Re: Sabine Hossenfleder reports on a study that finds that the universe is not fine tuned for life

On Tue, 26 Nov 2024 12:41:56 +0000, jillery wrote:

On Tue, 26 Nov 2024 11:01:04 +0000, j.nobel.daggett@gmail.com
(LDagget) wrote:
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On Mon, 25 Nov 2024 10:51:47 +0000, Ernest Major wrote:
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On 24/11/2024 21:40, John Harshman wrote:

On 11/24/24 8:44 AM, Ernest Major wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXzV7zdl4oU

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Interesting paper, but I find her delivery annoying. It seems that we're
supposed to like a scientific result to the extent that it argues
against a theory she dislikes for unexplained reasons. And why does a
lack of fine-tuning argue against a multiverse anyway?
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I think that the argument is that in a multiverse the majority of
observers exist in universes that are "fine tuned" for the existence of
observers, and therefore if you pick an observer at random it is
unlikely that it will be in a universe which is not fine tuned. That we
find ourselves in a universe that it not fine tuned (at least according
to the reviewed paper) is contrary to the expectations of a theory
incorporating multiverses. But I saw no quantification of how unlikely
this observation is, and regardless I'm cautious of drawing statistical
conclusions from samples of one.

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One could incorporate the Fermi Paradox and suggest that we are in
a universe which is only marginally favorable to the rise of life
capable of interstellar travel (or signaling), and wave away all
the uncertainties about those contingent probabilities.
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These don't seem to be speculations worthy of more than perhaps
a good friend buying you another beer that they were probably
going to buy you anyway.

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The Fermi Paradox has nothing to do with mutiverse has nothing to do
with fine tuning.  I realize discussions about "multiverse" can be
trivialized to a semantic labelling of what to name things which
extend beyond what can be observed, but doing so doesn't help to
identify what those things are.

Well a lots of these things have nothing essential to do with each
other but I was harkening back to the original argument.
That argument went like this. Using some variant of the anthropic
principle, it is noted that the fact that we are observing things
means we are in a universe compatible with life. Then, using what
I think is a quasi-baysian inference, the more compatible a universe
is with life, the more likely it is that there's somebody in it
to make silly posts on usenet. Now using a bad probability argument,
it then is suggested that an observer capable of invoking the
anthopic principle is most likely in an universe with optimal fine
tuning (that inference isn't true depending on what the distribution
of compatible universes is, and how one selects the range that is
"optimized").
My point of invoking the Fermi Paradox is that if a universe was
very optimized for the evolution of life that could communicate with
other star systems, similarly bad probabalistic arguments could be
used to say that our universe must not be too well optimized otherwise
we would be getting spam messages from our cosmological neighbors.
The short version of that is maybe our lack of contact with ETs
works against that argument about life being more likely in a
universe that has optimal fine tuning.