To follow on from my previous post, Philip Goff has now released a preview of an academic paper in progress on this topic. Currently titled "Is the Fine-Tuning Evidence for a
Multiverse?", this paper is a defence of the very same Roger White paper I had been critiquing, and the main argument it tackles relates to some points I made.
I thought I should give my take, but before I do I'll note that I'm not sure if the paper preview link may become stale at some future date or if the paper may be revised in ways that make my comments obsolete. In any case, if you're interested, you should read the paper and my previous post if you haven't already.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the problem of fine-tuning and how it may or may not be resolved by appeal to a multiverse. This has been prompted by recent correspondence with the philosopher Philip Goff and by the book I am currently reading, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. I hope to get around to discussing Deutsch's ideas in future, but for now I'm focusing on an argument put forth by Roger White and endorsed by Goff.
The fine-tuning problem is just that the laws of physics describing the universe seem to be fine-tuned so as to allow life to exist. While trying not to be too parochial in our assumptions about what life requires to exist, at least in a universe even vaguely like ours, it seems reasonable to assume that it must at least have time and a stable environment in which to evolve, access to sources of energy and a varied assortment of building blocks from which to assemble itself.
But if the physical constants were slightly different, then perhaps stars, heavier elements or atoms could not have formed. Perhaps the universe would never have expanded from its initial hot, dense state, or would have recollapsed too quickly, or perhaps it would have expanded too quickly for particles to come together at all. When we say the universe appears to be fine-tuned, we are claiming that it appears to be delicately balanced so as to allow complex evolving self-replicators (i.e. life) to exist -- that almost any tweak we imagine to the constants or the laws of physics would result in a simpler, lifeless universe. This curious observation seems to demand an explanation.
In a previous post, I have posed a question which seems to admit of two contradictory explanations. Go read that post before this one or this post won't make a whole lot of sense!
I wanted to call this post 'The Lottery Paradox', but it turns out that title is already taken by a very similar idea. The version I'm going to discuss is a bit more extreme and has a different focus.
It is inspired by some thoughts I've been having related to the validity of the Anthropic Principle (the subject of my last post), inspired by the comments left by Callum J Hackett on that post.
Suppose the nation of Foobar has a national lottery, but the way it works is that every single day, one of the citizens is chosen at random to win a big prize.
Now suppose that the nation of Foobar has an arbitarily huge number of citizens (say a Googolplex).
I'm going to try to persuade you to believe two completely opposing conclusions about the possibility of believing that you have won this lottery. One of these conclusions is true, and one of them is false. See if you can tell which is which.
