Skip to main content

with an infinite number of worlds, everything is possible

This point is by Bill Dembski: it's possible that Rubenstein knows nothing about piano yet hits keys randomly right before perfect music plays. His point is to show that if an infininte number of universes get rid of the anthropic principle, it gets rid of a whole lot of other stuff besides (including, I would add, science).
Labels:

Comments

Unknown said…
Polkinghorne (sp?) says that even with infinite multiverses, representing different variations of the laws of physics, there would still be some law beneath them that would have to be "just right" for the whole thing to *be* at all.

I suppose if the infinite variations truly represented every logical possibility, then there would be no true underlying physical laws. (As far as I'm aware, though, this isn't what multiverse proposers say.) In that case, there truly would be no "laws" to speak of! Is that what you mean by - there would be no science?
11:27 AM
Leo White said…
I kinda agree with Polkinghorne in the following way: to be able to say why two universes are not the same, you have to say that they are not the same X, where X is something applicable to both. Taking my point of departure from how we talk and know, I would presumptuously infer that following applies to any two universes: that each difference they have is a difference in X, where X is something generic to the two.

Uh, thinking about what I just said, I am not so sure that the word "bloviation" doesn't apply, but in any case, it's my story and I'm stickin' to it.

Regarding infinite variations, I like what Dembski says. He is having fun with logical possibilities, which include a lot of things that, if taken seriously, would seem absurd to us. His real point seems to me to be that if an infinite variety of universes includes these logical possibilities, then how do you know that you don't live in one of them right now? And to the degree that you are unable to give an answer to that question, science no longer seems to look that much like knowledge and more like wishful thinking, i.e., science looks rather unscientific.
9:21 PM
Leo White said…
Looking at this argument again, it seems to me that Dembski may be engaging in an appeal to ignorance: "How do you know it isn't so--that hitting the keys and the sounding of music merely coincide rather than being causally related?" But he seems to commit that fallacy only if you take his argument more seriously than he probably intended (then again, if there is an infinite number of universes, we may be in the one where he is arguing in a straightforward manner).

In any case, the claim that there is an infinite variety of universes isn't the same as the claim that every logically possible universe exists. If the latter is the case, then the former is too; but not vice versa.
8:39 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

P F Strawson's Freedom and Resentment: the argument laid out

Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson.  He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal.  My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this.  I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one. In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true.  Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist.  In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument ...
Post a Comment
Read more

response to friend who suggested that the self is a democracy of neural parts

This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level.  No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies.  None of them thinks about the whole as such.  And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist).  None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well?  And why not parts of these parts, et...
6 comments
Read more

interesting article by Jimmy Akin on death before the Fall

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/jimmy-akin/did-animals-die-before-the-fall/ Akin below: Aquinas.... writes: In the opinion of some, those animals which now are fierce and kill others, would, in that state, have been tame, not only in regard to man, but also in regard to other animals. But this is quite unreasonable. For the nature of animals was not changed by man's sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon. Nor does Bede's gloss on Genesis 1:30, say that trees and herbs were given as food to all animals and birds, but to some. Thus there would have been a natural antipathy between some animals  [ Summa Theologiae I:96:1 ad 2 ].  Aquinas thus holds that it was not  all  death that entered the world through man's sin, but human  death.
Post a Comment
Read more