This has become a common guiding light when tackling the domain of the unknown in the sciences and is the reason that there is consternation over the "Fine-Tuning Problem," the problem that, in several respects, the universe is ‘fine-tuned' for life". — Count Timothy von Icarus
However, it is hardly clear that this problem implies the "God of classical theism," a God that only seems to exist in philosophy journals anyhow, — Count Timothy von Icarus
It looks to me as if life in the universe is a fluke, despite the fact that we happen to be in a location where we notice life all around us. — wonderer1
The Great Programmer designed the universe to ... ? — unenlightened
I really don't see how that follows. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If the universe develops teleologically why does that entail that God is guided by the same goals? I don't even see how this necessarily applies to God's immanent activities and properties. — Count Timothy von Icarus
B. Seems to imply that having goals necessarily implies a lack of agency. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Surely one isn't free if one's behavior is arbitrary. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The ability to rationally develop one's own goals and the ability to have second and nth order goals about one's own desires are both generally taken as prerequisites for freedom. — Count Timothy von Icarus
How does this not rule out all free will? — Count Timothy von Icarus
The only way to diffuse the Boltzmann Brain problem, or the related question of "why the universe should be rational," is to find out why the universes' incredibly unlikely traits should be necessary — Count Timothy von Icarus
You seem to be drawing probability (with the word 'unlikely") and possibility ("necessary") into it.
There is a echo here of other threads - you seem to presuppose time. If the next moment everything is different, there is nothing to say that it is 'next', rather than any other configuration where everything is different. Time has no meaning unless there is continuity and change, that produces 'succession'.
Yes, because there is a connection. Take the normal argument for Fine Tuning. If the constants of our universe and its initial entropy are such that the odds of their occuring are significantly less than 1 in 10×10^123, then it doesn't make sense to assume such things have occured by chance. You don't bet against a coin that has come up heads for 5 hours of flips because it is obvious that the coin isn't fair given the result. Hence, the Fine Tuning Argument has been taken seriously to date. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Unless you can prove the necessity of the laws, under determination makes it more likely that you're actually in a universe that lacks such laws, and that this will be revealed at any moment as order breaks down. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The multiverse does not solve this problem at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus
I think probability can be taken one of two ways: it's either an assessment of some number of iterations (so we toss the coin 100 times, it comes up heads once, so we say it has a 1% chance of coming up. This assessment has to be considered in the light of the data from which it came.
The other way to assess probability is to examine the logical possibilities. Look at the coin and determine how it's weighted. If it's evenly weighted, there's logically a 50% chance it will come up heads.
We can't use the iterative form of probability either, because by definition, the universe is a one-off. However it is, it had a 100% chance of happening that way because the assessement is 1/1.
Frequentism has problems with all one-off events. What was the probability of Donald Trump winning the election in June 2016? If probability is frequency then it was already 100%. But then what is the chance that Joe Biden wins in 2024? Does it not exist? Do probabilities only exist for one-off events after the event? Or are we forced to posit eternalism, that all events exist eternally, so that there is some frequency for one-off events we can reference? — Count Timothy von Icarus
But in that case, frequency is just a useful way to observe propensities and discover them, in which case it is absolutely fine to apply probability to one off events. — Count Timothy von Icarus
How does this not apply to all natural phenomena? Every event we observe only occurs at one time, in one place, in one way. I don't see how it doesn't generalize. — Count Timothy von Icarus
But if you buy that, I don't see how it doesn't generalize to all arguments from statistical ensembles, making the entire scientific enterprise invalid. Every paper using statistics, every significance test, is bunk, because there aren't actually possibilities of different outcomes, but actually just the one outcome that exists. After all, the only set of observations are just those we do make. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Knowledge is about something, no? So it's necessarily tied to ontologically. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Medicine does not say, "smoking doesn't cause cancer, bullets to the head don't cause brain damage, etc., all we can know is that previous samples of groups of people who have been shot in the head have a higher incidence of brain damage — Count Timothy von Icarus
There are all sorts of ways to explore cause, do-calculus and the like, which are employed heavily in medicine. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If you don't believe in propensities, then you have absolutely no grounds for making classes whose frequencies you compare. — Count Timothy von Icarus
. If I flip a coin and it comes up heads 100 times in a row, and I don't believe in propensities, then I should just say that the probability of a coin coming up heads has changed, rather than positing that the coin is rigged. Indeed, what grounds would I have for saying the class of rigged coins and the class of coins are — Count Timothy von Icarus
Exactly. Frequentism is what underlies actualism, a form of determinism.
Imagine that you're rolling a die at a craps table. You'll say that the 5 has a 1/6 chance of appearing face up. This is an assessment of logical possibility. We have to be careful about what we say after the die has landed. If it was a 5, we know it's possible that the 5 could appear face-up because it did! But could the 2 also appear face up? Logically, you can't have more than one side of the die face up. If the 5 appeared, it isn't possible for any other number to be face-up. So what happened to the other possibilities? Where did they go? What exactly are those other possibilities?
One way to look at it is to say those other possibilities are information we possess about how the universe works. We use that information to make predictions. But we can back off of imagining that those other possibilities have some ontological implications. They don't. They're just the result of our analysis.
When we say that bullet to the head has the potential to cause brain damage, this reflects experience with brains and gun shot wounds. It's fully possible for a person to receive a GSW to the head and suffer no brain damage. It happens all the time, especially in suicide attempts where they just end up blowing their faces off. Again, you have to take it case by case.
This is just the axiom that things have already happened have necessarily happened in temporal logic. It doesn't entail that probability only exists subjectively. For that you also need eternalism, the claim that all events already exist at all times. Frequentism does not entail these though. There are plenty of ways to embrace frequentism and not rope yourself into determinism and eternalism. Otherwise, frequentism would have been much less popular in the face of observations that the universe behaves in a fundamentally stochastic manner.
So sure, probability is frequency is you take that definition as axiomatic, but I don't think there are good reasons to accept such a proposition. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Cause is there even if there is an attempt to banish it to the background. — Count Timothy von Icarus
By the same token, if we looked up one night and saw "there is no God but Allah," written in Arabic in stars across the sky we wouldn't say "I guess some protostars brighten much more quickly than others and the existence of such stars is tied to the initial conditions of the universe, so there is nothing exceptional here." — Count Timothy von Icarus
Anyhow, in your view is it possible to meaningfully talk about the probability that Biden wins the 2024 election? Does it make sense to say that aggressive anti-Chinese rhetoric by US politicians increases the probability of war? Or, as one time events, is it impossible to say anything about them because they are one time events? — Count Timothy von Icarus
One of the problems here is that populations can change. If the US passed a constitutional amendment that dictated that the winner of the national popular vote should become the next president, that would seem to make it more likely that the Democratic candidate would win in 2024 because, in the relevant population of recent election results, they have won the popular vote 7 of the last 8 times. But giving them just a 1/8 chance of losing the popular vote in the current climate, and given polling data, probably greatly overestimates their probability of winning the popular vote if Donald Trump is their nominee, as he lost the popular vote by large margins both times. So what then is the relevant population for frequency? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Science assumes the world is rational because it must. — Count Timothy von Icarus
You go with what works best for you until some new information comes in and reorganizes your entire brain from top to bottom. — frank
When taken together with Plantinga's argument that naturalism is self-defeating (or Hoffman's more fleshed out, but similar argument against mind-independent reality) I find this line of reasoning compelling. — Count Timothy von Icarus
If (a), the generation of this initial given (call it X) was then necessarily to some extent limited or bounded (hence, determined) by an end – for the sake of which it was generated – which, as end aspired toward, could not have been generated by God prior to God’s very first, intentional generation (i.e., his generation of X). Here, then, God was himself to some degree limited or bounded (determined) by his actively held intent (telos or goal or aim), an intent held by him which he did not create and which he did not instantaneously realize. Therefore, God was not - and thereby is not - omnipotent.
The solution is generally to define omnipotence more carefully, to reject the law of the excluded middle in some sense, maybe just for God, of to reject the God of classical theism as incoherent. I would go with the latter. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Something along the lines of, "Our knowledge of how things work in reality proves that we know nothing about how things work in reality." — wonderer1
If we start from the Principle of Indifference, shouldn't we expect a whirlwind of possible experiences, not a seemingly law governed progression such that empirical efforts succeed in defining future experiences based on mathematical laws (e.g., the successes of the sciences)? — Count Timothy von Icarus
If we've done an assessment of logical possibility and determined that of all the ways the universe could appear, the chances of it appearing as it is are 1 in 10^10^123, that doesn't really tell us anything about how this one possibility manifested, whether there was divine intervention or not. It just means we can imagine a huge number of other ways the universe could have been. — frank
Consider:
"If God is omniscient then God cannot forget anything and cannot create a truth that God does not know. Thus, God is constrained and not omnipotent."
Or:
"God can/cannot create a rock so heavy that God cannot lift it."
Plantinga argued that these turn out not to be real contradictions. The first is logically equivalent with "if there is a truth, God knows it." The second is logically equivalent with "God can lift all rocks." God only doing good things based on God's desires is equivalent with "all of God's actions are good and God only does what God wants to do," which is the same as "God is omnibenevolent and God can do or not do anything God desires." — Count Timothy von Icarus
What are the chances that our world should be a rational one? To put the question more concretely in the terms of physics: is it likely for a universe evolve from state to state, such that past states dictate future ones? Or, is the apparent rationality of our world evidence for a designer? — Count Timothy von Icarus
I've caught up on the thread now. I don't really want to get into a discussion of the fine tuning argument, because I've spent the past 15 years arguing with (mostly) Christian apologists and I'm pretty bored with discussing it at this point. My thinking is that the appearance of fine tuning to the universe gets us (at best) to recognition that there are things we aren't in an epistemic position to be able to explain.
We can speculate, and there are lots of speculative attempts at explanation, and not much strong reason to choose among speculations or even decide that anyone yet has speculated in a way that is somewhat accurate. I lean towards there being a multiverse (in line with Guth's thinking on eternal inflation) as being relatively parsimonious, but I don't lean that way nearly strongly enough to think it is worth spending any time arguing for it.
One point I would raise in the context of speculating about goddish minds as an explanation is, "What reason do we have to think that it is metaphysically possible for a mind to exist without supervening on some sort of information processing substrate?"
If reason, time and space emanate from god's nature (and who is to know if this is the case?) then god presumably transcends such strictures and as such is likely unintelligible. — Tom Storm
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