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Will_Newsome comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong
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Comments (533)
Isn't it interesting how there's so much raw material that the interesting things can use to make more interesting things?
Really? Your explanation for why there's lots of stuff is that an incredibly powerful benevolent agent made it that way? What does that explanation buy you over just saying that there's lots of stuff?
Again, some of it. The vast vast majority of raw material in the universe is not used, and has never been used, for making interesting things.
Why are you ignoring the future?
Back when I used to hang around over at talk.origins, one of the scientist/atheists there seemed to think that the sheer size of the universe was the best argument against the theist idea of a universe created for man. He thought it absurd that a dramatic production starring H. sapiens would have such a large budget for stage decoration and backdrops when it begins with such a small budget for costumes - at least in the first act.
Your apparent argument is that a big universe is evidence that Someone has big plans for us. The outstanding merit of your suggestion, to my mind, is that his argument and your anti-argument, if brought into contact, will mutually annihilate leaving nothing but a puff of smoke.
Are you proposing that in the future we will necessarily end up using some large proportion of the universe's material for making interesting things? I mean, I agree that that's possible, but it hardly seems inevitable.
I think that is more-or-less the idea, yes - though you can drop the "necessarily ".
Don't judge the play by the first few seconds.
The reason I put in "necessarily" is because it seems like Will Newsome's anthropic argument requires that the universe was designed specifically for interesting stuff to happen. If it's not close to inevitable, why didn't the designer do a better job?
Maybe there's no designer. Will doesn't say he's 100% certain - just that he thinks interestingness is "Bayesian evidence" for a designer.
I think this is a fairly common sentiment - e.g. see Hanson.
Necessarily? Er... no. But I find the arguments for a decent chance of a technological singularity to be pretty persuasive. This isn't much evidence in favor of us being primarily computed by other mind-like processes (as opposed to getting most of our reality fluid from some intuitively simpler more physics-like computation in the universal prior specification), but it's something. Especially so if a speed prior is a more realistic approximation of optimal induction over really large hypothesis spaces than a universal prior is, which I hope is true since I think it'd be annoying to have to get our decision theories to be able to reason about hypercomputation...