The anthropic principle is ridiculous. Suppose that, against all odds, you survive the worst plane crash in history. Then you ask NTSB what caused the crash and why you survived. They answer:
"Nonsense! You wouldn’t have asked the questions if you hadn't survived."
Questions stand alone, regardless of whether someone or something exists to ask them.
Fine tuning for the earth might be able to be explained away most easily, like you said. Fine tuning for the universe, though...
Firstly, we have zero evidence for multiverse. Some scientists even argue that the idea is untestable and unfalsifiable.
When you said:
> there must be a graveyard of universes where the parameters just didn't work out for life
You just committed inverse gambler's fallacy. It's like:
> You wake up with amnesia, with no clue as to how you got where you are. In front of you is a monkey bashing away on a typewriter, writing perfect English. This clearly requires explanation. You might think: “Maybe I’m dreaming … maybe this is a trained monkey … maybe it’s a robot.” What you would not think is “There must be lots of other monkeys around here, mostly writing nonsense.” You wouldn’t think this because what needs explaining is why this monkey—the only one you’ve actually observed—is writing English, and postulating other monkeys doesn’t explain what this monkey is doing.
This is a such common logical fallacy that we should have name for it.
> No matter how low the odds are, the counts of those potential interactions bring this outcome to a certainty.
"No matter how low", really? Are you suggesting that your multiplication result is infinite? Otherwise, no matter how big the result is—even if it's Graham's number or TREE(3)—but as long as it's finite, there are odds so low that bring the outcome extremely unlikely.
The thing is we don't know even a ballpark estimate of the odds, but you were saying like we have a lower bound of the odds. The universe is unfathomably huge, true, but we also don't know if abiogenesis is less unfathomably unlikely.
You're asking as if the other candidate is a no-brainer choice. If the other candidate were Kennedy, then sure—but they were not. In this case, many would be undecided and would vote not the best candidate, but the least bad one.
Yes, cosmological principle is probably the most fundamental assumption in astronomy.
Most people don't realize that science—and even everything in life—has to start from some axioms/assumptions, just like math. I first realized this fact when I was reading the Relativity book written by Einstein himself, who challenges the assumptions in classical physics.
As time goes, some of the assumptions could be proved to be unnecessary or even wrong. There must be still some assumptions left, though—because without them, we can't talk about science, or anything, really.
Agree. When people hear the adage "don't roll your own crypto", they often think it refers to crypto primitives only. In reality, it's also hard to design a secure crypto protocol, even if the underlying crypto primitives are secure.
> The costs associated with implementing this requirement can be very small, if not trivial.
This is too naive. While it may be the case for single player games that use online connection only as a DRM mechanism (Hitman 3, Gran Turismo 7), for some games it's not trivial at all.
For example, The Division 2 servers do not only act as a "coordinator" between players like CS:GO servers, but also run logics for NPCs and environments. The server and the client are too tightly coupled.
I think it aims mainly at games that use an online connection as a DRM mechanism, such as Hitman 3 and Gran Turismo 7. Both games are single player games that shouldn't necessitate online connection in the first place.
If ice didn't float, life as we know it wouldn't be possible anywhere in the universe. (It doesn't exclude life that doesn't require water, though—if that's possible.)
> You can’t exclude non English languages being you would still be surprised if it was in Spanish etc.
I'm not saying that the only surprising result is an English esssay. But sure, let's add all languages in the world. Getting a proper one-page essay is still surprising, because the absurd number of ways to arrange characters in one page. It's much much much larger than even the number of particles in the universe.
> but is probably 10^1,000 or so times more likely than any specific sequence.
Obviously. Your point? If the probability of an event is so low, it doesn't really matter if it's 1 in 10^1000 or 1^1000000. If that event happens, it is surprising.
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Anyway, I'm not arguing that the galaxy ring is a rare occurrence, hence surprising. I don't know even an approximate probability of it to happen.
I'm arguing against those who shrug and say "Well, it's random, so even a complex structure can form." Not necessarily. It all depends on the processes behind it.
Case in point: Darwin's evolution. The only reason that it's plausible that random processes can transform basic living organisms into complex ones like mammals is DNA replication.
Without DNA replication, random mutations between generations would be independent, just like random key presses by a monkey. You need to start over every time. This makes it essentially impossible to form complex organisms over time, considering how long DNA of complex organisms is.
> Similarly finding any shape in a random set of points is much more likely than the odds of any one shape.
Obviously. But that’s not the point (no pun intended). My point is that most of the "shapes" would be just an unstructured shape—if you can even call it a shape. "Familiar" shapes will be much much unlikely to form that "uncommon" shapes. (Hopefully this is obvious because the number of familiar shapes are much much fewer than uncommon shapes.)
Let me use another example to help you understand the point. Suppose a monkey is given a typewriter and a sheet.
Is the probability of getting The Declaration of Independence is as likely as the probability of getting one particular gibberish sequence of characters? Yes.
Should we surprise if the monkey types any proper one-page English essay? Yes.
In case it's not obvious, that's because the number of possible ways to write a proper one-page English essay, albeit humongous, is nothing compared to the number of possible ways to arrange characters in one page. In other words, it's very very very unlikely to happen.
I agree to almost all your points from the previous four comments, and I think so do you to my comments (because you didn't argue against my statements). We differs only on what to discuss.
Before I give up on this discussion that's always back to square one, maybe this question (that I've similarly asked) will help set a baseline:
What are a few examples of probablistic events that should surprise you?
> Sure, but given a large enough sample both will likely exist.
This applies to every event with nonzero probabilities. What's your point?
> Humans have been finding patterns in clouds, stars and even toast since time immemorial.
I knew this—humans love finding patterns. But our discussion is not about that. It's about the very basic thing in probabilities, which is some event is not as likely to happen as others. This is so trivially true.
The probability of getting a proper English word from a random string generator is much less likely than the probability of not getting it. Thus, getting a proper English word should be surprising. It is as surprising as getting any string from a set of gibberish strings with the same cardinality of English vocabularies.
> So the fact that one happens to be english should not surprise anyone
What should surprise you, then? I'm surprised that we need to talk about this very basic thing three times.
> Again I think you are confused. Assuming random distribution, 'We Are Coming' is just as likely as any other similarly long structure to form.
You are confused. How could we be back to square one? We've discussed it before. I'm not arguing that "WE ARE COMING" is more likely than, for example, "WE RAE COMING". Of course, they are as likely.
Suppose you have a machine that generates 15-char strings. Yes, "INTERCHANGEABLE" is as likely as "YSVQEPQVIGXOQSR" to come out—but that’s not the point. My point is that the probability of getting a proper English word is very unlikely. Most of the time, you'll get gibberish strings.
Also, I didn't say the sentence to be encoded in morse code. Instead, the galaxies form the literal shape of "W", "E", and so on. I hope you can see that in this case, it's borderline impossible to happen.
> However that doesn't mean that a sphere is any more or less likely than any specific other structure.
A shape/structure doesn't have an intrinsic probability. Your sentence is underspecified. Shape of what under what process?
In the context of the shape of galaxies, I think we can agree that if we found galaxies forming a shape like this sentence: "WE ARE COMING", everyone would freak out. So yeah, in this context, some shapes are more likely to form (randomly) than others.
But of all perspectives in 3D space, there are only a fraction of perspectives that see it as a line. Most other perspectives see it as a circle/ellipse. So, the earth's perspective is not that unique—in fact, it's the most common.
Of course each instance has the same probability. But we're not talking about the probability of an instance, but rather that of a set of instances.
In the dice example, it's obvious that the probability of getting at least one dice facing two is much more likely than the probability of getting all dice facing one.
Similarly, in the planet shape example, I hope you don't think that a pyramid-shaped planet is as likely to form as a sphere-shaped planet.
> Finding ~50 dots arranged in a (very loosely defined) circle, from any projection, of a dense set of 2 trillion of them is very plausible.
It depends on the size of the circle, though. The smaller the size, the more likely the probability is. But that’s only for a particular combination of 50 dots. Now we have to average out of all possible circle sizes and all combinations of 50 dots. Can someone do the math (or the simulation)?
"Nonsense! You wouldn’t have asked the questions if you hadn't survived."
Questions stand alone, regardless of whether someone or something exists to ask them.