those don't tell me anything useful because we don't know if math works "outside our universe." We don't know if that even means anything and most likely we never will.
Exactly. So claiming that other universe have anything relevant to determining the correctness of fine tuning is a mute point. It is not relevant nor is it necessary to determine what our universe has, what could happen if it was not the case and how that would affect the formation of life on the planet Earth.
That is a large part of what string theory, loop quantum gravity, and other such theories are about--making the math pretty. So not only has it been done, it's been done over and over again. There's a large group of people devoted to laying out a theory that says the exact same thing as the "ugly" theory in all cases for which we have evidence, and there's really no reason to believe one is more true than the other (except when an actual observation like the Higgs boson comes around, and--shockingly--validates the standard, evidence based model while invalidating a lot of theories that there was never any reason to prefer in the first place). I have made no secret of the fact that I do not think these people are really engaging in science so I am not surprised to find nonscientific attitudes from them, but it doesn't change the fundamental fact that fine-tuning arguments make no sense.
It is not the fine tuning that doesn't make sense because I feel it does. We do know empirically what this universe does. We do empirically know what those constants are. We do empirically using models based on those empirically proven properties that fine tuning does make sense.
Like I said, I would certainly accept a model theoretic proof that "almost all" eventually consistent universes don't have life--though I can't imagine how one would even begin proving such a thing, in the absence of some easy to constrain things like cosmological constants--but only as a starting point. We'd still have to contend with various "impossible worlds" where Turing computability was optional, since we have no reason to believe the Church-Turing thesis holds outside our universe and we can certainly conduct thought experiments in which it is violated.
I agree.
And even then--even after we've covered variation in the universes--we still haven't a shred of evidence that more than one actually exists. That means that we get to play around with theories about how such universes could form (or could fail to form) and a wide variety of possible interactive effects, probability distribution functions, and so on. Our only constraint would be that our universe has to be possible.
Again I agree.
Does this sound like fun to you? Or does it seem like a massive waste of time? Thought-provoking and revelatory, or frustratingly stupid and beside the point? Welcome to metaphysics--when you abandon reality, you can say all kinds of wacky things and no one can prove you wrong! This is why I don't understand why religion and science are so often depicted as being at odds--they're both ways of helping us make sense of reality by reducing the possibility space. All things considered, I think religion bears the much heavier load--science just has to deal with our universe, but religion has to deal with nonsense like this!
Well the point, which I do think we both agree on
is that we do know our universe and can experiment with the known universe and make determinations based on that. It isn't some theory that is out there somewhere but is right here in this universe based on what we do know of it.
Only in our universe. Which, for people like you and me, does not immediately imply that there are other universes. But for those who do, it seems to me that it is rather important that they explain (1) why universal laws would be different, anywhere, and (2) why they would only differ in ways that worked to help explain "fine tuning" that is entirely a construct of the model.
This is where we disagree. The fine tuning is not a construct of a model but a model based on the constants. We know what the numbers are, we know what they need to be for life (since we are here and can be tested for it) and we know that if that changed we could not in the form we are have formed.
In any case--once you start talking about locations that can necessarily not be observed, you can make any predictions you want.
Exactly! And we don't need to. We know what we know about our universe and what would happen if something was changed in regard to life beginning on earth.
Saying it's "unlikely" is meaningless because it's completely outside the realm of our experience. Again, things like this are warning signs that you have left the confines of scientific inquiry. But notice that I didn't even propose that mathematical laws had to be abandoned, just that they could be immeasurably more complex than our own.
Exactly. We do have the mathematical laws for this universe. We don't need other universe to compare anything to because we know what we know about this one.
In fact, as we learn more about the universe, our own fundamental laws seem to have grown in complexity, rather than becoming simpler. Since any "true model" of the universe would necessarily already explain all present phenomena, either (1) there is a simpler (easier to calculate) model, but for some reason we haven't found it yet, (2) it's already out there (maybe as a form of string theory), (3) the universe isn't governed by any one mathematical model, or (4) There is a "true" model, and it is at least as complex as quantum mechanics + special relativity. Given that physicists have had no problem assuming unseen entities to make their theories simpler for at probably a good century, I think (1) is probably the least likely, but I can't rule any of them out.
But the constants stay constant which is why we can develop mathematical models that can determine the fine tuning in this universe.
How about the field of drug discovery? In physics we probably wouldn't figure out the most optimal design for a trebuchet by lining up millions of models, testing them one by one, and then retesting again with different groups, but that type of thing is extremely common in biology because even though we know the underlying processes, they can't help us usefully predict organic behavior. This concept is known as
the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. To be clear, I'm not anti-math--quite the opposite--but even if you believe, as I do, that it all ultimately does come down to math, that's (1) not provable, and (2) doesn't actually help us in a wide variety of practical problems.
We both see the same problems with the multiverse explanation.
(continued in next post due to length)
[/QUOTE]
whew. maybe later.
