Greylorn Ell wrote:
Wyman,
I love your "aside," thinking that it is not so far aside as you might suppose. I'd prefer to comment on that, favorably from at least my perspective, after calling your hand. You wrote, "Of course, I can predict the gist of your response, but would like to hear the details.."
Before generating a response, I'd love to obtain your prediction of the gist of it.
That is because I doubt that you can predict the gist, or core, of my response. If you can, this suggests that you and I are kindred spirits who should exchange personal phone numbers.
I wonder if there is a way for me to post my response somewhere where you cannot find it, and I cannot modify it to make myself look good? Would this not be an interesting experiment?
One notion that comes to mind is this: I could send my response to one of the people with whom I share email correspondences. Or several. I could obtain their permission to share their address with you. My response, sent to him/her would be dated and time stamped in his/her email box, waiting to be forwarded to you AFTER you have explicitly expressed your prediction.
We ought to be able to work this out. Perhaps R. Lewis or our other moderator would be willing to hold my reply and make it available after you manifest your prediction. This should be fun. Let's find a way to make it work.
Greylorn
Well, we can go on the honor system. Here first is my understanding of the issue.
- If one has a stake in explaining why a great improbability has come about, there is an easy way to do it. If the math says that the chance of our existence in a universe such as ours is 1 in 1000 (to use manageable numbers), then why not say that we are 1 of 1000 universes? Then, the probabilities work out nicely. However, even dopes like me can see that this is disingenuous, unscientific reasoning. Science is supposed to go where the evidence leads, not create speculative theories to explain somewhat less speculative theories.
But if you are a physicist with great credentials, then the armchair physicists will likely buy what you feed them. However, even armchair physicists can see that the multiverse theory suffers from another objection (besides being speculative). It does not explain where the multiverses come from originally - like Arising's objection to Greylorn's theory above. No need to worry, Leonard Krauss has the answer in his book A Universe From Nothing. The multiverses come from quantum fluctuations, whereby quantum particles pop in and out of existence. This idea (quantum particles popping up) apparently has some mainstream support in physics. According to Krauss, this proves that, despite what philosophers may say, 'something' may indeed arise from nothing.
The next step is getting from something arising from nothing, to that something being the beginning of a universe. How he gets from quantum fluctuations to a series of inflationary 'big bangs' where entire universes spontaneously arise, creating space where there was no space, physical laws where there were none, matter or antimatter where there was none, etc. is somewhat murky to me (probably intentionally so; see my example of explaining the coin flips below). At any rate, tying this theory to actual observation and evidence is, to put it mildly, a long way off.
What Kruass and Hawking (Hawking is more honest, as he doesn't claim that the theory is anything but speculation) have done is to pave the road for the possibility of chance as explaining, literally, everything - i.e. teleology is banished.
Now, the above is my ham-handed, cutting corners, rough, non-physicist description of how I see the issue. Remember, I have never claimed to have any expertise in the area.
In my example of the improbable coin flipping - suppose that tails came up, not nine times in a row, but a thousand. Then we would be talking supernatural causes, miracles, etc.. Suppose that a well credentialed physicist comes along with a huge stake in explaining what happened without appeal to teleological principles (maybe he makes millions off of his publications). Well, he says, it is
consistent with current scientific theory that, for instance, from one event to another, there are a billion possible 'histories' or paths that are possible. In the quantum world, or some parallel universe, that coin was flipped a billion times, making the apparent improbability not so improbable after all. This not being very convincing, maybe he'll tie it in somehow with Feynman's 'sum over histories' model of quantum mechanics where particles take every possible path from point a to b (Hawking talks of this extensively). He'll do it in such a way that it is nearly impossible for a non-physicist to know what he is talking about - but only nearly so, or it wouldn't sell. And he'll depend on the appeal to logical consistency - he'll craft it so that his speculations do not contradict current, evidence based theories. But consistency is not the only or even primary criterion for accepting scientific hypotheses. Mostly, however, he will depend on his reputation as a physicist - the same appeal to authority, rather than evidence, that religions have used from ancient history.
That was my original thought as to the 'gist' of your position. However, I've had second thoughts since your last post, for psychological reasons. Since it would be unsportsmanlike to hedge (although I guess I just did) I'll stick with it and see if I'm in the right ballpark.
AUK did not. 
I recommend more afternoon personal seances, followed by sharing whatever ideas appear. That is how ideas develop.