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WrongBot comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong
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No other rational [ETA: I meant physical and I am dumb] process is known to rely on physical constants to the degree you propose. What you propose is not impossible, but it is highly improbable.
What?!? What makes you think that?
Sensitive dependence on initial conditions is an extremely well-known phenomenon. If you change the laws of physics a little bit, the result of a typical game of billiards will be different. This kind of phenomenon is ubiquitous in nature, from the orbit of planets, to the paths rivers take.
If a butterfly's wing flap can cause a tornado, I figure a small physical constant jog could easily make the difference between intelligent life emerging, and it not doing so billions of years later.
Sensitive dependence on initial conditions is literally everywhere. Check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
Did you miss this bit:
Sensitivity to initial conditions is one thing. Sensitivity to 1 billion SF in a couple of decades?
The universe took about 14 billion years to get this far - and if you look into the math of chaos theory, the changes propagate up very rapidly. There is an ever-expanding avalanche of changes - like an atomic explosion.
For the 750mb-or-so of data under discussion, you could easily see the changes at a macroscopic scale rapidly. Atoms in stars bang into each other pretty quickly. I haven't attempted to calculate it - but probably within a few minutes, I figure.
Would you actually go as far as maintaining that, if a change were to happen tomorrow to the 1,000th decimal place of a physical constant, it would be likely to stop brains from working, or are you just saying that a similar change to a physical constant, if it happened in the past, would have been likely to stop the sequence of events which has caused brains to come into existence?
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By the way, I'm reading your part 15, section 2 now.
Option 2. Existing brains might be OK - but I think newly-constructed ones would have to not work properly when they matured. So, option 2 would not be enough on its own.
First, that is VERY different than the design information being in the constant, but not in the genome. (you could more validly say that the genome is what it is because the constant is precisely what it is.)
Second, the billiard ball example is invalid. It doesn't matter exactly where the billiard balls are if you're getting hustled. Neurons are not typically sensitive to the precise positions of their atoms. Information processing relies on the ability to largely overlook noise.
What physical process would cease to function if you increased c by a billionth of a percent? Or one of the other Planck units? Processes involved in the functioning of both neurons and transistors don't count, because then there's no difference to account for.
Nitpick: c is a dimensioned quantity, so changes in it aren't necessarily meaningful.
*Blink.*
*Reads Wikipedia.*
Would I be correct in thinking that one would need to modify the relationship of c to some other constant (the physics equation that represent some physical law?) for the change to be meaningful? I may be failing to understand the idea of dimension.
Thank you for the excuse to learn more math, by the way.
Yes, you would be correct, at least in terms of our current knowledge.
In fact, it's not that unusual to choose units so that you can set c = 1 (ie, to make it unitless). This way units of time and units of distance are the same kind, velocities are dimensionless geometric quantities, etc...
You might want to think of "c" not so much as a speed as a conversion factor between distance type units and time type units.
That isn't really the idea. It would have to interfere with the development of a baby enough for its brain not to work out properly as an adult, though - I figure.