Skip to main content

infinite number of possible world's and the undermining of rationality

Bill Dembski has a witty argument that, if you posit an infinite number worlds exist, all talk about probability breaks down. I may not have his argument just right, but here goes. In one possible universe, Rubenstein sits down an hits keys randomly on the piano, but beautiful music comes out. How do you know that you are not in that universe? Etc.

He seems to be onto something. But what would he say about the possibility that we live in an infinitely old and oscillating universe? With an infinite number of future possible universe scenarios, wouldn't the same thing happen as he described with an infinite number of universes? So if he were confronted with this question would he be forced to argue as well that we live in a finitely aged universe? If he said "no," would this response weaken the point he made with the Arthur Rubinstein example? (mentioned in earlier post)

Comments

Unknown said…
Would this be consonant with what you wrote: anthropic principle understandings of cosmic history (involving a multiverse) are an attempt to make the capital-U Universe completely Copernican. But hasn't the existence of a special point in *time* (namely, the big bang) already violated this?
Leo White said…
Looking at Dembski's argument much later on, it seems trivial: one could posit a similar question without mentioning either a multiverse or infinitely aged universe. The question is basically, "How do you know that your knowledge of the laws of nature is so incomplete that something seemingly random may occur in the next moment? Problem of induction.

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 ...

Daniel Dennett, disqualifying qualia, softening up the hard problem, fullness of vacuity, dysfunctional functionalism

Around track 2 of disc 9 of Intuition Pumps , Dennett offers what I would call an argument from vacuity.  He argues that David Chalmers unwittingly plays a magic trick on himself and others by placing a set of issues under the one umbrella called the "hard problem of consciousness." None of these issues is really , in Dennett's opinion, a hard problem.  But in naming them thus, Chalmers (says Dennett) is like a magician who seems to be playing the same card trick over and over again, but is really playing several different ones.  In this analogy, expert magicians watch what they think is the same trick played over and over again.  They find it unusually difficult to determine which trick he is playing because they take these performances as iterations of the same trick when each is  in fact different from the one that came before.  Furthermore, each of the tricks that he plays is actually an easy one, so it is precisely because they are looki...

naturalism (or rather, anti-supernaturalism) and preternaturalism

I will use the term "preternaturalism" to designate a willingness to posit causes that are less than divine but which stand above and beyond those observable ones we see operating within the laws of nature. A naturalist might oppose theistic arguments from miracles or design by arguing for the possibility of preternatural causes.  Such an argument, however, would bring us back to Zeus and Hera, tree nymphs and  the like: a supernatural explanation would, by contrast, be more conducive toward a scientific approach to nature (i.e., positing only laws that are falsifiable when doing science).