In Bayesian Counter-Apologetics I outlined why the Fine Tuning Argument actually disproves the existence of God. And I didn’t make that up. What I outline there was independently corroborated twice by the peer-reviewed research of multiple experts (see On the Bayesian Reversal of the Fine Tuning Argument). And I’ve formally laid this all out in my chapter on Design Arguments in The End of Christianity. The Fine Tuning Argument also suffers from a false hidden premise: that the “God” hypothesis requires less luck than competing explanations of the same observation; it doesn’t (see A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument). But here I want to bring into focus the way Fine Tuning itself turns into a proof of atheism. This will in turn serve as a tutorial on some of the ways Bayes’ Theorem reveals how to employ the logic of probability correctly (as I recently demonstrated more generally in a peer reviewed article for SHERM).
Which God Do We Mean Here?
The conclusion is clearest, of course, with traditional definitions of God (the only kind of God anyone on Earth actually believes in), whereby God is someone who intends to create a universe for life and for that life to know They exist. But one could instead posit a Bizarro God, an all-powerful intelligence who deliberately decided to make the universe look exactly like a universe with no God in it, thereby deceiving us into the conclusion that God does not exist; or who had some other bizarre reasons (compulsory or voluntary) to do essentially that same thing—such as lacking any interest whatever in life and only, let’s say, wanting to make a universe that would generate black holes, and who is actually annoyed or indifferent to the mere accidental byproduct of that effort being life.
Bizarro God still falls to the same Prior Probability Defeater (far simpler godless theories exist that explain all the same observations). But it also falls to an additional Prior Probability Defeater: it commits the gerrymandering fallacy. I explained the logic of that fallacy in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics. Basically, any theory can be “gerrymandered” with multiple (usually bizarre) theoretical ad-ons so that it exactly predicts any evidence. Thus, I can gerrymander the theory that Donald Trump is a one-hundred-foot-tall lizard man from Alpha Centauri so that it exactly predicts all the evidence—including any possible evidence against that theory you could ever propose. I can gerrymander the theory that heirloom tomatoes are sentient angelic superbeings controlling world agricultural policy. I can gerrymander the theory that you are at this moment actually on the fourth moon of Jupiter. And so on.
Because all theories can be gerrymandered, the ability to gerrymander a theory cannot render it any more likely. And indeed, that is exactly what happens in the probability logic: all gerrymandering logically does is move an improbability in our equation from the evidence column to the prior probability column, producing no net gain in the probability of the theory—and often a serious net reduction in its probability. This is why all Cartesian Demon arguments fail to gain any credibility. And “Bizarro God” is just another Cartesian Demon. We can therefore simply dismiss this God out of hand. Lacking any evidence for it, it is simply always too improbable to credit. You can only change this assessment if you find specific evidence for that gerrymandered God—meaning evidence independent of what that gerrymander was created to explain, as for any other Cartesian Demon.
Therefore, I will not include under the term “God” here any gerrymandered and thus unfalsifiable Cartesian Demons. No evidence can ever make them more likely than alternatives, except very specific evidence of a kind that clearly we don’t have any of. Which is why no one believes in Bizarro God; not even the most lunatic or fanatical of theists. But in logical terms, I can ignore Bizarro Gods because any Bizarro God gerrymandered to turn evidence that’s otherwise only, say, 50% likely to be observed into evidence that’s 100% likely to be observed will drop in relative prior probability at least 50% at the same time, producing the same lower posterior probability of that God’s existence as for the Non-Bizarro God. I’ll illustrate this below. But the upshot is: you can’t escape the conclusion of the following argument by positing a Bizarro God. You just end up with an equally improbable theory.
The Odds on God Given the Observed Facts of Fine Tuning
The standard trick pulled by all Christian apologetics is to make an argument by leaving out all the evidence that would, if restored, entirely reverse that argument’s conclusion. I gave ten examples of this in Bayesian Counter-Apologetics. The Fine Tuning Argument does this by only looking at the arrangement of what are, actually, bizarre and logically unnecessary physical constants (everything from the relative strength of gravity and electromagnetism to the relative mass of the quark and electron), and noting that almost any other configuration of them would have prevented any life from arising in the universe (which is then argued to require intelligent design).
One can challenge that claim; but it isn’t necessary to. Because, as we’ll see, it doesn’t matter. So it won’t be challenged here. For the sake of argument, let’s just take it as if it were proved that “almost any other configuration of fundamental physical constants would have prevented any life from arising in the universe.” The real problem here is that this leaves out pertinent evidence. Because we are here testing two competing hypotheses to explain observations: either (A) chance accident produced that alignment of constants or (B) someone or something intelligently selected them. (The third possibility, that other arrangements are actually logically impossible, lacks evidence, but more importantly is ruled out by the premise we are granting so we needn’t consider it here.) So we have two hypotheses, and each makes a number of predictions (not just the one), and therefore to compare them requires looking at all those predictions, not just “cherry picking” the one single prediction we like and ignoring all the others that didn’t go the way we want.
So what different predictions do our two hypotheses make? Theory A predicts the following:
[T]he only way we could [observe ourselves existing] without a God is by an extremely improbable chemical accident, and the only way an extremely improbable chemical accident is likely to occur is in a universe that’s vastly old and vastly large; so atheism predicts a vastly old and large universe; theism does not (without fabricating excuses—a bankrupt procedure, as I already explained … ).
Similarly, the only way we could [observe ourselves existing] without a God is by an extremely long process of evolution by natural selection, beginning from a single molecule, through hundreds of millions of years of single cells, through hundreds of millions of years of cooperating cells, to hundreds of millions of years of multicellular organisms; so atheism predicts essentially that; theism does not …
Likewise, … we should expect [the universe we observe] to be only barely conducive to life, indeed almost entirely lethal to it (as in fact it is), since there are vastly more ways to get those universes by chance selection, than to get a universe perfectly suited to life throughout (indeed … by countlessly many trillions to one). Design predicts exactly the opposite (again, without a parade of convenient excuses).
Almost the entirety of our universe is a lethal radiation-filled vacuum, almost the entirety of its contents are lethal stars and black holes, and almost the entirety of what isn’t stars and black holes is a lifeless wasteland of rocks and dust on which nothing can naturally live. The universe is also billions (not mere thousands) of years old; and billions (not a mere handful) of light-years across; and life only slowly arose over billions of years of meandering, unguided natural selection from an initial, single, self-replicating molecule, which evolved into single cells, then into rudimentary colonies of cells, then into the advanced colonies of cells that we now call bodies; and exists now only as, indeed, a scaffolding of cooperating colonies of single-celled organisms (which we know as cells), an outcome only predicted by atheism—as that is the only way for intelligent life to arise without a God; whereas a God has no need of any such bizarre construction procedure, much less the billions of years of time it took.
So when we bring all the pertinent evidence back in, the evidence indicates support not for Theory B (intelligent design), but for Theory A (chance accident). Fine Tuning is therefore evidence against intelligent design. It could never be evidence for it, because gods don’t need fundamental constants at all, much less all the weird ones we have. No intelligent agent needs quarks or electrons or electromagnetism or even gravity—things can just behave as commanded or designed: where things need to fall, they just fall; where stars need to shine, they just shine; where things need to stick together, they just stick together. One might respond that, still, it is possible an intelligent engineer would choose all these weird and unnecessary ways to create and sustain life. But that is fully accounted for here. What matters is not whether it’s possible. What matters is how probable it is.
Because:
[I]f (a) we exist and (b) God did not design the universe, then (c) we should expect to observe several things, and lo and behold, those are exactly the things we observe; yet we do not expect to observe those things if God did design the universe. By definition that which is expected on x is probable on x; that which is unexpected on x is improbable on x. So if the evidence is probable if God does not exist and improbable if God exists, then that evidence argues against God, not for God.
Hence what matters is not what’s possible. What matters is its relative probability. In the case of Theory A, the probability of all these observations (the vast age, the vast size, the vast quantity of lifeless content, the vast lethality of the universe; and the bizarrely long, meandering, particular way life arose and developed into observers asking these questions) is essentially 100%. And you can’t get “more” than 100%. It’s as likely as likely can ever be. These observations are therefore maximally probable on Theory A. By contrast, none of these observations are at all expected on any plausible theory of intelligent design. Indeed, they are on Theory B predicted not to be observed.
Intelligent engineers aiming to create life don’t make the laboratory for it vastly larger and older and more deadly than is required for the project. Indeed, unless those engineers intend to convince that life that they don’t exist, they don’t set up its habitat to look exactly like a habitat no one set up. This is the least likely way they would make a universe. But set that point aside. The conclusion already sufficiently follows from the first point: there is no reason to expect God to have made the universe this way. It cannot be predicted that this is what a God would produce, or that it is what he would want to produce. Whereas it is exactly 100% predicted to be what we’d see if there was no God. So no matter what you try to propose, you can never get that probability to be 100% if there was a God. You can propose all sorts of excuses, all sorts of “maybes,” but you will never be able to prove those proposals to be 100% certain to be true. There will always be some significant probability that those “excuses” simply aren’t true, that God simply doesn’t have your imagined motives or limitations. And indeed, when there is no evidence for or against any one such motive or limitation, its probability simply is 50%. It’s as likely as not.
In other words, God is no more likely to have created a world that way, than in some other (indeed even more obvious) way. To change this assessment, you need to present evidence (not conjectures; but actual evidence) that God is more likely to have chosen these weird ways to do things instead. But even that won’t rescue your case. Because it wouldn’t even matter if you could get these probabilities to, say, 80% or even 90%. That’s still less than 100%. So unless you can prove it is logically certain that God would do all these weird things and not any more obvious things when creating a world for the purpose of supporting life, Fine Tuning is still evidence against the existence of God. Because the evidence of the universe’s construction (what its “Fine Tuning” actually did, such as merely allow the random appearance of life after billions of years, across billions of light-years, within a universe almost entirely hostile to life, and only along a slow and meandering cellular building process) is still “more” probable on chance accident than on intelligent design. And that’s what it means to say something is evidence for or against a theory: if the evidence is more likely on Theory A than on Theory B, then it is evidence for A and against B. And that’s that.
Without any evidence that God is any more likely than not to have made a universe to produce life in exactly the same way as a godless universe, the probability of each decision from God is at best 50/50. Whereas the probability is in every case 100% if there is no God, because the probability that we’d observe ourselves in a Fine Tuned universe of this kind is 100%. It may help to see it from the other way around. It is logically necessarily always the case that P(e|h) = 1 – P(~e|h); the probability of the evidence we observe is always the converse of the probability of having observed the opposite evidence (see Proving History, pp. 255-56). Yet the probability that we’d observe ourselves in a universe not Finely Tuned to produce life is exactly zero. Because, not producing life, it will never produce observers; so if God doesn’t exist, anyone observing themselves to exist will always observe themselves in a Finely Tuned universe. Thus, Fine Tuning is not a “peculiar” thing for us to observe. It is not distinctive of God-made universes; it is, rather, distinctive of godless universes. It is literally the only thing we could ever observe—unless God existed and made the universe. Because only then could the universe possibly have been made conducive to life without the Fine Tuning of our peculiar fundamental constants. Hence God-made worlds will tend to not be Fine Tuned.
This is a crucial realization. Fine Tuning of our observed fundamental constants is only necessary when a God is not doing the designing; it is only necessary when observers only evolve through billions of years of gradual cellular scaffolding, and life at all arises only by chance chemical mixing, and only after billions of years of the meandering random mixing of chemicals across a vast universe billions of light-years in size filled with random lifeless junk, which is almost everywhere lethal to life, and only hospitable to it in tiny specks of the chance arrangement of randomly mixed conditions. Only those conditions require Fine Tuning. Quite simply put: only Godless universes have to be Finely Tuned.
Which means when you observe a universe like ours (old, huge, deadly, and producing life only in the most awkward of ways and rarest of places), you can expect it to have been Finely Tuned by chance accident, not intelligent design. Intelligent design would more likely make a universe as large and old as needed to contain the life it was made for, and would create life directly (not employ billions of years of cellular scaffolding), and imbue the world with only those laws of physics needed to maintain it to its purpose (no weird fundamental constants, no weird fundamental particles). It would not produce a universe almost entirely hostile to life. There would be no lethal radiation-filled vacuum. No dead worlds or lifeless moons. Stars would not be uninhabitable monstrosities. Black holes would never exist.
You can easily do the math here:
So if there is no evidence for or against God choosing this one weird way to make a habitable universe, the odds favor the conclusion that the Fine Tuning we observe is a product of chance accident, not intelligent design, by at least 16 to 1. Hence it is sixteen times more likely we’d see the Fine Tuning we do if there is no God. Fine Tuning is therefore evidence against the existence of God. And it’s rather strong evidence at that. It means the probability that (at least a creator) God exists is less than 6%.
And this is being extremely generous to the God hypothesis. Because we are assuming it’s even half likely that an intelligent engineer would do any of these things, when we well know, from countless observations of how intelligent engineers do their jobs, not a single one of these things is anywhere near that likely. It’s at best thousands to one they’d make a universe this old, this large, and this lethal, and use a random, meandering, billions-years-long process of cellular scaffolding. They’d just make life. They’d give it a completely habitable environment. And they’d waste no time or space on it. Whereas if God does not exist, there is no possible way we could observe ourselves to exist other than in a universe this old, this large, and this lethal, following a random, meandering, billions-years-long process of cellular scaffolding. Hence the Fine Tuning we observe looks exactly like the kind we’d get if no God were responsible for it. The universe looks exactly like a world with no God. That’s weird if God were responsible for it. And weird is just another word for improbable.
There is no way to get around this. Even if you could somehow prove it’s, say, “90% likely” God would produce any one of these strange features in his life project, you still end up with odds against God having done it of around 1.5 to 1. Because it’s still 100% likely we’d see each and every one of these things if chance accident produced the Fine Tuning we observe. And that’s simply more than 90%. Compounded across four variables, it’s even less likely than that that God is the culprit. Between those two competing hypotheses explaining Fine Tuning, chance accident and intelligent design, Fine Tuning as we actually observe it is simply evidence for chance accident. It is therefore evidence against God.
This holds even for Bizarro Gods. You can try to gerrymander your way out of this fatal conclusion by just “insisting” the God that exists is full-Bizarro: he has a bizarre reason to make a vastly large universe, and vastly old universe, a vastly lethal universe, and use a vastly bizarre way of creating observers that extraordinarily looks exactly like the way they’d arise in a completely godless universe. If we “presuppose” each of these strange qualities in God, then we could say all this evidence is again 100% expected. But notice that still doesn’t get you evidence for God. Since 100% is not higher than the probability of seeing these things on atheism, Fine Tuning still is not evidence for God—even a Bizarro God. But it gets worse. Because the logical cost of all those presuppositions is simply moving the probabilities from the likelihoods to the priors. You end up with exactly the same odds against God.
Yes, you can argue that if God had a motive to, say, use billions of years of cellular scaffolding to produce worshipers, then observing that to be the case would be 100% expected. But what evidence do you have that God had that motive? In the absence of any evidence making that likely—or even any evidence making it unlikely (though we actually do: all the evidence of how creators intelligently accomplish their goals)—its expected probability is still at best 50%. Because there’s only a 50/50 chance in each case that your presupposition about God’s motives is true. So all you would’ve done is switch out an odds of 1/1 x 2/1 for 2/1 x 1/1. Or worse. But let’s be generous. It’s either a 50% chance God would on a whim use these weird methods, or a 50% chance he had a motive to (which amounts to saying the same thing). Either way, even at best, it still can’t be any more than 2 to 1 against that God existing on the actual evidence of Fine Tuning. And if you keep doing this down the list of all four oddities, it still ends up 16 to 1 against. You’re right back to less than a 6% chance any such God exists.
Conclusion
The usual response to this disturbing result is to say, well, okay, but “chance accident” still requires, you know, a chance accident. And that’s improbable, right? Maybe. But it doesn’t matter. Because the God hypothesis also requires positing a chance accident—indeed, one even more improbable. So that’s a wash. The only way to tell what is the more likely explanation of the Fine Tuning we observe—a chance accident of physics or a chance accident of theology—is to look at the evidence, to see what kind of Fine Tuning it looks like happened. And all that evidence confirms the kind we see is the kind produced by a chance accident of physics, not a chance accident of theology.
And that’s even if we just posit a brute, one-time, totally random selection of what would exist. In fact, there are dozens of extremely simple starting points that entail an inevitable limitless multiverse, which gives the “chance accident of physics” hypothesis an inherent probability of effectively 100%. When countless universes exist at random, it is simply inevitable that there will be many of them Finely Tuned for life in the way we observe. Per the Infinite Monkey Theorem: given enough tries, all probabilities approach 100%. So when we are comparing as hypotheses any of a dozen simple-initially-conditioned godless multiverse theories, and any God hypothesis, the priors always favor the former. Because they have much simpler starting points, requiring fewer lucky breaks. Indeed, arguably, the simplest possible theory that predicts a limitless multiverse is simply…nothing at all. And God is certainly a hell of a lot more complex a theory than that. So even the priors doom the God hypothesis; and even at best, can’t rescue it.
All the evidence of Fine Tuning therefore proves God does not exist—not the other way around. Of course by “proves” here I am not using the technical term in logic and mathematics to refer to a deductive proof; I am using the everyday English word that simply means showing sufficient evidence to warrant confidence in a conclusion; the concept of proof in science or a court of law. The actual evidence of Fine Tuning—the vast size and age and lethality of the universe, and the long meandering and peculiar process of evolution, all caused by the specific arrangement of physical constants observed—is simply not at all likely on the God hypothesis, but as near to 100% expected as makes all odds on any simple godless hypothesis—especially any standard Multiverse Theory today, any of which follows from far simpler proposed initial conditions than God.
Consequently, Fine Tuning is only what we’d expect to observe if there was no God. It is actually an odd thing to see if God exists, as such a God would have no need of Fine Tuning. Gods don’t need hyper-precise arrangements of bizarre physical constants to create and sustain worlds. That’s why none need be imagined to explain anything depicted in the first chapter of the book of Genesis. Real gods will just make stars glow and radiate heat, for example; they don’t need bizarrely complex nuclear reactions to do it. They don’t need electromagnetic forces. They don’t even need gravity. They can just make things fall or not fall wherever and however they want. Nor do they need universes that are almost entirely lethal to life and that span billions of light-years and spin their wheels for billions of years before producing any life at all. Whereas without God people could only ever observe themselves to be in a Fine Tuned universe; and will almost certainly always observe themselves to be in one Tuned to be vastly old, large, and lethal to life. Whereas even if on a whim a God used Fine Tuning to make a universe anyway (for whatever weird reason), they still would not likely have Tuned that universe to be so vast in size and age and lethality to life—as opposed to making their universe small and young and widely habitable, as our theists originally, and correctly, anticipated.
This doesn’t mean a God couldn’t have done that. Remember, we are here talking about what’s likely, not what’s merely possible. Regardless of what’s possible, it is still the case that the evidence of Fine Tuning reduces the probability that God exists. It does not increase it—because the observation of that evidence is 100% expected if God doesn’t exist, but significantly less than 100% expected on any typical God hypothesis. And that has the inescapable logical consequence of reducing the probability that God exists. This does mean that had we observed ourselves in a very young, small, widely habitable universe, all our species instantly formed, and the world obeying the physics of direct command without any underlying complex mechanisms like quarks or electromagnetism, then we could be conversely certain we were here because of intelligent design. But that just isn’t the way the evidence went. It went exactly the other way.
Fine Tuning is therefore evidence against God’s existence; and evidence indeed sufficient on its own to be confident no God exists. Because on the actual evidence of Fine Tuning, even the highest probability that any God could have isn’t even 6%; and for the reasons we just surveyed, it is almost certainly a great deal more improbable than that. And this is true even for Bizarro Gods, who, sure, could make the evidence 100% likely again, but only at the cost of lowering the prior probability that any such God exists in the first place by exactly the same amount. So you end up with the same improbability that any such God exists. We can therefore be confident none does.
A universe without Fine Tuning would be just random chaos. So the more we observe Fine Tuning, the more evidence for God.
Real gods will just simulate your consciousness, including your belief in atheism. A good reason why an apparently simple external world is needed for humans to start an eternal life, is that we would otherwise be overwhelmed and confused by the amount of Fine Tuning and the unpredictability that comes with it. God puts your mental health above Their wish to be worshiped.
That’s incorrect. The opposite of Fine Tuning is not chaos. For example, nothing is Fine Tuned in the Genesis account of creation. Yet it is not a chaos, but a well-ordered, young, small, completely habitable universe. As was the cosmos of Aristotle. And so on. This is already covered in the article you are commenting on. Search out and re-read the passages I wrote containing the word “young” again, to see what the difference is between intelligent design and the Fine Tuning of Fundamental Constants.
Possibly you are confusing Fine Tuning with just “Design.” This would mean you don’t know what Fine Tuning as a phrase specifically refers to. It only refers to the tuning of bizarre fundamental constants. No such constants are needed by a God, who can just make worlds act and be as he wants. He doesn’t need quarks, for example, much less a finely tuned mass for them. Whereas all godless universes that will ever be observed do require such things. Thus such things are evidence of godless formation, and thus against intelligent design.
This is why a universe created as depicted in Genesis would be strong evidence for intelligent design; whereas godless universes can only arise from the fine tuning of bizarre and logically needless fundamental constants. Fine Tuning is thus the opposite of evidence for Design. It’s precisely the wrong direction the evidence should go in if it’s supposed to go toward intelligent design. By contrast, Genesis is an example of what the evidence would look like on intelligent design. Whereas Fine Tuning is what all observed universes will look like that weren’t intelligently designed.
Meanwhile, every time you start making shit up about your hypothetical god (like all these weird motives and methods you just pulled out of your ass and fabricated from the armchair), you are reducing, not increasing, that god’s probability. Because you have no evidence any of those made-up things is true, so their probability commutes to the conclusion.
As again is already explained in the article you are commenting on. Search out and re-read the passages I wrote containing the word “prior” again, and the whole sections on Bizarro Gods, to see why what you are doing here has the opposite effect you think. Because you evidently still don’t know how the logic of probability works, even after just having had it explained to you in a whole article on the point.
Try harder.
It’s only the worse that your made-up excuses are internally incoherent. If gods made us, they would just make us so our minds aren’t disturbed by knowing things. So they would never have the excuse you contrive. An illogical god is even less likely to exist than an arbitrary one.
I don’t believe in any biblical God, but maybe you can tell me whether I believe in a Bizarro God. I do believe in a God that lives in harmony with cosmological natural selection. This means that it is no contradiction that God selects the best of all the possible eternal lives, and the fact that that life starts in a cosmos shaped by cosmological natural selection. Because of this, the selected life observes fine-tuned parameters (or at least scientists who claim there is fine-tuning). And yes, God Itself is also shaped by cosmological natural selection and is therefore even evolutionarily dependent on the world we observe. Is that a Bizarro God?
Any God you invent a bunch of stuff about, without any evidence any of that stuff is true, just to get that God to fit observations, is a Bizarro God.
So you can choose. Either make up a bunch of bullshit about God, and have a Bizarro God too improbable to believe likely, or propose a non-Bizarro God, and have all the evidence refute his existence.
There is no third option.
Yeah, Ward, that is a bizarro God. It’s a God that within those criteria you just stated then chose parameters that suck, that generate all sorts of weird and unnecessary outcomes (as Carroll pointed out, even down to weirdness like the starting entropy of the universe). It’s a God other Christians would definitely not arrive at. How the heck does a thing that adjusts a cosmos then get adjusted back? “Natural selection” doesn’t apply to single organisms, Ward, it applies to populations. You can’t evolve a single being. But you are discussing a weird version of natural selection that actually sounds a lot more like a Hegelian dialectic with Darwinian ideas tossed in.
I literally have no idea how to parse a coherent concept of God from that, even if I am nice enough to assume that you will bring no Christian dogmatic baggage into the mix afterward. I guess it’s possible, but the very fact that people like Richard have looked at your idea and you’ve had to clarify some really weird properties of your God is exactly Richard’s point. That’s the whole point of “fine tuning” and information theory. To describe what your God is like, you need a lot of bits of information to do it. That should tell you something: it’s a bizarro God.
Now, it being a weird God theory isn’t fatal. I actually admire you for taking the God idea and taking the problems with it seriously enough to take another crack at bat. But the problem is that I cannot tell the difference between you having stumbled upon something interesting or you just having disguised that you retrofitted your God to the data we have really well, and no one else can either, until you make a prediction that you stick to and abandon the theory when it’s falsified. But you don’t think you need to do that, even though you are talking about the best fit of a model a posteriori. So… you basically have admitted to conceding by default, I guess.
Test
What’s your response to theists who will claim all the chaos you refer to is the consequential effect of the fall of man and sin?
That makes no logical sense.
First, that can only be possible if God let it. So it’s still God’s fault. If you build a malfunctioning robot and then fill a factory with shoddy equipment that it can easily cause to explode, the blame goes to the engineer, not the robot. And that’s even if the robot has free will—since it still has to work with the drives and rationality it is engineered with, and still is in a factory with shoddy equipment that it can easily cause to explode. So this argument does nothing to get God off the hook; it rather credits God with a lot of ill will and bad design. For more on why this is epistemically fatal for theism, see Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed.
Second, that makes theism self-contradictory. God is supposed to be smart enough to build a massively complex universe, yet too dumb to build it well or make it work. Those cannot both be true at the same time.
Third, excuses cannot rescue epistemic likelihoods. The universe looks exactly like it would look if it was random and undesigned and thus no God exists. The probability of the gobsmacking coincidence that God would nerf his own creation not only so catastrophically badly but also just coincidentally in exactly the way that looks like there is no God is simply too improbable to credit. This argument thus makes God less probable as an explanation of observations, not more. For a contrasting example proving the point see How Not to Live in Zardoz, where catastrophic bad design usually still leaves evidence of design; yet that is not what we observe of the universe we are in (which is why We Are Probably Not in a Simulation either).
Fourth, the explanation is temporally illogical. The chaos in question predates human existence entirely. So how could an act of a human retroactively change the entire history and structure of the cosmos all the way back to before human animals existed, even all the way to the Big Bang? If the evidence showed a perfect world that then became corrupted after that act, then there would be evidence for this theory; but the evidence is the opposite, refuting the theory.
Great post. Thanks
This is beautifully presented. Wow.
Really enjoyed this. I have been thinking lately how random life is. If it can happen to you it will and does eventually. Nothing is guaranteed. This article is somewhat related to that. Very well stated.
In my opinion, (empirical) evidence isn’t good enough to prove anything. You can have evidence of some fact F, without any proof or understanding why F has to be true. My God can be proven via a priori principles, such as plenitude and cosmological natural selection.
You are just repeating what I already said about “proof” in the article you claim to be responding to; and then re-asserting your same crazy nonsense I already refuted elsewhere. Thus reminding me that you are a lunatic. Conversation with you is a waste of time.
So “empirical evidence isn’t good enough to prove anything” is now cognate of “Therefore, make up whatever shit you want?” What about it being a necessary but not a sufficient conclusion if you want to sort out what is actually true about the reality you are in when many logically possible things could exist?
Yes, you can have evidence that fact F exists without any proof or understand. But “F has to be true” is not actually something you can establish. Don’t apologists like you constantly complain about contingent things? Fact F can be contingent on something else, not logically necessary but a consequence of something else. Demanding proof or understanding at that point is largely irrelevant. Once I’ve seen multiple dominoes fall, I actually really don’t need much more than that to conclude with a pretty high degree of certainty that dominoes will fall in the future if I arrange them that way. Indeed, I can have such a high degree of certainty that if I start a domino chain and it doesn’t fall, I can suspect there has been some kind of cheating or something unusual like a sticky floor. Even a few observations that confirm fact F holds can actually lead you to some growing conclusions about why fact F holds, especially when you also have the kind of evidence science gets which also includes cases where F doesn’t hold and mathematically non-trivial models about the range of Fs.
You have models? Great. Prove that they actually hold. String theorists don’t whine when people point out that their theories may be impossible to prove even in theory. They try to find ways of falsifying the theory, with actual evidence, with proposed tests. Do that. Do some science, Ward. Don’t insist you can’t be wrong when it is transparently obvious that you can be and don’t complain about naturalistic biases or whatever else. It is so telling that apologists never actually submit their ideas to the kind of tests that would actually establish them. It’s almost like it’s a shell game to disguise that you are never going to do that.
I can disprove God -well St Augustine’s God using his logic – with little effort and far fewer words that Dr Carrier.
God is that which none can be imagined as greater
Ergo God has no needs as if they did we can imagine a God who didn’t, that’d be a demi-god perhaps a gnostic one that St Augustine didn’t approve.
God creates universe (being Omnipotent this is a doodle for Our God) for which to share Love (God being Omnibenevolence as stated by St Augustine)
But wait; if God needs to share Love isn’t that kinda a need which contradicts clause 1?
But says St Augustine I define love as “willing the good of the other” so contend that isn’t a need.
Oh you are just engaging in philosophical sophistry and applying the Humpy Dumpty criterion ‘When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less. ‘
But says St Augustine I am a esteemed church teacher and you merely posting of a Richard Carrier social media thing
You don’t even know how powerful social media is I retort. Besides I am writing in dot-point, just like Theologians when they are trying to look like academics;
You can express a need by creating a universe and be a God
The presence of a Universe proves you don’t exist. And if you argue further I’ll play the Babel fish argument.
There are plenty of logically contradictory definitions of God. Remove them and you are still left with logically coherent definitions of God. The gain is minor. Hence I don’t waste time on incoherent Gods; and I am not arguing against any such thing here. As they are impossible, I don’t need to argue against them.
Although taking that step can be worthwhile when trying to get someone to realize their beliefs are incoherent, and if they respond by revising them to be coherent, you’ve already gotten them to “move” on a faith issue, which means it will be easier to get them to move the rest of the way. But really, the only people who adhere to these logically incoherent definitions of God are rarefied educated elites who have a vested interest in Drink the Koolaid style dogmatism. They won’t be moved by logic. So it’s a waste of time.
The vast majority of believers don’t believe in the nonsensical God of Augustine. So we need to construct our arguments to address what they believe. We need to deploy our persuasion and demonstration to remove the army. The generals, we can just let them die off under the crush of their ensuing irrelevance.
What I find so funny about the ontological argument is that it is a vastly powerful disproof of God by the Christian’s own criterion (I say Christian because this approach seems to be largely found in Christian theism).
Can I imagine a universe without God? I sure can. So a maximally great being doesn’t exist. I know that there are possible universes without God. They are trivial to make and define.
The Christian can complain that those universes aren’t really possible. Okay, man, but you were the one who started talking about possible beings and universes and modal logic and all that. So when you can play that game fairly, such that all possible universes are at least consistent with a God’s existence, come back and talk.
They can also complain that I’m being a sophist with the definition of a maximally great being. Well, yeah, because you were, because it’s a dumb definition.
As Richard points out, this is because the Christian is cheating. It isn’t a good faith argument, and I wonder if it was even when Aquinas offered it, but it surely isn’t now. As WLC himself put it, the ontological argument supposedly forces the atheist to disprove God existing in all possible universes. It’s yet another way that they try to flip the burden of proof implicitly, yet another way they are trying to move the pea in the shell game and pick your pocket.
The Dinosauric Principle, which is the same as the Anthropic Principle, could be an argument for a finally-tuned universe, but it does not exclude capriciousness.
You’ll have to elaborate.
I don’t think the fine-tuning argument is consistent with a capricious universe.
Indeed. This would align with my “almost entirely hostile to life” element.
It’s possible to make an intelligently capricious universe (as Hell is usually described to be); yet even that would be self-evidently intelligently designed. So we don’t even live in that kind of world.
I was going to joke that the universe, if it’s designed, would look more like a universe made by Q, but that world would be way less boring and we would get a lot more chances for Q to screw with us. Mischievous and evil gods would make a world way worse than this one. It’s telling that almost every human (fictional) creation of a universe assumes a greater degree of ability to cross it and a greater variety of stuff to find and things to meet (and maybe shoot at).
Thanks for your interest, Fred. Cosmological Natural Selection does not apply to a single big bang universe. Our big bang universe originates in another parent big bang universe, and so on. I also assume Plenitude, which means that every possible universe competes for a high abundance with any other universe in the plenitude. Those that reproduce (or are reproduced) best, have the highest abundances. More complex entities require less complex entities for their own reproduction. For examples, animals require the prior existence of eukaryote cells. This is to say that complexity favors complexity. This means that more complex universes will consist of always greater densities of intelligent matter (brain matter or CPU matter). So this is my model: our string-theoretic multiverse is a special-case structure in a universe U that is larger, older, more complex, and has more non-compactified spatial dimensions. This U reproduces in turn in an even larger universe, and so on. In other words, the plenitude organizes itself as a Russian nesting doll of universes that all reproduce. The larger, more complex universes are always denser and denser filled with intelligent matter, until ultimately the whole plenitude consist for 100% of intelligent matter. Non-intelligent matter exists, but constitutes only an infinitesimally small fraction of the plenitude. This enables us to identify the plenitude with God. It also indicates that we are in fact simulated by God’s brain, and that the external world is an evolutionarily conserved illusion.
Disclaimer: some of these ideas have already been debunked by Richard.
There is no evidence or basis for any such correlation. What causes universe reproduction in every going multiverse model is non-sentient (black holes, or random quantum entropy-reversals, or quantumized chaotic distribution of dimensional expansion rates, and so on). So there is no way to “increase” intelligences present in a system in line with increasing universes produced. You can only increase total (not per-universe) intelligences, and simply by the brute fact of increasing the number of universes.
Even simming can’t catch up, because of the basic law of computation that the simplest model (sim) for a system is the system itself (i.e. reality, not a sim). Sims always require more resource dedication than the thing being simmed. So real universes will always outnumber simulated ones (especially measured by interaction-volume, e.g. you can have ten small sims running in one big universe, but the total number of interactive states will be less across all ten of those sims than in their housing universe).
Plus sims will be games and paradises; they won’t look anything like random naturally selected universes. Ours looks like the latter, not the former. That’s how we know it probably isn’t a sim.
This doesn’t follow on string theory. In no sense of larger. More uncompacted dimensions leads to more frequent collapse, not expansion, of the ensuing space. Large universes in terms of volume have to be low-D. Those are the only spaces that can explore complexity-space in terms of content, but even they collapse if there are too many interactive Calabi-Yau dimensions. For example, our universe likely tops out at 11 dimensions; it might go up to 26. But if you push it to thousands or millions of dimensions, you get such an intense particle interaction and force density that the resulting space collapses again.
Thus, a string multiverse model entails the overall expanding network is naturally selecting for “survival” only low-dimensional universes; and still even most of those by far can’t produce stars or complex elements (and thus can’t produce life). Life-producing universes will remain extraordinarily rare accidental byproducts of the process.
This is nonsensical as physics. Density increases lead to universe collapse. So I have to believe you don’t mean density. You must mean you think more of the same matter at the same density will be organized to produce intelligence than in compared universes. But as I just noted, there is no selective process for that. So there is no basis for thinking that will happen. Even when it happens directedly and not naturally (e.g. we might one day convert as much of our universe as we can into intelligently-engineered sims), that is not an “increasing” outcome; it simply is the statistical outcome of every rare universe capable of producing intelligence. But those will remain extraordinarily rare accidents. Their frequency relative to dead universes is not going to go up over time.
This is indeed a non sequitur. The evidence indicates we are not in a sim. So, that’s out.
And there is no expectation on any known physics that any such process as you describe will ever occur. You can get it only through Boltzmann process (which is random, not selected), which will be vastly rarer than natural worlds with life, or by engineering (our future sim-building), which will be a product of the life in a natural world, not the other way around.
It also isn’t statistically likely to be a single entity. The AIs we will build to run sims will be multiplicitous, not singular. There are also real concerns about how to do this in a way that won’t be awful. Simgods are not inherently likely to be good ones. But well-built or not, they will almost always be self-evident and not hidden. We would know they exist because we could talk to them or interact with them all the time. To add yet more epicycles to explain away the absence of this data reduces the theory’s probability yet even more than it already suffers.
On statistical probability I like to add the following quote:
“We must not confuse statistical probability with some trascendental and utterly compelling force” (Baron Bodissey)
Ward: No, I got that you meant more of a conceptual multiverse, like a “We’re going to assume that we can have a ton of laws of physics that probably aren’t possible, and an array of universes that are internally logically consistent”. I am perfectly okay with that as an armchair thought exercise. Of course, when it comes to reality, you have to actually figure out if a given multiverse model holds, just like in reality you have to figure out if unicorns or manticores or black swans exist. But in terms of just sketching out the possibility space, I am perfectly on board with thinking of hypothetical multiverse arrays that go beyond “Any logically internally inconsistent world” but are less restrictive than “Whatever string theory actually allows” or “Whatever another quantum multiverse theory allows”.
The problem is that even in that approach you don’t necessarily get whatever you want. This is actually a thing that fiction is already struggling with. Why can’t Marvel and DC crossover? In terms of their stated physics of multiverses, they should be able to. But, alas, intellectual property. In particular, any time entities within a multiverse can affect other entities within the multiverse, you can bin it. Because then this universe should be seeing it, and it isn’t. It’s one of the bummers about a multiverse: Any multiverse we can penetrate into is one that almost certainly doesn’t exist.
Which caps “God” pretty drastically. Maybe somewhere out there in a big ensemble there’s some law of physics that allows some kind of big mega-atom cloud to be able to have immense power within its specific universe. But that thing will never be God here. There will never be an avatar of that God who cleansed sin, not here and frankly not even there. Things that don’t make sense still don’t make sense.
Like, yeah, I like then idea that your Gods are basically Qs, entities that are contingent and come about from lower-level life. That’s again trying to be serious about the evidence. The problem is that you would need to actually show any laws of physics where you can have intelligent things that can maintain that intelligence over long periods of time. There’s a reason the animal chain ends with us: We are hitting pretty sharp limits of embedded biological intelligence. We observe that there are pretty drastic physical limits to a universe. And in a blind, non-theistic multiverse, it’s hard to imagine any state of affairs that would be otherwise. Any set of events that gets you to life from the operation of simple forces is likely not going to look much different from ours.
As for non-intelligent matter… that’s all really interesting, except, well, we don’t live in a universe with intelligent matter. That’s just the way the evidence shakes out. I know you disagree, but, well, the evidence is really clear. So either we’re one of those weird low-level universes, like a low-level matter harvesting universe for the higher emergent ones or a dead-end, or we’re normal. And by definition you’re more likely to be normal than not. And then you are already breaking multiverse rules.
It’s a novel approach, and I think that if you paired with a cosmologist maybe you could come up with something interesting to at least generate testable predictions so the entire exercise can at least make something that you can actually grip and assess. But until then, it’s just an idea that I will definitely be thinking on for a tabletop RPG.
What I forgot to mention is that all those universes in the Russian nesting doll, 1) all have different laws of physics, and 2) have a greater and greater degree of fine-tuning. So the argument that always denser intelligent matter would collapse doesn’t hold. Every complex universe is fine-tuned to survive at least until its own self-reproduction.
I agree that a high complexity is, at first sight, more improbable than a low complexity. However, this inverts once you take self-reproduction into account. There needs to be only one highly complex universe, with a high degree of fine-tuning, that can reproduce itself, and it will outnumber and outweigh its lowly complex siblings that cannot reproduce. Given Plenitude, every universe exists, no matter how complex it is or how much fine-tuning it requires, and it doesn’t seem to be a blocking requirement that some of these can also self-reproduce. Moreover, intelligent matter can use its own smartness to reproduce, which is an empirically observed fact.
With respect to simulations: you can never exclude the possibility that you are simulated, based on empirical evidence. It is namely possible that your consciousness is simulated directly, including your belief that you are not simulated. Maybe you could find it interesting that this simulation is a gradual process in the Russian nesting doll. In the next level, there would be complex entities (or superhuman aliens) that are evolutionarily dependent on human civilizations. They would then create many more human civilizations per square lightyear and per million years than what is compatible with our empirical evidence. But in order for the human sciences to develop in the evolutionarily conserved way, they would trick all these civilizations in the belief that intelligent life is extremely rare. In the level above that, intelligent matter becomes even denser, but still fooled in the idea that intelligence is rare, etc., until almost only intelligent matter remains.
You are contradicting yourself. If every universe exists, there is no selecting of universes. They all exist. So none are being selected.
And you can’t have it both ways on natural selection: either that follows the string landscape (and dense universes always collapse) or you aren’t talking about natural selection but intelligent selection (and then you have a completely inexplicable and implausible decision matrix for the deliberate creation of these universes; because density is not a requirement of intelligence or its quantity or capabilities, so there is no reason for it to gerrymander denser universes).
And “never exclude the possibility” does not answer “is extraordinarily improbable.” The words “extraordinary improbable” do not require excluding any “possibility.” They follow from improbability, not impossibility. So you aren’t even coherently comprehending the case against you but relying on possibiliter fallacies (“possibly, therefore probably”), a standard crank move.
As usual, being a lunatic, you can’t even produce coherent arguments. Much less any evidence for them.
Ward: Again, I do have to applaud you for at least taking these ideas seriously and non-dogmatically.
So, yeah, it makes some sense that if we lived in a multiverse ensemble where something like making zero point energy into background computing or what not was real, that model would likely spread. Indeed, this is an ongoing thing I am exploring in my novel setting, with the presence not only of living universes in the multiverse ensemble but also an entire universe that is one unified quantum AI that eradicates all things that are not calculable to it (including life because life is an emergent and thus chaotic property).
The problems, though, are in the assumptions you aren’t addressing (putting aside that there’s not a shred of evidence for it). For one, what makes us assume that there isn’t some kind of Great Filter event on a multiversal scale? My own examples indicate the point here. All it takes is one nasty multiversal civilization that weaponizes something, like opening up a pathway to a universe with a strong force or EM strength that is enough to just irradiate the universe and you’re cooked. I am a massive optimist and even I have to admit that, if the multiverse looks anything like our local corner, a Lensman Arms Race is almost guaranteed. And when you talk about a multiversal arms race, not only do we get to a falsification criterion (i.e. why the hell are we alive when we should have been absorbed into some Borg universe or harvested for parts or blown up by gamma ray pulses?) but in any case your life event stops. I don’t take things like Roko’s basilisk and singularity events and what not very seriously, but you’re talking about a multiverse where it only takes one.
Similarly, why should we assume that living universes outweigh dead ones? The history of life disproves that. There’s this nasty little thing called entropy. We get around it because a sun is dumping energy into our little pocket. How are all of these universes violating not only their internal entropy but whatever entropy rules exist between universes? It strikes me that it’s quite likely that a multiverse like you describe is full of waste products. Maybe our universe is one such waste product.
Heck, maybe living things tend to like to die. They voluntarily clean themselves out. Humans think they want to live forever… until you press them on what that would really mean, an eternity with nothing to actually achieve.
The point is that it’s possible that one can imagine a multiverse that conveniently happens to look like yours, but it’s not likely. There’s a ton of multiverse models that look similar to yours that don’t end up with your outcomes. So in terms of actually coming up with anything here, it’s a non-starter. Viable multiverse models don’t look like yours. Might that change? Yes. Might it not? Yeah, and much more likely so.
Still, sometimes real science is born from an interesting idea in the ether like this. But at present, this isn’t science. It’s barely philosophy. It is a germ of an idea that could be developed.
Selection does occur in a plenitude. If all universes exist, they also all exist multiple times (even infinitely many times), because all their recombinations have to exist. For example, the is-direct-neighbor-of relation has to be applied to all universes. Moreover, universes do not all exist equally many times: self-reproducing universes will exist more often, universes that can defend themselves against an attack will exist more often, etc. This is natural selection.
Indeed, I am talking about a combination of natural selection and intelligent selection. But why would intelligent selection not be a kind of natural selection? Humans also intelligently selected their partners in the last million years, but this is still called natural selection.
The probability that we are simulated evidently depends on my theory about the predominance of intelligent matter, not on the possibility that we are simulated. It is you who claimed that simulationism ‘is out.’ I just argued that it cannot ‘be out.’
Ward, I know you are a lunatic and thus can’t understand basic principles of logic, so I’m wasting my time saying this again: but if all possible things exist, no things can be selected. Selection entails some things are not chosen. But when all things are chosen, nothing is unchosen. No choices are therefore being made. Selection therefore cannot exist. Just one of many ways your beliefs are self-contradictory. You have to give up one or the other premise: either all possible universe don’t exist; or no choices are being made as to which universes exist. You may be suffering here from an equivocation over the meaning of a distinct universe.
As to the difference between intelligent and natural selection, the difference is one is blind and the other is deliberative. You are suffering from an equivocation fallacy here, using the word “natural” in two different senses in the same line of thought, which is a fundamental failure to reason correctly. In the context of IS vs. NS, the word “natural” means “in the absence of intelligence”; it does not mean “in nature.” Yes, the word “natural” means the latter in other contexts. But that’s how words work. They mean different things in different contexts.
As to what we are discussing, it is not whether simulationism is “out.” It’s whether it’s probable. You have literally no coherent argument, and absolutely no evidence whatever, that it is probable. But I’ve already explained that to you. And you are a lunatic. And as a lunatic, you never remember things you were told, and don’t comprehend things like evidence and logic.
That’s not selection, Ward. By pretty basic definition. Selection means you remove something. It’s “natural selection” when something dies. “Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype”, to quote Wikipedia. If everything sticks around indefinitely, there is no selection. That is actually what made Darwin’s insight so brilliant and solved previous evolutionary ideas that just used randomization. So your model needs a mechanism for poorly-suited universes to die, or at least to be differentially less selected. You allude to that with self-reproducing universes, but, uhhh, what are those? Are we talking about multiverse theories where the whole universe is splitting, Carroll-Chen style? Do you have a single citation that individual universes can actually propagate into multiple new ones at greater rates? And why would this quasi-evolutionary process lead to universes more likely to produce Gods or even information? Yes, there are definitely multiverse theories where some universes that have some properties that let them cohere can pass things on (like black hole-rich universes), but that is still a stretch.
Yes, intelligent selection is a kind of selection. It’s not natural selection, by definition, but I catch your meaning: In life, it does the same thing. So… to get to Gods… we need intelligent things… that can consciously select universes (how? destroying universes? cloning them? choosing ones they like that replicate and also have other things they like for whatever reason? and why?). In other words, to get to gods, we need gods. Maybe you can sketch this out better, but otherwise this is blatant boot-strapping. It’s also begging the question: We’re doing all this to arrive at some kind of God theory, and now we have intelligent universe selectors in the premises.
And, no, you can’t just make up a theory that lets you reconceptualize the evidence to suit your theory. That’s also blatantly dishonest, dude. The matter in our universe transparently doesn’t think. Provide any evidence in this universe that it does and then you may have a shot. This is the opposite of how actual multiverse theorizing has to work. You have to start with the observations of the one universe you have and indicate that this universe is consistent with it. Simulationism is a piss-poor explanation for this universe. The fact that it might explain some other hypothetical universes well in an ensemble still makes your theory bad. We can pick an array of other theories that don’t blatantly contradict the evidence we do have.
Fred, I’d like to answer some of your objections, however, it is not the first time that Richard silently refuses to let an earlier post become visible … probably because he cannot answer it adequately? In these circumstances, it does not make much sense to do the effort.
Ward, I’ve answered you amply. That you ignore me and keep saying the same refuted shit does not constitute me ignoring you. It constitutes you ignoring me.
But as to unposted comments, I have been sitting on fifty or so for months now, sent by dozens of people, simply for lack of time to go through the queue. So whatever posts you are talking about, I literally haven’t even read them yet.
Uhhhh, Ward, Richard and I are not the same person. So… even if Richard is being unduly dismissive, and I am sympathetic to that but then again he has been patient with you and given you plenty of time to respond to objections and from what I have seen you just don’t so I am also sympathetic to him having given up on you (I too find it grating to talk to someone who really doesn’t think that empirical evidence matters for the reasons I discussed and you didn’t reply to), that shouldn’t mean you can’t answer my objections. Eventually I am sure that if you did indeed answer my objections the posts will come up. For the record, I always go out of my way to allow someone to come back with an idea or objection later even if I am unconvinced at first or even had a negative interaction. So if I see something else later, I’ll check it out, but frankly, the questions I am asking are really basic to just an introductory version of your idea, and you not being clear about them is already a big problem.
And yeah, Richard updates the site’s comments somewhat irregularly because he wants a comment section that isn’t a garbage fire. It’s why I appreciate commenting here. Read the comments: You will constantly see people wondering when the comments are coming up. It’s not personal, man.
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It worked! You’re in.
Richard and Fred, in a plenitudinous reality, every non-plenitudinous multiverse is a multiverse in which classical natural selection takes place: reproducing multiverses, choosing between multiverses, dying multiverses, predominating multiverses, etc. So by extension, the whole plenitude is subjected to classical natural selection. Compare this to set theory: if every set has property P, then by extension the universal class has property P. However, if you really don’t believe this extension can work, just pick a multiverse M that is sufficiently large, but non-plenitudinous. The same conclusions will follow. (E.g. 1. submultiverses of M that reproduce (or are reproduced) well, will be more abundant, and therefore more likely to be observed, 2. evolutionary conservation of the role of humans in the reproduction process of the big bang universe explains why we still observe a big bang universe that seems only minimally fine-tuned for humans to exist, and 3. this evolutionarily conserved universe will be reproduced always more efficiently, until it is simulated by dense brain or CPU matter.)
Plenitude (or an arbitrarily great multiverse) replaces boot-strapping in explaining arbitrarily much intelligence.
With respect to intelligent selection, you should blame Darwin: humans also intelligently selected their partners in the last million years, but this is still called natural selection. But ok, I might call it intelli-natural selection in the future, or something like that.
I try to keep my answers as short as possible. Otherwise the discussion would increase exponentially in length.
That isn’t logical, Ward. There is no need of selection in a universe if all universes exist. Because then, every outcome already exists. You don’t need a universe to select it. Honestly. Think this through.
First of all, Ward, that all hinges on there being a plenitudinous multiverse. Since other multiverses are logically internally consistent and mutually exclusive, you have to figure out which one actusally holds. So, you know, back to the evidence thing you want to skip because it’s easier to make stuff up. I don’t want to leave that unsaid, nor the fact that looking up plenitudinous multiverses got me down a modern Platonic rabbit hole, which isn’t exactly reassuring.
But, okay, putting aside Richard’s objection that you can’t select if you already have everything (that’s by definition not selection – I don’t select anything from a bag of Skittles if I eat all of them in one bite), you’ve introduced no selection criterion that could even do something like alter over time the internal distribution of those universes. How is selection happening? What is shifting universes around so the ensemble is changing in relative proportions, or destroying universes, or harvesting universes? You keep talking about something that near as I can tell is impossible and/or incoherent as being inevitable. I keep hoping for the actual explanation. I got the basic idea already, Ward.
Either universes can interact with each other, plenitude or not, in which case we should have already seen that and so your theory is falsified, or they can’t, in which case your approach is impossible. And if universes can interact with each other, the idea that the only thing they do is select for each other in the way you want is an assumption, not a justification. What if by sheer random chance the Devil Universe gets stronger first and destroys all possible beneficent challenges? What if the AI dimension that is like AM from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is the first one to develop interdimensional travel? These aren’t trivial objections. I want you to justify why your selection process has any outcome you can predict. Natural selection is restricted in what it can do by at least two key variables: The local laws of physics and the specific chemistry. DNA/RNA/etc. can only do certain things, and we don’t see pigs the size of Texas because the laws of physics prevent it. But in a plenitude, how the hell do you know what selection will do? Anything is possible because even the rules governing everything are varying!
Hell, your theory is internally contradictory for the same reason any unrestrained comprehension is. A plenitude has to include universes that are sole universes as defined, and universes that have a history of destroying all other universes, etc. I’ve spent a long time trying to make a consistent multiverse that allows you to imagine all fictional settings as coexisting, and that only works when those fictional settings themselves don’t have rules about beings that are solitary in the whole multiverse or when they haven’t already stipulated particular multiversal interactions as extant.
And, no, plenitude doesn’t replace boot-strapping. Either you are saying that a plenitude includes universes that “spawn” with Gods already, which thus far you have been unwilling to actually say out right and which actually just solves your problem at the cost of being immediately falsified (because then this universe would be being affected by a God entity and all the evidence shows it isn’t), or you aren’t. If you aren’t, your explanation of intelligent selection requires selection. And what bothers me is that you don’t recognize this and simply say, “Well, we don’t need outright Gods. Maybe we start with beings that select parts of universes or change very local laws of physics, and from that select beings that are stronger, etc., until you do get a true God”. That’d be fine, barring the problems with assuming that any consistent law of physics that makes a universe that doesn’t just collapse can make such a God, but you don’t seem willing to do so. I am again seeing the classic theistic trend toward wanting to have the cart before the horse.
And how are we evolutionarily conserved in the minimally fine-tuned universe? What the hell role do we play? It makes no sense. It’s surely not obvious. Maybe it’s true and you can find some evidence for it, but it’s not something you can see from the armchair. Maybe you’re banking on the idea that, say, universes with high levels of black holes also happen to be good universes to randomly make life so you get universes that both have life and can propagate because they are also in universes that spread and take over the ensemble. I still wonder how the hell that works in the context of transfinite math, but whatever.
I get that brevity is a concern. You don’t owe me or Richard a 5000 word essay. But the problem is that your brief explanation doesn’t cut it. I read your argument and see something that is maybe logically possible, but faces logical objections before empirical ones. I can’t think about it as anything but a potentially interesting idea to explore from the armchair unless you provide more. And I really think just thinking about the basics would help. What is doing the selection? It’s possible to succinctly describe Darwinian evolution: Try something similar. As it is now, your elevator pitch isn’t selling, I am sorry to say.
Don’t worry. I have thought this through, through and through. As I already explained, if every outcome exists, then 1) every outcome also exists absolutely infinitely many times, and 2) there are absolutely infinite differences with respect to how many times a pair of outcomes exist. More precisely, for every pair of universes A and B that are not partonomically related (so neither A is part of B, nor B is part of A) it holds that either A or B exists absolutely infinitely many times more often than the other. (Even more precisely: in a random limit to the plenitude). As a result of that, all the absolutely eternal lives exist, but only a single one (namely my life) is observed with certainty. This is to say that cosmological intelli-natural selection selected my life by comparing it with all the other possible lives and reproducing it absolutely beyond the abundance of any other life. That is something entirely different than claiming that ‘every outcome exists,’ and stop right there. It is true that I (just like anybody else) will eventually observe every possible universe, however, what matters is the order in which these universes are observed.
You do realize that every universe with observers in it is observed 100% of the time, right? You don’t seem to grasp this point. The probability of any universe being observed does not “go up” when it is always 100% for every universe with observers in it. This is why your selection theory makes no logical sense. If all possible universes already exist, all possible observers already exist. There is no role or function here for “selection” to make any difference.
Being as charitable as I can imagine, and ignoring the challenges with the transfinite math: Maybe an infinitesimal fraction of universes in a plenitudinous ensemble have life, but over time life colonizes all the non-living universes, so the number of observed universes goes up and so the probability of a random universe chosen out of a hat being observed goes up?
This gets to all the problems of physical impossibility I pointed out earlier. Intelligences can’t go “backwards in time” to repopulate the rest of the plenitude; so you aren’t ever going to get the desired result, except in some hypothetical future that we can clearly observe we are not in. And even that would require defying nearly all the laws of physics. So it isn’t a tenable hypothesis of current reality.
You’d be better off supposing something along the lines of Tippler: that we, alone, by ourselves (or some alien civilization in our universe taking the baton later, if we don’t survive long enough) will rearrange all the matter of this universe in the distant future to create our own plenitude of virtual universes.
That’s entirely plausible, and may even be the statistically inevitable end-point of nearly all universes producing intelligent life. But (a) we plainly can tell we aren’t in that future now (as in that, the observed worlds will all be intelligently-governed games and paradises, not randomly capricious junkyards) and (b) none of those universes will ever be able to talk to each other or travel or transmit anything to each other. They will remain forever physically isolated oases, entirely on their own.
And that’s all according to current, well-evidenced physics. So any thesis to the contrary is simply ignoring scientific fact or inventing new science on a basis of no evidence. Neither of which is a credible way to arrive at assertions about reality.
Meanwhile, relative probability of location in an infiniverse depends on observation, not prior probability. You are where you observe yourself to be.
If we observe ourselves to be in a godless universe (and we do), then the probability we are in one approaches zero no matter how many “more” godverses there may be than godless ones. It does not matter if six billion people are on Earth and only one on Mars. That does not make it six billion to one we are on Earth. If you look around and you are on Mars, you are that lone guy on Mars. Prior odds be damned.
So even if you could get to “more godverses will exist than godless universes” (and as I’ve also already explained, you can’t), you still don’t change the situation for us. We look around and see we are on Mars. We’re therefore the guy on Mars.
What I might say in Ward’s position is that the result of all that is that we can then know that the guys from Earth are coming (e.g. a god will save our brains or whatever he is trying to get at here, I am waiting until his woobie becomes obvious) because we can know that, yes, we are on Mars, but there is an Earth.
Which is only useful if we get evidence that this particular model holds, but that’s not even worth pointing out at this point when this is all so tentative.
Right.
That’s why I pointed out the physical impossibility of such a model.
It is literally not possible to travel between universes in any plausible multiverse cosmology today. Forward travel is destructive (no intelligence or anything organized could survive it; in essence, the Big Bang would disintegrate anyone trying to get through); and backward travel is logically impossible (without also, again, being destructive; e.g. antimatter devolves, and thus any brain made of it would deconstruct as it moved backwards in time); as is lateral travel (since that would require cross-temporal spatial continuity, which eliminates the distinction of any two worlds as separate universes to begin with).
This is why Ward has to resort to bizarre convoluted claims about extended (rather than collapsed) hidden dimensions that just “by coincidence” interconnect all universes (a claim as implausible as totally nowhere in evidence). This is all just a giant made-up Rube Goldberg apologetic monstrosity contrived to get a desired conclusion, not a credible theory of reality.
It’s also pointless. Since if all universes already exist, we don’t need plenitude-crawling to get any desired result. Whatever outcome you want, it will already exist somewhere in the plenitude already. Sans crawling. Not everyone will get to enjoy the result (like us: clearly we didn’t end up in an intelligently-governed supergarden); but someone will.
This is why it matters whether you restrict the multiverse to physically possible worlds or not. If you give a miss to physical possibility, you are asserting every logically possible outcome exists (which is the position of Tegmark, for example). That has the effect that selection is no longer needed to get any outcome. Because every outcome already instantaneously exists.
At least with models limited to known physics you could get differential selection effects across a multiverse, e.g. Smolin’s hypothesis. But none of those models consist of evolving superintelligences. Smolin’s model entails most universes will look like ours because those produce more black holes over their time-space run, producing more universes of similar inherited characteristics. His model follows physics (and merely proposes a few more laws of physics entirely compatible with existing laws). But you can’t tweak his model to replace black holes with superintelligences; that would contradict physics.
So, you can stick with physics, and fail to get Ward’s result; or you can drop physics and get to Ward’s result instantaneously without any selection required. There is no third option.
Which is why this ends up a question of epistemology: is it credible to suppose reality is exactly contrary to all observed evidence? The answer is no. It thus does not matter if something is logically possible. Without evidence, it simply isn’t physically probable. And that’s that.
Oh, yeah, the obvious objection is that there’s no even plausible science and possibly not even possible science, but I think there are some interesting ideas worth exploring before then. And I think it’s telling that the idea has so many problems even in its internal logic.
But… what is and isn’t partonomically related, Ward? If your multiverse theory allows any interaction at all, then they are all interactable. You keep on tripping on how fatal “Everything goes” is to your theory. We transparently don’t live in an “Everything goes” ensemble. We’d be dead if we did.
I don’t get how you are arriving at a multiverse where types of universes vary as you describe with A/B except by just assuming it. I can imagine a plenitude where every universe type is held constant in relative ratio. Just like I can imagine an infinite bag of candy where there is every possible kind of candy once, but exactly once. Or a bag of candy where all infinite kinds of candy are there infinite numbers of times.
And if there’s all these absolutely eternal lives, why are you the one sucker with the finite life? It’s like in Dr. Strange where a character (won’t say who for spoiler reasons) is the only one of her analogs in the multiverse who does not have children. That’s literally infinitely unlikely, or at least vastly so. Unless you’re trying to claim that, against the evidence, your life is actually eternal.
And if we’re the result of selection for our kind of life, why don’t we live in a universe teeming with life? I find it so telling that your theory could imply that we are in the early stages of an evolving multiverse but you don’t pick that because apparently you want religious conviction of eternity so badly you will scupper logic to get there. I really can’t see anything in all of this but motivated reasoning.
Thanks for your charitability, Fred. However, universes with complexity (life, intelligence) are better in reproducing themselves, so we might expect to see a plenitude filled with absolutely dense brain matter. The reason why we see intelligence-hostile laws of physics is evolutionary conservation: more complex entities are dependent on the prior development of less complex entities, so they have to reproduce these less complex entities in order to reproduce themselves. The solution is simulationism. By simulating only the most complex parts of a reality (because these are the parts on which they get evolutionarily dependent), they can reproduce themselves.
Compare this to the relation between animals and mitochondria. The mitochondria believe to be swimming in a warm ur-ocean full of chemicals they need, but in fact they are parts of animal cells. The animals ‘simulate’ the ur-environment for the mitochondria. Likewise, humans are just organs of bodies with four (non-compactified) spatial dimensions. But these 4D bodies have to simulate to cogency of our empirical sciences (including their own non-observability), because these are the sort of things we require to do what we are expected to do. And in this 4D world, the density of intelligent matter is already greater than in our 3D world. And so it goes on until we live in a reality with an absolutely infinite number of spatial dimensions, full of dense brain matter.
I keep getting ‘Nonce verification failed’ after I post my message. Hopefully it works this time.
To try to be brief, I’ll just list my objections, but they all come down to how you are making confident predictions about a multiverse model that is so weird and unintuitive that I have no confidence that anyone could actually do so.
1) Why would less complex universes be inherently better at replicating themselves? I can imagine a host of fairly simple universes that are basically infectious or gray-goo like or just very good at spreading. Those universes may be odd and may rely on highly exotic physics, but you’re the one proposing a plenitude. These universes could even be less frequent than the complex universes but just need less time to spread, gaining a first mover advantage. The best part about that is that it matches what we know about the only biosphere we know of, where you have ubiquitous colonization by the simplest kind of life.
2) Why should we assume a plentitude of universes with sapient life will all spread blindly? It’s quite likely that many of them would be concerned about risks of infection, or want to maintain a healthy multiversal biosphere, or have a kind of Prime Directive.
3) Actually, we have absolutely zero reason to expect any universe full of brain matter. Unless you can show that laws of physics that allow physical brains to just float without associated bodies and support systems (and I’m being charitable to even assume that you mean that and not ghost minds) and that they could be maintained across universes, an infinitely big universe still leaves most of it with no brains. That’s just sort of inescapable. It’s a direct consequence of entropy.
4) Are you assuming time travel?! Because otherwise, the future multiverse with dense thinking can’t be selecting anything in the past! This really is bootstrapping, and I suspect that you’re using the multiverse to disguise that fact. It doesn’t matter if universe 881 gets early super-intelligences from prior early intelligences, they don’t have any need to make universe 1022 with late intelligence evolve. In fact, they may have negative reasons to do so, as we already noted: Population and resource control, concerns over gray goo scenarios, etc.
5) Why the hell does an advanced superspecies need to create a simulation?! To seed the processes they already know about?! Why would you expect universes so sophisticated that they can make universes are somehow not sophisticated enough to make more of themselves and also will assuredly want that?! Why would that be the inevitable outcome instead of a Borg/Zerg/Xenomorph universe or a zombie universe or a sludge universe assimilating everything?!
6) The animals “simulate” the ur-environment for the mitochondria because the mitochondria are a part of them, and do something that those organisms can’t do on their own, and because animals aren’t designed. Super intelligences need none of those limits. Again, you are imagining an entire fictive set of limits that do not logically hold. All I have to do is point to one universe in the plenitude where there’s not such crippled multidimensional entities and those ones win the selection, by your reasoning. They can then tell all the other multidimensional beings.
7) We’re not a God’s organ, Ward. The evidence doesn’t go that direction. There’s no mechanisms, no observations, nothing that makes that make any sense. So you make an empirical conclusion that isn’t verified. So… there’s absolutely no reason to take your theory seriously.
You are imagining unfathomable entities and physics and then just using bald assertions to arrive at the idea that they have to behave like you like.
I also got the Nonce verification error, it cleared up.
Fred, why do you and Richard keep coming up with the ‘evidence’ argument? My theory is immune to it. According to my theory, all evidence is created/simulated by super-intelligent beings. Not only is external evidence simulated, even your brain is in direct control of these super-intelligent beings. So even if there would be any errors in the external evidence, you would not notice it.
Now I have seen you and especially Richard making the objection that, if we would be simulated, the world would be much more benevolent. This objection fails: probably the world is a lot more benevolent than what you think it is. You are just simulated to believe it is not benevolent, so you would type the words you type. And you have to type what you type, because conversations like ours do have an impact on the reproduction plan of our big bang universe. Indeed, the outcome of our debate has consequences on the question whether alien civilizations can be trusted, how afterlife worlds would best be organized, and whether we should actively try to create new big bangs. Compare this with biological cells: cells harvest any type of complexity to play a role in their reproduction plan. In that comparison, we are the molecules and proteins that play a modest but essential role in the reproduction of their cell. This comparison indicates that our beliefs and our conversation are also evolutionarily conserved, just like the proteins’ function in a cell. So all the people who really suffer on Earth may not have a real consciousness. They just have to be there so you would have the conserved beliefs you have.
This is not a moral conclusion that any religious apologist would like to end up with. But I will not alter my beliefs on that basis.
“I don’t need evidence for my theory.”
And
“It doesn’t matter that all the evidence there actually is contradicts my theory.”
Behold, the Universal Creed of the Crank.
And also not seeming to recognize that someone has been proposing internal contradictions and logical issues, reacting to the mere mention of evidence like a bull seeing red.
Well, Ward, if you want to say that your argument is immune to evidence, you have to prove it always logically holds, even against the apparent weight of contrary evidence. Not just that a universe could look like that, or likely would look like that, but that your plenitude must exist and must have the properties you assert. You don’t even try. So, dude, your argument isn’t just not immune to evidence, it is fatally crippled by it.
I have been incredibly charitable, as even you have admitted at least in part, by taking the idea at all seriously despite a host of existing objections. I’ve allowed you to stipulate highly rich, finely-tuned starting conditions. What I haven’t done is allow you to draw conclusions that are anything but literally the only imaginable, logically consistent conclusion from it. This is why if you want to convince me you actually have to address my objections and not just paper over them. Every objection I make is one that is clearly logically possible. They’re all imaginable universes. Gray goo scenarios, for example, aren’t just logically imaginable, they are
Unless you can show that your plenitude must develop in the specific, bizarre way that you suggest, your argument actually needs evidence to sort out which one of the possible plenitudes it is.
You say that your theory is immune because on your theory the multiverse evolved exactly as you suggested. But, Ward, you need evidence that it did, and that evidence has to be consistent with our observations. It makes no sense that we are a backup sim for super-intelligences. It makes no sense that they’d need such a thing, it makes no sense that they’d do so through a simulation rather than actually creating a new universe. If we’re God’s organs, why do we die?! Presumably we’d be just as eternal as God, who really should be immune to cellular decay and replacement! And I think even you know on some level that your theory’s naive predictions are not anything like what we’d see. That’s why it’s gerrymandered to hell. I could grant that if your particular multiverse model held that you’d be right and still a rgue that your particular multiverse model is only a probability, only one possible development even from your starting conditions, and you’re still hosed. And the fact that I did all the work I could to address your argument even a priori and you decided to just focus on the evidence bit tells me all I need to know: This is not serious.
So you say, ” This objection fails: probably the world is a lot more benevolent than what you think it is. You are just simulated to believe it is not benevolent, so you would type the words you type”. Let’s put aside that this means that we can’t possibly be doing any independent processing for the Gods we are the organs of, because they have simulated our responses, which obliterates virtually any point (what is the point of us again on your theory, Ward? not just with bald assertions but with a clear model?). This is special pleading, even given it contradicting your theory. It’s making an excuse for the fact that the evidence doesn’t match our expectations on your theory, while also fucking gaslighting us. Ward, I know what benevolence is. Either your woobie is threatened or your mind or your emotional intelligence have been fucked up by something (theism or something else) to be willing to accept the observable facts of the universe as something that anyone would tolerate from maximally beneficent super-minds.
But even with all that aside, you said it yourself. “Probably”. So, maybe it isn’t. So even by your own admission, you need evidence. Because you have to show that “probably” holds in this case. We’re calling your bluff, Ward. You can say you probably have a royal flush all you want, but I need to see your goddamn hand.
You then say, “And you have to type what you type, because conversations like ours do have an impact on the reproduction plan of our big bang universe.”. Prove it. Prove how that makes any sense. Prove that a vastly powerful antecedent sim civilization has any need to sim a Big Bang universe, then prove that such a vastly powerful civilization actually doesn’t want us to arrive at conclusions relatively freely but wants us to puppet views they could clearly already arrive at and what utility that would give them. Bald assertions do not cut it.
You then say, “Indeed, the outcome of our debate has consequences on the question whether alien civilizations can be trusted, how afterlife worlds would best be organized, and whether we should actively try to create new big bangs”. Not to the mega-beings, Ward. Unless you are going to just assume, again without a shred of evidence, that the mega-beings who rigged our universe just happen to want us to decide for ourselves (at the end not the beginning, in a blatant internal contradiction), how to trust and make afterlives and such. Rather than bringing us into their civilization, or guiding us at all, or absorbing us, or any number of other logically possible outcomes. I’ll put aside that a random debate on a corner of the Internet can’t possibly be above statistical noise to such people. But I won’t grant that they actually benefit maximally from us having blind debates without even having the basic information we need to even start to arrive at conclusions. Prove that logically and then there’s at least a start here. Until then, this is just yet another excuse that your theory doesn’t match observations.
You make a comparison to biological cells. But this comparison is fraught. Even our finite intelligences make us affect our cells literally every day, Ward. We choose food, medicine, cleaning products, exercise, beverages, supplements, and countless other products and behaviors in order to try to maximize cell health when we are aware of it. We balance our gut biota, we groom ourselves to get rid of dead cells, we care about free radicals and try to use anti-oxidants, etc. The evidence doesn’t line up for cells unless you are going to say that some invisible element does all of the work which then reduces your prior probability. And it makes no logical sense. If we could engineer our own cells with no risk of changing the germline, we would. Why would no other civilization do so?
And “real consciousness?” Ward, unless you’re saying that they’re p-zombies, in which case put up or shut up, if they even have animal-level intelligence and sensation that’s still fucking evil that they hurt. Oh, and if they’re not real consciousnesses, then what the hell are they doing in a sim?! Are they just not good enough to be God’s cells? Then why do they look visibly like us so that we form artificial attachments to them? MMORPGs identify their NPCs, Ward. Why don’t your creators ever do anything clearly when they have precisely zero inability to do so?
Come on, man.. For so long you were proposing something that avoided the sheer moral traps of classic theism. Now you fall right back into them at the finish line. You yourself say that it’s unpalatable, while ignoring the fact that now you have to prove that every other civilization in the multiiverse will have your moral cowardice. Good luck with that! Hope to see some evidence that it’s true, because it doesn’t follow logically and even you know it.
Correction: ” Gray goo scenarios, for example, aren’t just logically imaginable, they are taken very seriously”. Ditto Roko’s basilisks, ditto other civilizational traps.
Exactly. A good theory is provable from axioms and a priori principles. Not from a posteriori evidence that is not understood why it is the case. Moreover, the evidence shows that we do indeed live in a universe that is roughly minimally fine-tuned for intelligent life. So nice to see that the evidence also backs my theory.
There is no such thing as a theory about reality that “is provable from axioms and a priori principles.” Only analytical, not empirical truths can be proved that way. That you don’t know the difference is why you are too incompetent to be doing this.
By “a good theory is provable from axioms and a priori principles”, what you mean is “not internally inconsistent”, which still does not fucking apply to your theory so who cares about this blatant excuse?
Like, yeah, man, you can definitely construct a closed, open or flat model of the universe based on different geometries regarding parallel lines. Which one are you specifically in, though? You can’t determine which one is the best theory for the actual question you are asking without checking. Because all three are logically possible. I know some part of you knows this. I know that you know that I can construct infinitely logically valid syllogisms that prove God doesn’t exist, that unicorns do, or that you are actually a figment of our imaginations.
So, yeah, a very good theory goes beyond looking at the data and provides reasons for it, usually with an internally-consistent model. That’s not the only criteria (you still care about parsimony, not having the model being over-tuned, etc. etc.), but sure. But it can’t contradict the evidence. You yourself clearly allude to this. If you really believed that evidence was irrelevant, Ward, you wouldn’t have said that it’s good for your theory that evidence was in tune with it, because evidence doesn’t matter. So… pick a lane, dude.
Newtonian mechanics were internally consistent. They were wrong. Evolution could have been Lamarckian. It just wasn’t. Apparently you don’t believe in the distinction between contingent and necessary truths!
But, no, Ward, the evidence contradicts your theory. Your theory does not just produce a minimally finely-tuned universe. All multiverse theories do that. Plenitude or not, you’ll get boring science-nerd universes like ours just as much as you’ll get rad universes with thunder gods and pegasi and Infinite Improbability Drives. But your theory, as you yourself have stated, predicts non-trivial elements of how humans function and how the multiverse works that are contradicted by what we see.
Moreover, the way that our universe is finely-tuned counts. I don’t actually think you can say that the universe as we know it is minimally finely-tuned. Some important, weird finetunings are off by really huge margins from reasonable ranges. That’s sort of the whole point of the finetuning debate. The problem with the apologists’ argument isn’t that the universe isn’t finely-tuned in ways that go beyond the minimal, the problem is that their explanation for why sucks. Your theory has the exact same problem. You still need to answer why this universe we live in has these weird parameters. “It’s a sim” just changes the nature of the explanation. And “It’s a sim to make us organs in the mind of gods” is stupid because that doesn’t match what we see.
Construct a list of all the accepted data points as premises and then add your premises of your theory in, Ward. See if you don’t generate a contradiction. I guarantee you that you do. So you’re wrong.
Fred, empirical evidence is severely limited. In particular, you cannot use it to find out whether the observable realm is surrounded with nothingness or with everythingness. Only logical reasoning can answer that question, which results in a priori principles. If the observable realm is surrounded with nothingness, then this observable realm cannot be explained: it cannot be answered why it is the case, rather than something else. Moreover, abstract entities (such as numbers, sets, strings of symbols, and computer programs) exist, and they contain information. You cannot ‘undo’ this information. So reality is explained by abstract entities. Therefore, every logical possibility is a physical fact. There is nothing internally inconsistent with that theory.
I don’t think you have understood my theory, if you say ‘It’s a sim to make us organs in the mind of gods,’ or if you think I might choose for an open or a flat universe model. In an evolutionary multiverse (a multiverse in which cosmological natural selection applies), universes will not live much longer than what is required to display complexity (life, intelligence). Extrapolating far beyond that time-frame is just a meaningless mathematical extrapolation, just like the existence of singularities. All these things follow from a lack of empirical evidence. Imagine the whole observable universe would be a growing embryo that is observed three weeks after conception. Mathematicians (or physicists) would then claim that the embryo originated from a singularity and that it would grow exponentially for all of eternity. This is meaningless extrapolation. Universes are biological organisms that do not live forever. And, yes, this follows from a priori principles, because I believe that (cosmological) natural selection is known a priori. We can reason logically that Lamarckian evolution does not make sense. No empirical evidence required for that.
So what is the internal inconsistency in my theory?
Ward, you just made a bunch of assertions as premises none of which are known to be true. All of which therefore can only be probable with evidence; and there is none.
Your conclusion also does not logically follow from those premises, but that is a separate problem. That your argument is illogical is only the first thing wrong with it. That it is also based on improbable premises lacking any evidentiary support and even contradicting what evidence there is, is just another thing wrong with it.
That you still don’t get this after having both facts shown to you repeatedly is how we know you are a lunatic. You are insane. Mentally ill. Incapable of competent thought. And that can only be treated medically. We can’t help you here.
Dude, the fact that something is limited doesn’t mean that you can just make shit up. There’s tons of theories about math we could answer if we infinite computation and could brute force (like if we could list literally every prime). That doesn’t give us license to just flip a coin about the theories on the table. When you don’t know, you don’t know.
Like Richard, I’ve been keeping an eye on the character flaws that tend to produce crank behavior, especially in otherwise smart, well-adjusted people. This is one of them. Ambiguity intolerance. It apparently causes you extreme duress to just admit “I don’t know”. You have a theory that you like. The honest thing to do would be to admit that, at present, you can’t know if it’s true. Instead, you try to gerrymander it so it’s just true by definition. That’s not a rational thing to do. But it is apparently necessary for you personally.
So, yes, some questions may be beyond empirical confirmation. That doesn’t make them subject to a priori principles, Ward. “What’s outside the observable realm? It could be nothing, or it could be lots of things”. Let’s put aside what kind of nothing we mean and whether that nothing is possible and say it could be any of those things. Which is it, Ward? They’re both logically possible. You keep saying you can use a priori principles to prove things, I keep pointing to logically internally consistent alternatives that you cannot exclude without evidence, you keep coming back to this well.
That’s why I made the card analogy. You can tell me it’s logically possible from a priori principles that you have a royal flush all day, Ward. But it’s also logically possible from a priori principles that you have an eight high. And I’m calling your bluff. Show me your cards. What’s hilarious is that you think it’s easier, rather than harder, to literally count all the remaining cards in the deck and have me show you my hand and then “prove” you have to have a royal flush (even though you could have had a ace up your pocket) by process of elimination than just to show me the hand.
So, yeah, abstract symbols “exist”, Ward. That’s a posteriori evidence: You know that because you’ve encountered them. Does that mean they exist everywhere? I don’t know, Ward, and neither do you. It is an obvious fallacy that, if X exists in point A, it must also exist at point B. The number 3 is found on the number line and yet it only exists once: There is only one number three. From what we can see, the only things in the universe that contain abstractions are physical objects capable of operating on them. That’s the evidence. It’s surely not empirically verified that they are everywhere, and even if that was the case, that would be an empirical verification and so a posteriori, not a priori. This is really actually very simple. So you can conclude nothing from their presence. Only that they can exist somewhere, not that they do.
Everything else is just a string of non sequiturs. It’s almost gibberish, Ward. Abstract entities exist therefore they explain reality? But… non-abstract entities exist that the abstract entities refer to. That’s one of those logical contradictions, Ward. If anything, the evidence indicates that abstract entities came after physical ones and were used to engage with them first. We learned how to count so we could trade apples and goats, and only after a long time did we discover more things. Just like how we discovered airplanes and refrigerators. No one sensible thinks that airplanes and refrigerators are therefore woven into nature somehow.
And then you say that because abstract entities can refer to everything, all the things they could refer to have to exist. Well, Ward, then they have to exist here too. You can’t just claim they exist somewhere. I can count unicorns just as well here as Unicorn Planet. So your claim is logically and empirically false. It is literally instantaneously verifiably false.
Your a priori principles are bullshit. They’re not true. And they don’t have to be true. So nothing follows from them.
As for flat and open universe model: You’re the one not understanding, Ward, and in an incredibly revealing way. My point was that there are three mathematically distinct, logically possible universe models, and one has to use evidence to determine which one is true. You can’t reason from the armchair to do it. It was an analogy to try to get you to stop using this bullshit armchair approach. You interpreted that the opposite way, somehow.
And, yes, I must admit I likely don’t fully understand your theory, Ward. That’s because you suck at communicating it. I’ve been raising objections precisely to try to get you to specify to a minimum level of comprehensibility. But you yourself made the cells in God analogy, Ward. “Likewise, humans are just organs of bodies with four (non-compactified) spatial dimensions. But these 4D bodies have to simulate to cogency of our empirical sciences (including their own non-observability), because these are the sort of things we require to do what we are expected to do. And in this 4D world, the density of intelligent matter is already greater than in our 3D world. And so it goes on until we live in a reality with an absolutely infinite number of spatial dimensions, full of dense brain matter”. So are you admitting now that these mega-entity “Gods” have bodies? Because if they’re purely mental, Ward, then we are cells in God’s non-physical brain, despite us being physical. Yet another internal contradiction. If not, then what the hell are you talking about?
You then say that in an evolutionary multiverse that universes won’t live for a long time. Then you don’t have a fucking plenitude, Ward. Because a plenitude would include eternal individual universes. It would at least include long-lived ones. Yet another internal contradiction. Your two-steps are aggravating and I am increasingly thinking that you are doing them deliberately. If we stipulate that all abstract entities are possible, then you don’t have a purely evolutionary multiverse. You just don’t. Even putting aside objections I keep raising, like the Roko’s basilisk/mega-invasion/bomb universe/etc. objections, to no answer, this plenitude cannot have a selection criterion if only because we can specify universes abstractly that cannot be selected. I can imagine a non-evolutionary multiverse, Ward, and so a non-evolutionary multiverse must exist. Yet another internal contradiction. This is why a priori reasoning is garbage. It can only tell you how to sort information you have. You can offer mutually contradictory arguments from a priori principles, as long as you change your axioms and assumptions.
As for the internal contradictions: I’ve mentioned tons of them, Ward, even before this response. I get it, you don’t necessarily have unlimited time, but I keep pointing out things like how a plenitude with no barriers between dimensions logically suggests one unconquerable Roko’s basilisk, one unconquerable Borg or Zerg-type assimilation, etc. In fact, a literal plenitude is as logically impossible as naive omnipotence and for the same reason: Unrestricted comprehension. I can specify a dimension that includes all possible dimensions but one and your plenitude both must and cannot contain it. Even assuming that you somehow have a plenitude that makes sense given all that, and still gets to your theory, and you have to prove that, the objections still apply.
I can keep going, but there’s no point. I appreciate you trying to talk to me earlier, but you’ve stopped now. You are talking past me.
In my opinion, it are the mentally sane ones who are incapable of competent thought. The true theory is mentally and emotionally too challenging: 1) an eternal life, 2) becoming God, 3) being simulated, 4) being a solipsistic, elected consciousness among maximally infinitely many others, etc. As a result, the vast majority of people just stick to a mental plan that is the result of Darwinian evolution, not logical truth. You are one of them, Richard. Misled, with the only benefit of staying mentally sane, as required by evolution. Why exactly do you believe that your evolutionary ideas have any value?
That’s literally what lunatics say, Ward. You are confirming everything I’m saying here. Your reasoning is illogical and replaces emotional desires with facts, and pretends no evidence is required for anything. And then you insist that is the correct way to reason. That is insanity by definition.
Yep, Ward, that’s what nutters say. Sure, some smart people were dismissed as insane. Some of them actually were. Other people just thought they were smart. We can only tell by assessing ideas. At present, all I can do is listen to what you’re saying, Ward, and it’s nonsense. You have no duty to communicate it in more detail to me so i can understand what you are and aren’t saying. But I have a duty of intellectual honesty to reject what I’ve heard so far. That’s all we can do given that we are, despite your protestations, all capable of being wrong.
The “true theory” isn’t mentally and emotionally challenging, Ward. I’ve been finding it interesting to engage with. I also know it could be false. I want to see how one could figure out if it was. Or, alternatively, a strong argument that holds that proves that it must be true by logic. You have failed at both by not even trying. But now you have the gall to act as if your theory is not only worth considering and could be true, like mathematicians with strong work that is moving toward a good proof sometimes do. Nope, you act as if it’s true, despite it being crank nonsense that contradicts even all the other religious crank nonsense. Yet another personality flaw: Massive, unremitting arrogance. You come off polite, Ward, but if you really think you know “THE TRUTH”, you are just as bad as every failed Rapture doomsayer. You can be wrong, Ward. You can fuck up a math problem even though the correct answer is true by definition. You can fail to see how an assumption that you have, some axiom, doesn’t hold. Again, mathematicians do not have your arrogance. Richard often calls people like you pre-Aristotelian, and it holds. You don’t have the intellectual humility we’ve learned as a species among the people who take the work seriously. Please try to fix that.
And “the vast majority of people” stick to Darwinian evolution? What about the huge swaths of creationists or people who aren’t adequately informed? Whenever you make claims about testable reality, you’re wrong. It’s almost like having contempt about the truth means you suck at finding it out.
It’s okay to be wrong, Ward. It’s okay to be fallible. Even in your theory, the gods had to start that way before they got better. The universe had to evolve. You can too, buddy.
Until then, you’re just a lolcow.
Richard, have you ever considered writing very long responses to the arguments that Bentham’s Bulldog from Substack makes in favor of God’s existence?
I’ve never even heard of that.
There are millions of people making long arguments online for things. Why should we spend any time on this specific one? Does this author have some special credentials that makes them not just another rando? Are they using novel arguments that haven’t already been debunked everywhere already? Etc.
There needs to be a reason; ideally and at minimum either or both of those. So you’d have to build out your case here for why I should bother.
Alternatively you can hire me to do it. If that is your interest, please contact me and I’ll quote you a rate.