Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

Comment by soulofmischief | Hacker News Reader

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Would being one in a million itself be a coincidence though, one which we couldn't differentiate from coincidences explainable by the anthropic principle? "Most likely" doesn't satisfy me.

It's easy to form conjectures, but there is a deep metaphysical problem when it comes to satisfactorily modeling a system from the inside. It's turtles all the way down [0]. Unless our universe is embedded within another system, and its configuration at least partially mirrors the configuration of the system it is embedded within [1], and this is recoverable, then we really just can't make many absolute claims about the nature of our universe's particular configuration.

[0] And the only way out is by solving the deepest metaphysical problems which physics has not been able to touch, such as, "Why is there anything at all?"

[1] An example might be the conservation of energy, or stationary action. If such principles were to hold even within a system our universe might be embedded in, we could start to narrow down a few things and maybe uncover some suprauniversal inevitabilities. The challenge is proving that without observing the universe from the vantage point of a host system, which would really mean proving the inevitability of such principles in any system of sufficient complexity.

My claim is just that if we see something that seems like an unlikely coincidence, we should look for explanations. Either there's some underlying reason that it isn't a coincidence after all, or there's a reason that no observers would be possible if it were otherwise.

It's possible that occasionally, we'll waste our time looking for explanations of things that really are coincidences. But since this will be rare, it's worth looking for explanations anyway.

So false coincidences or false gratuity (+ the rare coincidences allowed by the probabilities of non-correlated variables).

There seems to be a contradiction in terms in my approach: how could I conceive of gratuitous coincidences that are outside of the causal network necessary for life to emerge and at the same time expect they are not entirely independent from necessary coincidences ?

Both necessary and superfluous coincidences could be manifestations of "structural coherence" and correlate to the degree of "order" or "complexity" of the universe. I'm unsure about my choice of words (knowing that there are precise ways to measure those), but maybe what I'm trying to grasp at is that emergence of observers is a hard problem, as shown by the very small margins the fundamental constants need to sit within for this to happen. Our existence isn't attributable directly to the singular values they take, but to the expressivity they allow, carbon chemistry being an example of that.

Maybe the laws of physics and fundamental constants operate like a sophisticated construction system. Like Lego, they offer increased degrees of freedom and expressive potential, but this very complexity comes with the cost of enabling marginally legal or "quasi-valid" configurations. A high level of compositionality inherently generates possibilities beyond strict necessity—introducing both meaningful structures and potential anomalies.

We could almost put this to test by measuring how easy it is to find non-sensical quasi-equations in the laws of physics, comparing our set of fundamental constant values with randomly generated ones. I guess distinguishing false coincidences and false gratuity would constitute the wall preventing us from doing so.

Anthropic principle explains only coincidences necessary for existence of life. If a coincidence isn't necessary for life, then it's not explainable by anthropic principle.

Physics isn't unable to touch the problem "Why is there anything at all?", it only doesn't touch it because the problem was declared to be useless to think about, and you obviously can't touch it without thinking. The usual reason is that the thing kept existing since previous time.

Not quite. It was declared useless to think about precisely because physics can't answer the most fundamental question of "Why". Richard Feynman went off on an interviewer for asking "Why are they doing that?" (regarding magnetic attraction/repulsion) precisely for this reason. [0]

He considers it a waste of time to consider, because you fundamentally can't make meaningful progress on the problem with our current tools and understanding, and it's possible that no amount of tools or understanding can reach the bottom-most turtle. There are some things we may simply never know.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1lL-hXO27Q

That you can't make progress is not a fact, but an opinion. But it's a fact that you won't make progress if you don't try to solve problems.

As another example, Lee Smolin disagrees with anthropic principle, because he believes anthropic principle doesn't allow to study such fundamental problems. At least he thinks solving these fundamental problems is science's business.

I agree that it's worth pursuing, but it turns into a metaphysical journey, and metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, not physics. We have to establish that it's even possible to answer these questions.

>Physics isn't unable to touch the problem "Why is there anything at all?"

>Not quite. It was declared useless to think about precisely because physics can't answer the most fundamental question of "Why". Richard Feynman went off on an interviewer for asking "Why are they doing that?"

In Chinese, Korean or Japanese, "how" and "why" are the same word. A "why" after all, always decomposes into a "there is" (fields, particles, properties such as mass) and a "how" (the associated laws). Physics is restricted to the latter but hasn't been able to find a definitive frontier between the two. A "there is" often decomposes into another "how" and another "there is" after progress is made. Example: mass and the higgs field.

>We have to establish that it's even possible to answer these questions.

We won't know until we try. Like Poincaré conjecture was pending for a century.

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