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I had the extremely good luck of being born as a middle-class American and therefore enjoy a level of privilege that most people at most places and times could only dream of. I grew up with all my necessities taken care of, I got a higher education and postgraduate degree, I had access to all the fruits of modern technology - antibiotics, air conditioning, the internet. I have daily use of things that many kings of old would have traded half their kingdoms for. That I would have all the privileges I enjoy is exceedingly unlikely, I am among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged human beings who have ever lived on earth.
Not only that, but most members of this very forum are similarly privileged. The majority of users here are middle class or higher, educated, and live in conditions that most human beings could have never even dreamed of. What are the odds that hundreds of people, all from among a tiny fraction of a percent of the most privileged humans in history, would all find themselves here at some random obscure internet forum? We are talking about a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, multiplied by a tiny fraction of a percent, repeated hundreds of times. We're talking about odds of some miniscule fraction like 0.0000....0001%.
Therefore, I submit that The Motte was created by Jesus Christ himself. The odds that a place like this could arise by the chance congregating of individuals is so astronomically unlikely that we can dismiss such a hypothesis as ludicrous. Only the guiding hand of our Lord and Savior could have created such a rare and perfectly fine-tuned set of conditions.
Your point only functions as an explanation of fine tuning if we assume in advance that the (or “a”) multiverse hypothesis is true. It’s unlikely that I would result from my parent’s act of conception, but billions of acts of conception were happening before I was conceived. But we don’t have an analogous knowledge of there being billions and billions of universes with different parameters and physical laws, exhausting enough of the possibilities to eventually create life.
No, it doesn't. It works equally well with a one-shot universe. If the parameters had not been properly fined tuned, then we wouldn't be here. Therefore we can only observe a universe in which the parameters are fine tuned. This is true regardless of how many universes exist.
Those other billions of acts of conception are irrelevant. You could not possibly have been made by any of those other acts of conception, since those other people had different genes than your parents. Moreover, the statistical likelihood of you being conceived is independent of each prior act of conception in the same way that the outcome of a coin flip is independent of prior flips.
The relevant analogy is to note the large number of eggs and sperm your parents produced over their lifetimes and the extreme unlikelihood that the particular egg and particular sperm that produced you would have combined. This was, indeed, extremely unlikely ex ante, but you can only observe an ex post world in which this highly unlikely event did in fact occur.
People mean different things by “the anthropic principle” so let me clarify what you have in mind. Sometimes the idea is supposed to challenge the fine tuning argument by pointing to the multiverse and invoking the law of large numbers. That argument works if you have some reason to think the multiverse exists and is more probable and theoretically virtuous than theism.
But I also hear much more naive and confused sounding appeals to the anthropic principle. For example, sometimes people seem to be suggesting that because a phenomenon involves the creation of observers, the phenomenon requires no explanation, which is silly. Imagine if I prayed for a parachute while falling from a plane, one spontaneously manifested out of thin air and deployed to save my life, and I reflected afterwards about why that happened. I conclude, “well, I wouldn’t be here to ask the question in the first place if that didn’t happen, so there must be no explanation needed.”
Or imagine saying the theory of evolution is dispensable because “if it didn’t happen we wouldn’t exist. We wouldn’t be here to wonder about it if not, so what is there to explain?”
I am not saying that a phenomenon that involves the creation of observers requires no explanation, I am saying that observing such a phenomenon exists provides no information because such a phenomenon is 100% guaranteed to exist in any universe with observers. So I am saying we cannot draw any useful conclusions from observing such a phenomenon exists.
For example, every person I meet who has ever been skydiving tells me that their parachute has opened every time they've gone skydiving. This fact tells me no information about how likely parachutes are to open (except that the probability is not 0%). It provides no information about parachutes one way or the other.
The surprising part isn't what the phenomenon looks like. It's that there are observers at all in the one-shot universe. It does provide information.
It doesn't provide information, because the only possible one-shot universe we can observe is one with observers. Maybe there was a 0.000...01% chance that the one-shot universe would be fine-tuned for observers, or maybe there was a 99.999...% chance that the one-shot universe would be fine-tuned for observers. Either of these possibilities is consistent with the fact that we, as observers, see a one-shot universe with observers in it.
So imagine we have two hypotheses, to simplify.
Hypothesis 1 is that there's a 95% chance of a rational being coming into existence.
Hypothesis 2 is that there's a 0.001% chance of a rational being coming into existence.
You, the observer, notice, hey, I'm a rational being who came into existence!
I'm saying that it's rational to think that this should update your priors towards hypothesis 1 over hypothesis 2. But only if there's a one-shot or few-shot universe.
It's 95000 times more likely for a rational being to come into existence under hypothesis 1 than under hypothesis 2. So this piece of evidence should update our beliefs by 95000 times using the odds form of Bayes' theorem, I believe.
For a comparison (and I'm not certain that this is a perfect analogy, but I think it works), let's say you are told that there's a 50/50 chance a surgery succeeds. Under the 50% chance you survive, you always wake up. Under the 50% where it fails, they freeze your body, and you estimate that there's a 1/50 chance that they manage to revive you in the distant future.
You wake up. Assuming there's not going to be any distinguishing sensation between the two ways you could wake up, which should you think is more likely? I would think you should think that there's a 50:1 chance that it worked.
No, it shouldn't change your priors, irrespective of whether there's a one-shot or multi-shot universe.
Given that you are a rational being, the odds that you will observe a universe where a rational being came into existence are exactly 100%. This is true regardless of whether hypothesis 1 or hypothesis 2 is true, and therefore it tells you no additional information about which hypothesis is correct.
That's true, because this situation is materially different from the one we are talking about above. Here, we know two sets of probabilities ex ante (both of which can occur), and are now trying to decide, ex post, which is more likely to have occurred. Given two different possibilites, the one with the higher probability is, by definition, the one that was more likely to occur (this is true whether the surgery is one-shot or many-shot, by the way).
In the situation we are discussing, we don't know anything about the probabilities ex ante, and we are trying to derive those probabilities based on our ex post observations.
A better analogy would be: you go into a surgery and nobody knows your odds of survival. You wake up after the surgery. What, if anything, does this tell you about your ex ante odds of surviving the surgery? The answer is, it tells you nothing about those odds. It just tells you that you survived. Your odds of survival could have been 0.001% or 99.9%, but since you can only observe outcomes in which you survive, that fact that you observe your own survival gives you no additional information about the ex ante likelihood of that outcome.
Another example to illustrate the point. Suppose an alien hands you a black box with a screen and a button on it. You push the button, and the number "21" appears on the screen. Pushing the button again does nothing and you cannot disassemble the box to learn how it works. What are the odds that the box was going to display the number "21" when you pushed the button? The answer is, you have no idea (except you know the odds are not 0%). It might have been a 100% chance, it might have been a 0.000000001% chance. You have no way of knowing based on your single ex ante observation.
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What do you think of my example of the “made by God” world? Wouldn’t your argument be equally applicable in such a world, so that it wouldn’t be evidence of theism?
In a world where each subatomic particle is stamped with the words "made by Jesus Christ," we have two apparently unlikely things being true:
The parameters of the universe are fine-tuned to produce human life, and
The parameters of the universe are fine-tuned to reference a particular Hebrew carpenter by name.
Even though point 1 seems extremely unlikely ex ante, it is not actually unlikely given that human observers exist. Point 1 must necessarily be true in any universe in which human observers exist. Therefore, observing that point 1 is true does not tell us any information about how our universe came into existence, because point 1 is 100% guaranteed to be true in any universe we can observe.
Point 2, on the other hand, is actually extremely unlikely. There is no reason why point 2 must be true in every universe where human observers exist, and in fact we know it need not be true in all such universes because it isn't true in our own universe. Therefore point 2, if it were true, would actually be powerful evidence of something (perhaps the truth of Christianity, or perhaps that we're living in a simulation and are being messed with by the simulators).
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New Zorba origin story?
All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.
And so he called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters he called Seas: and he saw that it was Actually A Quality Contribution!
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