Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jodrellblank 859 days ago
> "The answer that I'm arranging the events intentionally explains why an otherwise low-probability event is occurring"

Okay, I'll grant you that if someone only believes in a God creating conditions for life then the Anthropic principle sort of suggests a non-God possibility, along the lines that Evolution with natural selection presented a way for increasing complexity and intelligence to arise from random mutations without an intelligent designer.

Still, we humans exist in a visibly large and competitive 'dog eat dog' ecosystem, so observing that the ecosystem affects the life within it is a certain kind of idea which fits in with a lot of other observations. Your comment line which I quoted above assumes a low-probability event based on no other observations, when there's no reason to assume that, no sign of an 'evolution of Universes competing in a wider ecosystem of Universes'; you've declared this universe to be 'low probability' based on nothing and then seek to explain something about how we find ourselves in a low-probability universe. For all we know, this could be the only possible Universe configuration, the only solution to some Universe-equation, or an overwhelmingly likely one if all possible Universes are capable of supporting life [and the ideas of Universes which couldn't support life are, in some way, not possible].

1 comments

Indeed, it doesn't seem to me that we have a good reason to believe that universal constants could have been otherwise, or even if they could have been otherwise, that the probability that they lie in the Goldilocks range is low, so I don't really buy the fine-tuning argument. Nonetheless, I think we should give credit where credit is due - it's still an explanation.