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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   38183 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023

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Suppose you were sentenced to death by firing squad but a thousand marksmen ten feet away missed their shot. Would you say you don’t have to explain how this happened (by design, presumably—a conspiracy not to kill you), because being in a position to ask it requires already existing?

If this is still supposed to be about the unlikeliness of abiogenesis, then this analogy would only make sense if you believed that the conditions necessary for the arising of life happened only once in the entire history of the universe. Then it really would be a miracle.

But it's more like there are a bajillion people about to be executed, each with their own thousand-strong firing squad and we know that at least one of them survived. With so many tries, one of them could have gotten super lucky. (And of course, we don't really know how many marksmen you need to postulate to match the probability of abiogenesis happening in some small volume of the primordial soup at a particular point).

(If it's about the wonder of the fact that our universe can support life at all, then I'm fine with answering "I dunno" while insisting that there's no justification for jumping from "I dunno" to "therefore, God.")

This is correct.

The level of analogy for which he makes sense would be ways the physical laws of the universe itself is fine-tuned for life. As long as there are no varying-laws multiverses, then there's only one, not a bajillion.

I'll also note that the firing squad example makes this more complicated to me. I was reminded of Joe Carlsmith's SIA vs SSA series on anthropics, which I don't remember well enough to be able to give truly informed opinions.

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