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ciphergoth comments on The Sin of Underconfidence - Less Wrong
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He has piles of pet arguments, that's part of his technique; he fires off so many arguments that you can't answer them all. I've watched him and put a lot of thought into how I'd answer him, and I'm still not sure how I can fit the problems with his arguments into the time available in a debate, but I'd start with asking either him or the audience to pick which of his arguments I was going to counter in my reply.
In particular, I still don't have a counter to the fine-tuning argument which is short, assumes no foreknowledge, and is entirely intellectually honest.
Could you point me to the counter argument you rot-13? Google isn't finding it for me. Thanks!
The "fine-tuning" argument falls into the script:
If you accept that script you lose the debate, because there will always be some odd fact that can't currently be explained. (And even if it can actually be explained, you won't have time to explain it within the limits of the debate and the audience's knowledge.)
The trap is that it is a very temping mistake to try and solve the puzzle yourself. It's highly unlikely that you will succeed, and your opponent will already know the flaws (and counter-arguments) to most of the existing solution attempts, so can throw those at you. Or if you support a fringe theory (which isn't generally considered in the solution space, but might work), the opponent can portray you as a marginal loon.
I suspect that the theist wins these debates because most opponents fall into that trap. They are smart enough that they think that they can resolve the puzzle in question, and so walk right into it. By debating domain experts, the theist positively invites them into the trap.
How I might respond. "I can't currently explain the values of physical constants, and as far as I'm aware no-one else can either. If you think you have an explanation, you can do the scientific community a great service. Just formulate your 'God' theory as a set of equations from which we can derive those values, including some values or degrees of precision that we don't currently know. Propose experiments by which we can test that theory. Submit to a leading physics journal, and get physicists to perform the experiments. When you've done that, you can claim evidence for your theory, and I will be more inclined to support it. You can't do it though, can you?"
The anthropic principle does technically work, but it admittedly feels like a cheat and I'd expect most audiences not familiar with it already would consider it such.
It's not a knock-down counterargument, but it seems to me we don't know enough about physics to say it's actually possible that the universe could be fine-tuned differently. Sure, we can look at a lot of fundamental constants and say, "If that one were different by 1 unit, fusion wouldn't occur," but we don't know if they are interconnected, and I don't think we can accurate model what would occur, so it's possible that it couldn't be different, that other constants would vary with it, and/or that it would make a universe so entirely different from our own that we have no idea what it would be like, so it's quite possible it could support life of some form.
Or, reduced into something more succinct, we don't actually know what the universe would look like if we changed fundamental constants (if this is even possible) because the results are beyond our ability to model, so it's quite possible that most possible configurations would support some form of life.
Multiverse works too, but again feels like cheating. I also admit there may be facts that undermine this, I'm not super-familiar with the necessary physics.
If there is no multiverse, "Why is the universe the way it is rather than any other way?" is a perfectly good question to which we haven't found the answer yet. However, theists don't merely ask that question, they use our ignorance as an argument for the existence of a deity. They think a creator is the best explanation for fine-tuning. The obvious counter-argument is that not only is a creator not the best explanation, it's not an explanation at all. We can ask the exact same question about the creator that we asked about the universe: Why is the creator what it is rather than something else? Why isn't 'He' something that couldn't be called a 'creator' at all, like a quark, or a squirrel? Or, to put the whole thing in the right perspective, why is the greater universe formed by the combination of our universe and its creator the way it is, rather than any other way?
At this point the theist usually says that God is necessary, or outside of time, which could just as easily be true of the universe as we know it. Or the theist might say that God is eternal, while our universe probably isn't, which is irrelevant. None of these alleged characteristics of God's explain why He's fine-tuned, anyway.
I haven't read this particular version of the fine-tuning argument, but the general counter-argument is that evolution fine-tuned life (humans) for the universe, not that the universe was fine-tuned for humans.
Unfortunately, that doesn't work. Without the fine tuning, the Universe consists of undifferentiated mush, and evolution is impossible.
That isn't any version of the fine tuning argument I've heard. And it just sounds plain stupid. Who makes this particular argument, and more importantly how do they justify it? It sounds like some wild claim that is just too irrational to refute.
To me it sounds commonplace. What is the problem you see?
I don't think this is good enough. There seem to be several physical constants that - if they had been slightly different - would have made any sort of life unlikely.
That part can be deproblematized (if you will forgive the nonce word) by the anthropic principle: if the universe were unsuited for life, there would be no life to notice that and remark upon it.
True. But since a universe unsuitable for life seems overwhelmingly the more probable situation, we can still ask why it isn't so.
(My own feeling is that the problem has to be resolved by either "God" or "a multiverse". The idea that there's precisely one universe and it just happens to have the conditions for life seems extraordinary.)
My understanding (I'd have to dig out references) is that the fine tuning may not be as fine as generally believed. Ah, the wikipedia page on the argument has some references on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_Universe#Disputes_on_the_existence_of_fine-tuning
In addition to the anthropic type arguments, some theoretical work seems to suggest that the fine tuning isn't. ie, that we don't even need to invoke anthropic reasoning too strongly. Heck, supposedly one can even have stars in a universe with no weak interaction at all.
So it may very well be that, even without appealing to anthropic style reasoning in multiverses (which I'm not actually opposed to, but there's stuff there that I still don't understand. Born stats, apparent breakdown of the Aumann Agreement Theorem, etc... so too easy to get stuff wrong) anyways, even without that, it may well be that the fine tuning stuff can be refuted by simply pointing out "looking at the actual physics, the tuning is rather less fine than claimed."
I agree, but the anthropic principle has always seemed like a bit of cheat -- an explanation that really isn't much of an explanation at all.
I don't accept that form of the anthropic principle. I am on a planet, even though planets make up only a tiny portion of the universe, because there's (almost) nobody not on a planet to remark on it. The anthropic principle says that you will be where a person is. However, it can't change the universe. The laws of physics aren't going to rewrite themselves just because there was nobody there to see them.
That being said, if you combine this with multiple universes, it works. The multiverse is obviously suitable for life somewhere. We are going to end up in one of those places.
Even in the case of a single infinite universe, the anthropic principle does help - it means that any arbitrarily low success rate for forming life is equally acceptable, so long as it is not identically zero.
In that case, it would look like the universal constants don't support life at all, but you somehow managed to get lucky and survive anyway, rather than the universal constants appearing to be fine-tuned.
If the "universal constants" are different in different areas, then it would basically be a multiverse.
As i understand it, it's possible to pick out even better constants than what we have. For instance, having a fine structure constant between 6 and 7 would cause all atoms with at least 6 protons to be chemically identical to carbon due to 'atomic collapse'. That would probably help life along noticeably.
As things stand, we're pretty marginal. There's a whole lot of not-life out there.
It would probably also completely screw up the triple-alpha process, so that much less carbon will be produced in stars -- assuming stars would be possible in that situation in the first place.
Would that help really? Most life requires all of CHNOPS. And pretty much all complex life requires at least a few heavier elements, especially iron, copper, silicon, selenium, chlorine, magnesium, zinc, and iodine. Life won't do much if one can't get any elements heavier than carbon.
It obviously wouldn't be life exactly as we know it, no! I'm pretty confident that if you replaced all the elements heavier than carbon with carbon, some form of life would be able to emerge. Carbon is where the complexity comes from - everything else is optimization.
Seriously, that's the most blatant case of the failure of imagination fallacy I've seen since I stopped cruising creationist discussion boards.
As I understand it, the vast majority of constants are worse than what we have now. You might be able to find something better, but if this was just chance, we're very lucky as it is. Since you're not usually that lucky, it probably wasn't chance.
Exactly. The parameters we have define this universe. Any complex system -- presumably most if not all universes -- would have complex patterns. You would just need patterns to evolve that are self-promoting (i.e., accumulative) and evolving, and eventually a sub-pattern will evolve that significantly meta-references. Given that replicating forms can result from simple automata rules and self-referencing appears randomly (in a formal sense) all over the place in a random string (Godel) it doesn't seem so improbable for such a pattern to emerge. In fact, an interesting question is why is there only one "life" that we know of (i.e., carbon-based)? Once we understand the mechanism of consciousness, we may find that it duplicates elsewhere -- perhaps not in patterns that are accumulative and evolving but briefly, spontaneously. This is totally idle speculation of course.
Another argument: There's nothing in Physics that says there isn't a mechanism for how the parameters are chosen. It's just another mystery that hasn't been solved yet -- so far, to date, God has reliably delegated answers regarding questions about the empirical world to Science.
Yes, that's something I've often thought too. (Not only about this particular theist; the practice of throwing up more not-very-good arguments than can be refuted in the time available seems to be commonplace in debates about religious topics. Quite possibly in all debates, but I haven't watched a broad enough sample to know.)