Plus the doomsday argument, the possibility of coming up with a nice reference class, and that you should ignore scientific evidence if it tells you there were a lot of early humans
I really like the aliens who will protect us if the coin comes up heads and destroy us if it comes up tails because it does away with any nagging worry that retro causation or knowledge of the future is what gets the result.
"Freddie isn’t just assuming controversial bits of anthropic reasoning: no, it’s much worse than that. The truth is horrifying, appalling, grotesque, an affront to God and to beauty, to the good and the true, to the pure and saintly; a horrifying crime against being."
And there seems to be some conflation of prior and posterior probability. The prior probability I was born in a particular year is very low. The posterior probability conditioned on an observation of my birth certificate is nearly 1. How does that tell me anything?
There's some rhetorical slight of hand when you suppose examples like "God created two people with blue shirts and one with a green shirt." There we know the distribution and we can conclude something. But the general case is more like "I have a magic bag with an unknown number of unknown things. I reached in and pulled out an apple." How can you conclude anything more than "The bag contained at least one apple?"
>Furthermore, this could allow you to have psychic powers—as long as you agree to have a huge enough number of offspring unless a boulder rolls, or a deer drops dead at your feet, you could be confident that the boulder would roll and the deer would drop dead.
I don't think SSA really implies this. True, it does if you explicitly conditionalize on "if I do X/¬X, the boulder will/won't move, and I can do either X or ¬X." However, you shouldn't really be conditionalizing on this, but your evidence for this claim instead. When you take this into account, SSA will imply high probability for the weaker disjunction "either the boulder will move, or I'm wrong about the physical mechanics of the setup." For example, you could just be wrong about your ability to have lots of children. Or, failing that, that your future self will in fact successfully follow through with his/her commitment to have lots of children.
This still involves precognition, but that seems less bad than omnipotence, and I don't really understand the aversion to precognition anyway. If the point of anthropics is to deduce things about the world, including extremely strikingly weird things, it's not obvious to me why it's so bad that some of those things might be in the future rather than in the past (or in some other, spatiotemporally disconnected universe).
I'm new to this whole idea that deep questions can be settled by byzantine arguments based on probabilities. All this stuff with coin flips, sampling, etc. seems so weird and unconvincing. Are there philosophers who think this is all BS? If so, who are they, and do any of them write accessible Substack posts I can read? I'm looking for other perspectives on this sketchy anthropics business.
I mean, this coin-flipping BS is certainly valid within its own "narrative bubble", but a lot of thinkers reject anthropic reasoning altogether. I think Lee Smolin had a pretty famous written debate about this ~20 years ago against Leonard Susskind that's more or less accessible
I only skimmed it, but their debate seems to be centered on the anthropic principle as it applies to the fine tuning of the universe, not about the self-indication assumption and related probabilistic arguments.
Ah, I see. Smolin has thrown some serious shade on anthropic arguments in general, but maybe not the specific methods of them, like SIA and friends. Are there any applications of these methods you're interested in? They're just not something I've really encountered in any philosophical topics before I saw this kid's God Argument. If I had to go out on a limb, I'd guess no philosophers take these coin flip arguments seriously, beyond the pastime of trying to think of imaginary/artificial scenarios in which they're valid
IDK man. SSA and SIA are interesting little narratives in their own right, but they seem to be competing in a grand narrative that posits that, in some sense, science "evaluates" theories probabilistically. Many scientists would likely see this as a cultural appropriation of their narrative on science. For example, Newton probably didn't see his system as being inferred from a set of observations about weights under the influence of springs or data about the motion of planets. Rather, it's more like he started with "pure abstractions", such as force, mass, and gravity, worked out the mathematical implications of these abstractions, and then considered the only remaining work for probabilistic experimentation to do was to see how well force, mass, and gravity correspond to the observations of springs, weights, and orbits. In other words, the probabilistic observations played more of a "defining" (eg, "What even are force, mass, and gravity?") role than an evaluating role
I really like the aliens who will protect us if the coin comes up heads and destroy us if it comes up tails because it does away with any nagging worry that retro causation or knowledge of the future is what gets the result.
"Freddie isn’t just assuming controversial bits of anthropic reasoning: no, it’s much worse than that. The truth is horrifying, appalling, grotesque, an affront to God and to beauty, to the good and the true, to the pure and saintly; a horrifying crime against being."
I don't really get these anthropic arguments at all - you have one sample from an unknown distribution. How can you infer anything from that?
And there seems to be some conflation of prior and posterior probability. The prior probability I was born in a particular year is very low. The posterior probability conditioned on an observation of my birth certificate is nearly 1. How does that tell me anything?
There's some rhetorical slight of hand when you suppose examples like "God created two people with blue shirts and one with a green shirt." There we know the distribution and we can conclude something. But the general case is more like "I have a magic bag with an unknown number of unknown things. I reached in and pulled out an apple." How can you conclude anything more than "The bag contained at least one apple?"
>Furthermore, this could allow you to have psychic powers—as long as you agree to have a huge enough number of offspring unless a boulder rolls, or a deer drops dead at your feet, you could be confident that the boulder would roll and the deer would drop dead.
I don't think SSA really implies this. True, it does if you explicitly conditionalize on "if I do X/¬X, the boulder will/won't move, and I can do either X or ¬X." However, you shouldn't really be conditionalizing on this, but your evidence for this claim instead. When you take this into account, SSA will imply high probability for the weaker disjunction "either the boulder will move, or I'm wrong about the physical mechanics of the setup." For example, you could just be wrong about your ability to have lots of children. Or, failing that, that your future self will in fact successfully follow through with his/her commitment to have lots of children.
This still involves precognition, but that seems less bad than omnipotence, and I don't really understand the aversion to precognition anyway. If the point of anthropics is to deduce things about the world, including extremely strikingly weird things, it's not obvious to me why it's so bad that some of those things might be in the future rather than in the past (or in some other, spatiotemporally disconnected universe).
"Freddie’s argument inherits gall of these problems! "
I think you mean "all" or "the gall"?
Fixed.
I'm new to this whole idea that deep questions can be settled by byzantine arguments based on probabilities. All this stuff with coin flips, sampling, etc. seems so weird and unconvincing. Are there philosophers who think this is all BS? If so, who are they, and do any of them write accessible Substack posts I can read? I'm looking for other perspectives on this sketchy anthropics business.
Well if it's bullshit, what's to replace it? You can't just not assign probabilities to where you are or what person you are.
Nothing forces anyone to assign probabilities to anything. Whole tribes of people have gone tens of thousands of years never using them
You can choose not to count but that doesn't stop numbers from existing.
I mean, this coin-flipping BS is certainly valid within its own "narrative bubble", but a lot of thinkers reject anthropic reasoning altogether. I think Lee Smolin had a pretty famous written debate about this ~20 years ago against Leonard Susskind that's more or less accessible
Are you referring to this?
https://www.edge.org/conversation/lee_smolin-leonard_susskind-smolin-vs-susskind-the-anthropic-principle
I only skimmed it, but their debate seems to be centered on the anthropic principle as it applies to the fine tuning of the universe, not about the self-indication assumption and related probabilistic arguments.
Ah, I see. Smolin has thrown some serious shade on anthropic arguments in general, but maybe not the specific methods of them, like SIA and friends. Are there any applications of these methods you're interested in? They're just not something I've really encountered in any philosophical topics before I saw this kid's God Argument. If I had to go out on a limb, I'd guess no philosophers take these coin flip arguments seriously, beyond the pastime of trying to think of imaginary/artificial scenarios in which they're valid
IDK man. SSA and SIA are interesting little narratives in their own right, but they seem to be competing in a grand narrative that posits that, in some sense, science "evaluates" theories probabilistically. Many scientists would likely see this as a cultural appropriation of their narrative on science. For example, Newton probably didn't see his system as being inferred from a set of observations about weights under the influence of springs or data about the motion of planets. Rather, it's more like he started with "pure abstractions", such as force, mass, and gravity, worked out the mathematical implications of these abstractions, and then considered the only remaining work for probabilistic experimentation to do was to see how well force, mass, and gravity correspond to the observations of springs, weights, and orbits. In other words, the probabilistic observations played more of a "defining" (eg, "What even are force, mass, and gravity?") role than an evaluating role