I want to type out a long comment on how crazy it is that besides the general habitability conditions we also have a strong magnetosphere that protects us from shit like this
But then I remembered anthropic principle and I guess that makes it less crazy
The conditions of the universe and our local environment are exceedingly improbable to have occurred.
the universe in some sense compelled to eventually have conscious and sapient life emerge within it.[4][5] A form of the latter known as the participatory anthropic principle, articulated by John Archibald Wheeler, suggests on the basis of quantum mechanics that the universe, as a condition of its existence, must be observed, thus implying one or more observers. Stronger yet is the final anthropic principle (FAP), proposed by John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, which views the universe's structure as expressible by bits of information in such a way that information processing is inevitable and eternal.[4]
Basically there's a 1 in 10^50 chance of a universe to emerge from a big bang with constants that make it possible for things to work so we can live. Things like the gravitational force being too strong or too weak (and it's already oddly weak compared to other forces) mean that shit would be fricked from inception.
Counter arguments include: All those universes exist but we can only exist in the one that works, hence us being here. Which is still kinda weird that life would be that exceedingly rare, but maybe there's sentient dustclouds in other universes. If Everett's MWH is even valid.
Also the Axis of Evil is interesting (even the Wiki neurodivergent rationalist astroturfing crew wasn't able to bury it):
anomalies in the background radiation have been reported which are aligned with the plane of our solar system. These are unexplained by the Copernican principle and suggest that the solar system's alignment is special in relation to the background radiation of the universe
The "axis of evil" is a name given to the apparent correlation between the plane of the Solar System and aspects of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). It gives the plane of the Solar System and hence the location of Earth a greater significance than might be expected by chance – a result which has been claimed to be evidence of a departure from the Copernican principle as assumed in the concordance model
Lawrence Krauss is quoted as follows in a 2006 Edge.org article:
The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is simply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.
Stronger yet is the final anthropic principle (FAP), proposed by John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler, which views the universe's structure as expressible by bits of information in such a way that information processing is inevitable and eternal.[4]
>assume the structure of the universe is expressed as [vague] bits of info
>conclude that [vague] information processing is inevitable and eternal
This is suppose to be insightful? Because it's kind of r-slurred.
The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is simply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird a
How does this BIPOC not know what a point of reference is? If we were on another planet, it would also seem like everything is either moving toward or away from us.
@Geralt_of_Uganda, what the heck is going on here? It's all nonsense!
It's kinda weird because it's been observed several different times in different ways and still hasn't been resolved conclusively, but there's no obvious reason whybit aligns with the plane of the ecliptic. It doesn't prove anything other than possibly maybe the (((universe))) is anisotropic
Isn't the universe anisotropic? The cosmic microwave background radiation (whatever the acryonym is) certainly is not uniformly dispersed. We've mapped out superclusters, and those aren't uniformly dispersed either.
The universe is not homogenous on smaller scales, but according to the standard cosmological model, it should be be isotropic and homogeneous statistically on scales larger than 250 million light years.
Oh, but isn't that a useful basic assumption? It doesn't necessarily have to be true, but assuming it's true, then "such and such" follows. I guess the other clowns are people attacking the basic principles and wanting to supplant them with their own?
Yeah, it's what the generally accepted model tells us.
The axis of evil guys aren't for the most part attacking the standard model, just going over observations and saying "why is it like this when it should look like this?"
There are agendacels who want to prove their pet theory but I think most people doing research just want to understand it better
Oh yeah some people go absolutely schizo with it, especially if you start invoking it to prove or disprove existence of higher powers. I'm not even gonna pretend that I understand what kind of argument that Barrow neighbor is trying to make (not because it's stupid but because I'm stupid), the explanation I put in my other comment is the principle in its simplest form I think
Wheeler had absolutely crazy ideas though that built onto this though, but it's genuine lovecraftian nonsense that I barely comprehend, such as that the universe necessarily generates itself through the act of observing itself, and argues that this explains the observation problem in QM
that the universe necessarily generates itself through the act of observing itself,
>the universe observes
I hate it when the anthropomorphizing neighbors enter the room. The universe is a big collection of dirt and light. It can't do anything in the conscious sense. It's like people don't know what "act" means.
It's kinda fricked up because despite how much of modern science is built on this concept, I'm not sure if there's a single agreed upon definition of what "observation" even means besides some handwavy "information about an event leaks... somewhere"
WolverineWe/Wuz
I'm the Best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn't very nice
Geralt_of_Uganda 6mo ago#6389825
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dont particles "observe" each other when they are affected by each other in any capacity? where is this sapient thought thing coming from?
why is a planet existing with the qualities of earth mean sentience might be pre-determined? cant it be just because the universe is really big with a lot of combinations of any possible outcome happening somewhere? of course sentient life would exist in place where its possible, rather than not??
why would the fundamental laws of physics being the way they are considered a rare luck for us? arent they set in stone?
There's just so many things in physics that don't make sense. It's more likely that the world is a simulation run on a Dyson Sphere than the universe works like we think it does.
ChaposeAsuna/Kirito
I would kill to kill a waifu.
Wolverine 6mo ago#6390814
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Youre right, everyone who says otherwise is either religious or some I-fricking-love-science-cel who needs to believe in a higher power out there somewhere BUT NOT GOD!!! (religious but even more r-slurred)
maybe I'm r-slurred but my understanding is the "observer effect" is different from how things work on a quantum scale when it comes to things "collapsing".
This is all worthless philosophy, our systems plane lining up with things in the CMB is almost neat but is guaranteed to just be due to our horribly uninformed readings on all that so far away, like the neighbor says himself at the very end.
maybe the data is simply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales.
we don't even know what a hole do with the """"data"""" it sucks up into it's bussyhole horizon and those things are like right next to us everywhere compared to CMB.
How does this BIPOC not know what a point of reference is? If we were on another planet, it would also seem like everything is either moving toward or away from us.
that would be obvious, but that's not what that alignment between CMB and solar system "plane" of rotations is about
We [...] identify the axis of the residual Maximum Temperature Asymmetry (MTA) (after the dipole subtraction) of the [..] CMB temperature sky map. The estimator is based on considering the temperature differences between opposite pixels in the sky at various angular resolutions ([...]).
We compare the direction and magnitude of this asymmetry with three other cosmic asymmetry axes (α dipole, Dark Energy Dipole and Dark Flow) and find that the four asymmetry axes are abnormally close to each other.
We compare the observed MTA axis with the corresponding MTA axes of 10^4 gaussian isotropic simulated ILC maps (based on ΛCDM). The fraction of simulated ILC maps that reproduces the observed magnitude of the MTA asymmetry and alignment with the observed α dipole is in the range of 0.1% − 0.5% (depending on the resolution chosen for the CMB map). The corresponding magnitude+alignment probabilities with the other two asymmetry axes (Dark Energy Dipole and Dark Flow) are at the level of about 1%. We propose Extended Topological Quintessence as a physical model qualitatively consistent with this coincidence of directions.
This is a really interesting comment but I think it's needlessly complex for explaining the Anthropic Principle
the simplest way to explain it is, for us to exist we have to exist somewhere that can support life, so it makes sense that the Earth/universe seems fine-tuned. If it couldn't support life we wouldn't be here talking about it. Maybe a trillion universes came and went before one finally popped up that could have conscious life in it.
>For matter to exist there must be an environment in which it can exist. Ah, yes, there is some matter, and it's inside this universe, and... Yes, it does exist. Well done, chaps.
It still sounds like a meaningless position.
It "makes sense" that our solar system is "finely tuned" [coincidentally] for supporting life because the argument is tautological.
There's nothing wrong with tautological arguments, unless they're meaningless or don't offer anything insightful. With economics, we basically assume people do things the best they can with what they got, so if we see someone spending $80 on gas when there's a gas station nearby selling it for $60, then we assume that rational expectations still holds true. There's something else going on to explain their behavior. It's tautological but useful. I'm not seeing that with the anthropic principle.
Someone else described it as such:
The question the anthropic principle is trying to answer isn't "is it statistically unlikely that the universe contains life" - that question isn't really answerable, as we don't have access to other universes to compare our own to. The question it answers is "why is our universe habitable?" - if it weren't, then we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
The point is some crucicux will always come in and be like ”The odds of [life] occurring have to be so small that it's more statistically logical that God is more likely than anything else.”
But we don't really have any reason to think we know what the probability of life arising might be. Any environment we can observe necessarily is one we can survive in, and we can deduce nothing about how likely or unlikely that is from observing it.
Your environment (for this example planet, but can be extended to other things like universe in general) is quite unique when compared to an average environment, as it is capable of supporting your existence. Taking it at face value you might say that the odds of you being alive right here right now on a livable planet are really small and that you're #blessed, because you don't believe yourself to be unique in any way and as such expect to see the "average" slice of the universe- a barren wasteland- which you don't. The anthropic principle (at least in one of its formulations, there's strong vs weak and different people phrase it differently, and there are also legitimate arguments against it) states that actually it is all but certain that you find yourself alive and on a planet that supports you being alive, as you shouldn't expect to observe the average slice of the universe. Instead you should expect to see the average slice of the universe that is capable of supporting observers, ie you. In other words- you aren't observing the average part of the universe as one might assume, but instead what the average observer in said universe is observing.
You might say "no shit, it's obvious that I don't observe environments in which I cannot exist in the first place", but I want to solidify the point with an example:
Say you live on a discrete, 1-dimensional ribbon and you're measuring some local, binary quantity which can be either 1 or 0. Say there are two theories- one that predicts that your measurements should randomly return 1 or 0, and second that predicts you should only ever measure 1.
So you run your measurement, move one step forward, run it again and repeat so 10 times until you have a string of 10 results, which happen to be 1111111111. What conclusions can you draw from it? Without anthropic principle, one would say that this is evidence for theory 1, as the likelihood of getting 10 ones in a row is 0.5^10=very small under theory 1, but the chance of getting ten ones under theory two is 100%. However, the TRVE ANTHROPIC TRVTHER would make a different argument- since you are not looking at a "random" slice of the universe, you cannot just treat each result in this string as an independent probability. Instead, it is a conditional probability under the conditions that allow you to observe it. Perhaps life can only exist in the part of the universe where this thing you're measuring takes the value of 1. And then, to gauge the probabilities, instead of treating each observation as independent you work with the whole string and have to ask yourself- if you performed this measurement at every point in the universe (assumed infinite for this example) and got an infinitely long binary string, what is the probability that at some point it would contain the sequence 1111111111 which you measured. And then you realize that under both theories 1 and 2, given infinite string, the sequence 1111111111 appears infinitely many times, and as such both theories are equally likely and hence you haven't extracted any information from your experiments.
This is a bit of a wacky explanation as I'm not an astrophysicist so perhaps someone from !physics can factcheck this and give a better example. !math conditional probabilities starting 3rd paragraph so make sure to tell me if I fricked it up and it actually doesn't work like that
You fricked it up and it actually doesn't work like that. The anthropic principle only applies when the experiment and underlying phenomena are related in the ability to perform the experiment.
Suppose I have a phenomena and an experiment which attempts to prove or disprove that phenomena. If being able to correctly perform the experiment requires the phenomena to exist already, then the experiment cannot give evidence the phenomena existed, as the fact that the experiment took place to begin with is proof of the phenomena.
Example: If I write a computer program which attempts to check if the computer is on, then it must always say yes.
Suppose I have a phenomena and an experiment which attempts to prove or disprove that phenomena. If being able to correctly perform the experiment requires the phenomena to exist already, then the experiment cannot give evidence the phenomena existed, as the fact that the experiment took place to begin with is proof of the phenomena.
This sounds utterly backwards. Just perform the experiment. This sounds a lot like metaphysical nonsense where people chase their tails worrying about things that might possibly exist but have no real relevance to us.
Example: If I write a computer program which attempts to check if the computer is on, then it must always say yes.
The program exists outside of the computer, like a sysadmin checking on down machines. It's exactly like being an external observer. These people have an issue with that?
The question the anthropic principle is trying to answer isn't "is it statistically unlikely that the universe contains life" - that question isn't really answerable, as we don't have access to other universes to compare our own to. The question it answers is "why is our universe habitable?" - if it weren't, then we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
But I included that in my thought experiment: it is potential that your ability to perform a measurement of the hypothetical quantity is dependent on that quantity being 1. I just didn't state it as something that is known a priori and instead framed it as a probability from the viewpoint of observer who lacks this information
WolverineWe/Wuz
I'm the Best there is at what I do, but what I do best isn't very nice
Geralt_of_Uganda 6mo ago#6389852
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okay after reading paragraphs 3 and 4 i get what youre saying about your observations not being exemplary of universe as a whole because it only shows you a slice of it where the conditions of your existence were met.
still dont get the other comment about paralel universes doe
Impressive. Normally people with such severe developmental disabilities struggle to write much more than a sentence or two. He really has exceded our expectations for the writing portion. Sadly the coherency of his writing, along with his abilities in the social skills and reading portions, are far behind his peers with similar disabilities.
It's the idea that in order for something to be observed it must allow for observers to exist. So in this case he is saying it's crazy how much protects us from dangers in the universe. But when you consider that only places like this could support life it isn't that crazy. Likely all planets supporting life have similar conditions. Tbh it doesn't actually say much. It just takes "WOW we are so lucky!" to "We exist therefore of course everything lines up with allowing us to exist." which kind of kills the awe-inspiring vibe.
Really? Life still seems extremely unlikely regardless of the principle, so I don't see how that changes anything. I also don't understand how the existence or non-existence of observers affects the probability of a planet sustaining some kind of interesting life.
This is not my area of expertise but I think it exists to argue against another idea in theoretical physics which is that until we have more data points we should assume our situation is average. For example Earth supports carbon based life and since that is the only reference for life we have it makes sense to assume carbon based life is the norm, as statically we are most likely average. You could expand that to say our solar system is average, galaxy average, universe average. The anthropic principal challenges that and basically changes it to, it makes sense that we are in an average situation for a situation that supports life. And we cannot say if the situation that supports life is common or not.
But like I said I am no theoretical physicist. I might be wrong, but that's how I understand it.
, it makes sense that we are in an average situation for a situation that supports life. And we cannot say if the situation that supports life is common or not.
... Well, yeah, but why invoke a principle when you can just harp on about sample bias? What does it really add if anything?
It's a mildly novel idea in theoretical physics. It's just a fancy sounding name for a factor to consider when trying to figure out how the universe works.
So we either exist and observe a possible universe which allows us to observe it, or a different universe exists where we can't exist and thus can't observe it. In this case, it's crazy that Earth has all these things to support and protect life, until you realize that you are only able to think about this if the Earth has all of that stuff. Otherwise you don't exist.
I remember independently reaching this kind of conclusion after playing too much Spore when I was 12. It's not a very deep thought, imo. It's just kinda like “ah, yeah, obvious when you think about it.” Like realizing how every single other people has an entire life and set of circumstances for the first time.
Universes don't allow anything because they can't act.
The existence of another universe that we can't observe doesn't really affect the rarity of life on our own.
This all seems like really silly word games from people who read the wrong philosophers.
hsshsss it's crazy that Earth has all these things to support and protect life, until you realize that you are only able to think about this if the Earth has all of that stuff. Otherwise you don't exist.
Okay. So what?
>we exist
Yeah. How does that affect the probability of a planet containing life like our own?
It's still crazy because it seems like everything around us is dead.
RedeeIVIedSinnerI/We
I’m 100% certain that at least half the mods do not have Faith or the Holy Spirit.
EvilUbie 6mo ago#6390516
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"Yes, it could literally just be random chance that lead to humanity's existence"
Sorry man, I don't mean anything against you in particular, but you're like the third person to say that invoking anthropic principle is denying God. Why? I don't understand. I never made that claim. I think it's a bad argument against existence of God for many reasons. I'm a member of !catholics ffs. So why is the first reaction of so many people to claim that this is blasphemy? Anthropic principle says nothing about existence of God, and I didn't use it to disprove it either, I don't even see the relation
Is this because everyones exposure to it is through atheist debates or something like that? Just because it's a poor case against teleological argument doesn't mean that it's worthless, it can be applied in other spheres too. It only means that people who invoke the anthropic principle in attempts to disprove God misunderstand what it really says and misuse it
I'm sorry I upset you. I didn't mean to. It was really just a joke. I thought you could take a joke - but I guess I was wrong. I've been teased about being a Christian but I never felt the need to tell my ping group about it and longpost on rdrama. Maybe you're just over-reacting? I don't understand why you're so upset about such a small thing. I thought we were friends.
RedeeIVIedSinnerI/We
I’m 100% certain that at least half the mods do not have Faith or the Holy Spirit.
inquirer 6mo ago#6390519
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chudscantsneedXi/Simp
Comrade Modscantsneed of the rdrama Committee to the Communist Party of China
DickButtKiss 6mo ago#6388850
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You might want to stop using rdrama else be doomed to heck
Au contraire, if and when the wayward souls of rdrama can be brought to touch grass the kind of nihilistic disenchantment with our prevailing secular ideology is probably prime territory for evangelizing kinda like ended up doing. On other websites we're ghettoized or /
!Christians pray for our political extremists, incels, and neets that they may be brought to the light of Christ.
!Catholics it's Ascension Sunday in the liturgical calendar here praise be and Happy Mother's Day as well
@Shellshock stand with Israel, but anthropic principle states that if @Shellshock didn't stand with Israel @Shellshock wouldn't be able too not stand with Israel because they would have nuked @Shellshock from orbit
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I want to type out a long comment on how crazy it is that besides the general habitability conditions we also have a strong magnetosphere that protects us from shit like this
But then I remembered anthropic principle and I guess that makes it less crazy
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What's that, bb G?
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The conditions of the universe and our local environment are exceedingly improbable to have occurred.
Basically there's a 1 in 10^50 chance of a universe to emerge from a big bang with constants that make it possible for things to work so we can live. Things like the gravitational force being too strong or too weak (and it's already oddly weak compared to other forces) mean that shit would be fricked from inception.
Counter arguments include: All those universes exist but we can only exist in the one that works, hence us being here. Which is still kinda weird that life would be that exceedingly rare, but maybe there's sentient dustclouds in other universes. If Everett's MWH is even valid.
Also the Axis of Evil is interesting (even the Wiki neurodivergent rationalist astroturfing crew wasn't able to bury it):
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This is suppose to be insightful? Because it's kind of r-slurred.
How does this BIPOC not know what a point of reference is? If we were on another planet, it would also seem like everything is either moving toward or away from us.
@Geralt_of_Uganda, what the heck is going on here? It's all nonsense!
!ifrickinglovescience, help!
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It's kinda weird because it's been observed several different times in different ways and still hasn't been resolved conclusively, but there's no obvious reason whybit aligns with the plane of the ecliptic. It doesn't prove anything other than possibly maybe the (((universe))) is anisotropic
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Isn't the universe anisotropic? The cosmic microwave background radiation (whatever the acryonym is) certainly is not uniformly dispersed. We've mapped out superclusters, and those aren't uniformly dispersed either.
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The universe is not homogenous on smaller scales, but according to the standard cosmological model, it should be be isotropic and homogeneous statistically on scales larger than 250 million light years.
Should be is doing some serious lifting there
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Oh, but isn't that a useful basic assumption? It doesn't necessarily have to be true, but assuming it's true, then "such and such" follows. I guess the other clowns are people attacking the basic principles and wanting to supplant them with their own?
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Yeah, it's what the generally accepted model tells us.
The axis of evil guys aren't for the most part attacking the standard model, just going over observations and saying "why is it like this when it should look like this?"
There are agendacels who want to prove their pet theory but I think most people doing research just want to understand it better
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!chuds
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Nah bro !chuds are back
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Oh yeah some people go absolutely schizo with it, especially if you start invoking it to prove or disprove existence of higher powers. I'm not even gonna pretend that I understand what kind of argument that Barrow neighbor is trying to make (not because it's stupid but because I'm stupid), the explanation I put in my other comment is the principle in its simplest form I think
Wheeler had absolutely crazy ideas though that built onto this though, but it's genuine lovecraftian nonsense that I barely comprehend, such as that the universe necessarily generates itself through the act of observing itself, and argues that this explains the observation problem in QM
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I hate it when the anthropomorphizing neighbors enter the room. The universe is a big collection of dirt and light. It can't do anything in the conscious sense. It's like people don't know what "act" means.
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It's kinda fricked up because despite how much of modern science is built on this concept, I'm not sure if there's a single agreed upon definition of what "observation" even means besides some handwavy "information about an event leaks... somewhere"
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dont particles "observe" each other when they are affected by each other in any capacity? where is this sapient thought thing coming from?
why is a planet existing with the qualities of earth mean sentience might be pre-determined? cant it be just because the universe is really big with a lot of combinations of any possible outcome happening somewhere? of course sentient life would exist in place where its possible, rather than not??
why would the fundamental laws of physics being the way they are considered a rare luck for us? arent they set in stone?
@TheOverSeether im going insaaaane BIPOCman help!
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@PoonstaryerCaribeaner youre in my pbs space time crew what do you think
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There's just so many things in physics that don't make sense. It's more likely that the world is a simulation run on a Dyson Sphere than the universe works like we think it does.
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Youre right, everyone who says otherwise is either religious or some I-fricking-love-science-cel who needs to believe in a higher power out there somewhere BUT NOT GOD!!! (religious but even more r-slurred)
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maybe I'm r-slurred but my understanding is the "observer effect" is different from how things work on a quantum scale when it comes to things "collapsing".
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it's a google away u r-slur
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@NO WHAT CHANNEL IS TNT
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There's barely any dirt, you anthropic r-slur. The universe is a fart.
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THAT'S THE SMALL PART OF IT YOU CAN observe...
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Yeah yeah, and dark matter, and dark energy, and my dark anus.
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!moidmoment
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This is all worthless philosophy, our systems plane lining up with things in the CMB is almost neat but is guaranteed to just be due to our horribly uninformed readings on all that so far away, like the neighbor says himself at the very end.
we don't even know what a hole do with the """"data"""" it sucks up into it's bussyhole horizon and those things are like right next to us everywhere compared to CMB.
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This sounds like an !anime plot
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Ask those r-slurs to reconcile their shit with Blue/Red Shift, Standard Model of Particle Physics, Relativity, or Quantum Field Theory.
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All a bunch of frickin crap
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that would be obvious, but that's not what that alignment between CMB and solar system "plane" of rotations is about
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What's it about, soosy?
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https://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.5915
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This is a really interesting comment but I think it's needlessly complex for explaining the Anthropic Principle
the simplest way to explain it is, for us to exist we have to exist somewhere that can support life, so it makes sense that the Earth/universe seems fine-tuned. If it couldn't support life we wouldn't be here talking about it. Maybe a trillion universes came and went before one finally popped up that could have conscious life in it.
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wish this comment was here when i started reading this thread because the parent comment threw me in for a loop
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It still sounds like a meaningless position.
It "makes sense" that our solar system is "finely tuned" [coincidentally] for supporting life because the argument is tautological.
There's nothing wrong with tautological arguments, unless they're meaningless or don't offer anything insightful. With economics, we basically assume people do things the best they can with what they got, so if we see someone spending $80 on gas when there's a gas station nearby selling it for $60, then we assume that rational expectations still holds true. There's something else going on to explain their behavior. It's tautological but useful. I'm not seeing that with the anthropic principle.
Someone else described it as such:
It's tautological but not insightful.
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The point is some crucicux will always come in and be like ”The odds of [life] occurring have to be so small that it's more statistically logical that God is more likely than anything else.”
But we don't really have any reason to think we know what the probability of life arising might be. Any environment we can observe necessarily is one we can survive in, and we can deduce nothing about how likely or unlikely that is from observing it.
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Okay, that's making more sense.
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Don't research his views on QM and his Participatory Universe Hypothesis if you want to retain your sanity
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this all seems unfalsifiable
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I like scientists that weren't disproven, okay?
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Interesting. Makes sense
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It's like this meme
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Sounds r-slurred and I'm not even a religion strag
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WAP to FAP
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Your environment (for this example planet, but can be extended to other things like universe in general) is quite unique when compared to an average environment, as it is capable of supporting your existence. Taking it at face value you might say that the odds of you being alive right here right now on a livable planet are really small and that you're #blessed, because you don't believe yourself to be unique in any way and as such expect to see the "average" slice of the universe- a barren wasteland- which you don't. The anthropic principle (at least in one of its formulations, there's strong vs weak and different people phrase it differently, and there are also legitimate arguments against it) states that actually it is all but certain that you find yourself alive and on a planet that supports you being alive, as you shouldn't expect to observe the average slice of the universe. Instead you should expect to see the average slice of the universe that is capable of supporting observers, ie you. In other words- you aren't observing the average part of the universe as one might assume, but instead what the average observer in said universe is observing.
You might say "no shit, it's obvious that I don't observe environments in which I cannot exist in the first place", but I want to solidify the point with an example:
Say you live on a discrete, 1-dimensional ribbon and you're measuring some local, binary quantity which can be either 1 or 0. Say there are two theories- one that predicts that your measurements should randomly return 1 or 0, and second that predicts you should only ever measure 1.
So you run your measurement, move one step forward, run it again and repeat so 10 times until you have a string of 10 results, which happen to be 1111111111. What conclusions can you draw from it? Without anthropic principle, one would say that this is evidence for theory 1, as the likelihood of getting 10 ones in a row is 0.5^10=very small under theory 1, but the chance of getting ten ones under theory two is 100%. However, the TRVE ANTHROPIC TRVTHER would make a different argument- since you are not looking at a "random" slice of the universe, you cannot just treat each result in this string as an independent probability. Instead, it is a conditional probability under the conditions that allow you to observe it. Perhaps life can only exist in the part of the universe where this thing you're measuring takes the value of 1. And then, to gauge the probabilities, instead of treating each observation as independent you work with the whole string and have to ask yourself- if you performed this measurement at every point in the universe (assumed infinite for this example) and got an infinitely long binary string, what is the probability that at some point it would contain the sequence 1111111111 which you measured. And then you realize that under both theories 1 and 2, given infinite string, the sequence 1111111111 appears infinitely many times, and as such both theories are equally likely and hence you haven't extracted any information from your experiments.
This is a bit of a wacky explanation as I'm not an astrophysicist so perhaps someone from !physics can factcheck this and give a better example. !math conditional probabilities starting 3rd paragraph so make sure to tell me if I fricked it up and it actually doesn't work like that
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All those words to say, the heckin plane didn't come back after being hit where it was weakest.
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Yea cause I demonstrated the predictive power of the principle
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No, you pseuded it up and wrote a dozen paragraphs of nonsense.
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I presented a simplified scenario to demonstrate the argument (which isn't even mine, I stole it), what are you on about?
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Anything above 5 sentences is reddit, sorry, I don't make the rules.
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You fricked it up and it actually doesn't work like that. The anthropic principle only applies when the experiment and underlying phenomena are related in the ability to perform the experiment.
Suppose I have a phenomena and an experiment which attempts to prove or disprove that phenomena. If being able to correctly perform the experiment requires the phenomena to exist already, then the experiment cannot give evidence the phenomena existed, as the fact that the experiment took place to begin with is proof of the phenomena.
Example: If I write a computer program which attempts to check if the computer is on, then it must always say yes.
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This sounds utterly backwards. Just perform the experiment. This sounds a lot like metaphysical nonsense where people chase their tails worrying about things that might possibly exist but have no real relevance to us.
The program exists outside of the computer, like a sysadmin checking on down machines. It's exactly like being an external observer. These people have an issue with that?
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The question the anthropic principle is trying to answer isn't "is it statistically unlikely that the universe contains life" - that question isn't really answerable, as we don't have access to other universes to compare our own to. The question it answers is "why is our universe habitable?" - if it weren't, then we wouldn't be here to ask the question.
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Yeah, we exist. There has to be more to it because that doesn't seem very insightful or useful.
Whoooooaaaaaaaa, man.
Sure, it is. Don't arbitrarily restrict yourself to other universes.
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But I included that in my thought experiment: it is potential that your ability to perform a measurement of the hypothetical quantity is dependent on that quantity being 1. I just didn't state it as something that is known a priori and instead framed it as a probability from the viewpoint of observer who lacks this information
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Sure, but there isn't evidence for that being the case. You said it was a local phenomena, but the existence of the Earth's magnetic field isn't.
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okay after reading paragraphs 3 and 4 i get what youre saying about your observations not being exemplary of universe as a whole because it only shows you a slice of it where the conditions of your existence were met.
still dont get the other comment about paralel universes doe
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Impressive. Normally people with such severe developmental disabilities struggle to write much more than a sentence or two. He really has exceded our expectations for the writing portion. Sadly the coherency of his writing, along with his abilities in the social skills and reading portions, are far behind his peers with similar disabilities.
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It's the idea that in order for something to be observed it must allow for observers to exist. So in this case he is saying it's crazy how much protects us from dangers in the universe. But when you consider that only places like this could support life it isn't that crazy. Likely all planets supporting life have similar conditions. Tbh it doesn't actually say much. It just takes "WOW we are so lucky!" to "We exist therefore of course everything lines up with allowing us to exist." which kind of kills the awe-inspiring vibe.
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Really? Life still seems extremely unlikely regardless of the principle, so I don't see how that changes anything. I also don't understand how the existence or non-existence of observers affects the probability of a planet sustaining some kind of interesting life.
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This is not my area of expertise but I think it exists to argue against another idea in theoretical physics which is that until we have more data points we should assume our situation is average. For example Earth supports carbon based life and since that is the only reference for life we have it makes sense to assume carbon based life is the norm, as statically we are most likely average. You could expand that to say our solar system is average, galaxy average, universe average. The anthropic principal challenges that and basically changes it to, it makes sense that we are in an average situation for a situation that supports life. And we cannot say if the situation that supports life is common or not.
But like I said I am no theoretical physicist. I might be wrong, but that's how I understand it.
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... Well, yeah, but why invoke a principle when you can just harp on about sample bias? What does it really add if anything?
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It's a mildly novel idea in theoretical physics. It's just a fancy sounding name for a factor to consider when trying to figure out how the universe works.
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Hm. I don't like it.
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So we either exist and observe a possible universe which allows us to observe it, or a different universe exists where we can't exist and thus can't observe it. In this case, it's crazy that Earth has all these things to support and protect life, until you realize that you are only able to think about this if the Earth has all of that stuff. Otherwise you don't exist.
I remember independently reaching this kind of conclusion after playing too much Spore when I was 12. It's not a very deep thought, imo. It's just kinda like “ah, yeah, obvious when you think about it.” Like realizing how every single other people has an entire life and set of circumstances for the first time.
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But that's not really insightful.
Universes don't allow anything because they can't act.
The existence of another universe that we can't observe doesn't really affect the rarity of life on our own.
This all seems like really silly word games from people who read the wrong philosophers.
Okay. So what?
Yeah. How does that affect the probability of a planet containing life like our own?
It's still crazy because it seems like everything around us is dead.
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I'm not an astrophysicist so whatever insight the thought could provide is likely wasted on me.
It's basically “I think, therefore I am in a universe that has the conditions required for thoughts to exist.”
Edit: I don't really mean “allow” in an anthropomorphic sense, but rather that the universe exists in a specific way that is required for me to exist.
Edit to your edit:
It proves other intelligent life existing has non-zero probability instead of zero probability. That's all.
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"Yes, it could literally just be random chance that lead to humanity's existence"
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It's called God
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Sorry man, I don't mean anything against you in particular, but you're like the third person to say that invoking anthropic principle is denying God. Why? I don't understand. I never made that claim. I think it's a bad argument against existence of God for many reasons. I'm a member of !catholics ffs. So why is the first reaction of so many people to claim that this is blasphemy? Anthropic principle says nothing about existence of God, and I didn't use it to disprove it either, I don't even see the relation
Is this because everyones exposure to it is through atheist debates or something like that? Just because it's a poor case against teleological argument doesn't mean that it's worthless, it can be applied in other spheres too. It only means that people who invoke the anthropic principle in attempts to disprove God misunderstand what it really says and misuse it
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this neighbor said 3 words to you
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Yeah I know.
Call me assblasted, I just don't get it
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Dear @Geralt_of_Uganda,
I'm sorry I upset you. I didn't mean to. It was really just a joke. I thought you could take a joke - but I guess I was wrong. I've been teased about being a Christian but I never felt the need to tell my ping group about it and longpost on rdrama. Maybe you're just over-reacting? I don't understand why you're so upset about such a small thing. I thought we were friends.
@Doc
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Good. I hope you understand now that I will argue with anyone over anything
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Not recognizing Arthur copypasta
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Gigger
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you ghosted my reply discussing this but thought to respond to "Gigger"?
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Sorry man, there's a lot to say but I'm very tired, had a long day. Don't take it personally, I'll get back to you
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don't fret man people are taking this astrophysical concept too seriously. i didnt even consider religion.
go jerk off in the shower instead
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Yea I got too serious about it too and idk why
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!
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GOD? More like Get On Deez nutz
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God exists, the anthropic principle is atheist cope
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You might want to stop using rdrama else be doomed to heck
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Au contraire, if and when the wayward souls of rdrama can be brought to touch grass the kind of nihilistic disenchantment with our prevailing secular ideology is probably prime territory for evangelizing kinda like ended up doing. On other websites we're ghettoized or /
!Christians pray for our political extremists, incels, and neets that they may be brought to the light of Christ.
!Catholics it's Ascension Sunday in the liturgical calendar here praise be and Happy Mother's Day as well
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@Shellshock stand with Israel, but anthropic principle states that if @Shellshock didn't stand with Israel @Shellshock wouldn't be able too not stand with Israel because they would have nuked @Shellshock from orbit
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very well put
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