Intelligent Design

[Fudbucker]

It is a bit "hilarious" to try to rest one's case on the Fermi Paradox, though, given that there are many viable solutions to it, even assuming that our universe is "teeming" with life.

I wouldn't rest my case on it, but it does beg a rather obvious question: where is everyone? Of course there are reasons why we might not be observing them, but the prima facie idea at work in Fermi's paradox is that we should have observed some evidence of all this teeming life by now: radio signals, observations of large-scale engineering projects, past signs of colonization waves, Von Neumann probes, etc.

It's odd that we haven't.

 

[Fudbucker]

That's the closest that you've come to accurately assessing the analogy! Progress! There's still a bit more, though, such as the implication that there's likely more than one possible shape that the puddle could be and still be wondering about how it fit so well.



The puddle represents any beings in a similar position to humans, not just humans, after all. A similar view is quite expectable to arise in pretty much any intelligent species.



Ahh. You just don't like accepting uncomfortable labels, no matter how accurate. That's not a failure of the analogy, though.



Sure. Of note, though, it does not imply that all puddles are sapient. Rather, it simply points out that that all sapient puddles would be in a position where they find that the hole perfectly matches the puddle.



Again, your attempt to reframe things just doesn't work. This is, again, not a failure of the analogy, given that you're trying to invoke entirely different principles, and ones that are not validly backed up, at that. Again, a sample size of 1 does not give sufficient data to reasonably make any conclusions about a range of potential values. The "scientific" calculations that you want to invoke are the products of attempts to figure out how things work and the overwhelming majority of the attempts are simply wrong, and we don't know which, if any, of the current options are reasonable to actually consider to be right.

Got any real objections?

Ah, the puddle analogy. I have my own take on this:

If you find yourself living in uniquely shaped irregular puddles, it's not significant. If you find yourself living in uniquely shaped irregular puddles that look like the numerals 314, it's significant.

The universe is like the latter. There are too many coincidences to hand-waved away. The reason multiverse theory is so popular is it doesn't matter how uniquely shaped the puddles are. If there are enough universes, eventually, some puddles will spell out "eat at Joe's". And some worlds will have casinos carved from natural erosion.

 

[Fudbucker]

I shouldn't have said 'thinking'. 'Presuming' would have been better word.

The Fermi Paradox has been widely criticised. Also BTW, Fermi never wrote any papers proposing this paradox.

'[I]The Fermi paradox has been criticized as being based on an inappropriate use of propositional logic. According to a 1985 paper by Robert Freitas, when recast as a statement in modal logic, the paradox no longer exists, and carries no probative value.'[/I]

The Hart Tipler argument expands on Fermi Paradox taking the seemingly obvious fact they are not here as evidence that a premise ‘‘technological extraterrestrials exist’’ must be false, because if they did exist, the colonization argument leads to the conclusion they are here,

This is a reductio ad absurdum argument. It depends on every statement being true—yet the argument consists of many speculations which are not known to be true. While we can envision the possibility of interstellar travel, the presumption of it is a leap.

All true, but there is that instinctive question: where is everyone?

 

[acbytesla]

All true, but there is that instinctive question: where is everyone?

Probably a long long long long long way away.

You never want to say something is impossible given what man has accomplished in the last 200 years. Nevertheless the possibility of interstellar travel is a projection of our imagination and nothing more. This is kind of the problem I see associated with the idea of a manned mission to Mars. As much as I love the idea and I do love the idea, I think given our current state of technology it is a suicide mission with little chance of survival.

We would be much wiser to wait until our technology has solved many of the technnlogical problems first

 

[Fast Eddie B]

Bare assertion fallacy...

Thank you.

I fully got the concept, but did not know it had a name.

 

[acbytesla]

Thank you.

I fully got the concept, but did not know it had a name.

Ipse dixi

The fallacy of defending a proposition by baldly asserting that it is true without proof.

 

[Delvo]

if the puddle was actually intelligent enough to know the laws of physics and how those laws applied to it, it would "know" that whatever the shape of the hole (another universe with a different attributes) it would be filled by a different puddle. The implication is that any hole gets filled by any puddle, and that it is possible for all holes to have puddles.

Our universe is not like a hole. It is more like a a sharp steep mountain ridge, and the human race is more like a massive boulder that finds itself balanced on the ridge. Assuming the boulder is also intelligent and can assess the situation it finds itself in, it says "If anything changed even slightly, I would not be here." And it would say that it is highly unlikely that there are any other boulders that would find themselves in that situation.

What theists are actually doing with fine tuning and other such arguments is worse than either of those analogies suggests. Nobody actually ever came up with the intelligent creator as an answer to the question of why the universe exists in its known form. Over the ages, our ancestors...

• concocted a bunch of smaller, more limited gods for other reasons...
• then gradually blew up one of them (or two or more, which they then merged into one) to be greater than the rest of the otherwise still similar gods and absorb parts of their roles relative to different parts of the world...
• then eventually got around to claiming that those other gods weren't just inferior but hadn't even existed, and doing a sloppy job of trying to edit the rest out of the myths that they'd already always been in all along...
• then extended that god of all roles within the world into a god over the whole world from the outside...
• then started re-interpreting their old fable of creation by modification of existing parts into a fable of conjuring those parts from nothing instead even though that isn't what the text says...
• then started losing the power with which they'd spent all these ages forcing people to act like they believed this crazy nonsense...
• then decided that they needed to start awkwardly flailing around for some way to make this god sound less ridiculous to deal with more and more open criticism that they were finally getting...
• then finally started settling on a general set of solutions which all boil down to pretending to redefine their god as something it had never actually been, something carefully designed to be indistinguishable from a non-existent fictional character by stripping it of the defining traits that had ever made it "God" anyway...
• then started carting these pseudo-intellectual arguments for a god of nothingness & vagueness around in debates, for the completely different mythological god that they actually still believed in to hide behind as if arguments for the former could possibly ever support the latter...
• then started pretending that their favorite pseudo-intellectual arguments for a god of nothingness & vagueness had ever been the reason why they believed in their god or why anybody ever came up with the idea of gods in the first place, as if nobody were aware of where the gods had really come from.

The equivalent for the puddle or boulder would be if the puddle/boulder were not an individual thinking of the idea of a creator because of its circumstances, but a whole population of some sort of microbes which started off with silly mythology, then open debates over that silly mythology, then eventually claims about their collective status as a boulder/puddle to try to rescue that silly mythology from itself instead of just leaving it behind.

 

[Aridas]

I wouldn't rest my case on it, but it does beg a rather obvious question: where is everyone? Of course there are reasons why we might not be observing them, but the prima facie idea at work in Fermi's paradox is that we should have observed some evidence of all this teeming life by now: radio signals, observations of large-scale engineering projects, past signs of colonization waves, Von Neumann probes, etc.

It's odd that we haven't.

It does make for an interesting question, but... like with any such question, it's actually a collection of various smaller questions. Radio signals, for example, seem to not actually be all that "strong," contrary to some science fiction. The "normal" bleeding of radio signals would likely be relatively difficult to detect by the time they reached the edge of our solar system, let alone the vast distances to get to other solar systems... and yes, this does undermine the value of the SETI project, though not eliminate it entirely. As for large-scale engineering projects, I think that you're overestimating the techniques that we have and time that we've had to use them, in addition to the very real questions of the actual feasibility of such things. We might be able to detect a Dyson's sphere while it's being built, for example, but the sheer amount of resources that it would take to actually make one would be generally be quite prohibitive. As for colonization waves and Von Neumann probes, interstellar travel has yet to be actually shown to be meaningfully feasible, even in the slower forms, so saying that it's odd that we haven't detected other beings that did so yet in the very relatively short period that we've actually had where we might feasibly have been able to is jumping the gun quite a bit. We've advanced a lot and swiftly, but we've only really barely begun to start to reach the range where detection might start to become reasonable without a huge stroke of luck or them directly visiting and announcing themselves to us.

Ah, the puddle analogy. I have my own take on this:

If you find yourself living in uniquely shaped irregular puddles, it's not significant. If you find yourself living in uniquely shaped irregular puddles that look like the numerals 314, it's significant.

The universe is like the latter. There are too many coincidences to hand-waved away. The reason multiverse theory is so popular is it doesn't matter how uniquely shaped the puddles are. If there are enough universes, eventually, some puddles will spell out "eat at Joe's". And some worlds will have casinos carved from natural erosion.

Maybe, maybe not, though it is worth noting that your puddle example touches on an entirely different point than the standard one. That point, though, is addressed with the point that a sample size of 1 is entirely insufficient to make much of any meaningful estimation of probability or significance. Even if we were living in a puddle that looked like the numerals 314, without anything else to compare it to we have no way to tell if it actually is odd or not. As noted a couple times earlier in this thread, though, the multiverse theories are as proposals to directly address other issues. That they may also be used to address suggestions of fine-tuning is incidental, but convenient.

This is kind of the problem I see associated with the idea of a manned mission to Mars. As much as I love the idea and I do love the idea, I think given our current state of technology it is a suicide mission with little chance of survival.

We would be much wiser to wait until our technology has solved many of the technnlogical problems first

I'll disagree slightly. I think that it's feasible with our current technology, much like I considered settling the moon to be feasible, and wouldn't need to be a suicide mission if done right. On the other hand, I also consider them to be a long, long way from being much more than resource-intensive and entirely symbolic gestures, at present.

 

[Pixel42]

Ah, the puddle analogy. I have my own take on this:

If you find yourself living in uniquely shaped irregular puddles, it's not significant. If you find yourself living in uniquely shaped irregular puddles that look like the numerals 314, it's significant.

The universe is like the latter. There are too many coincidences to hand-waved away.

And if the hole was bigger or smaller by even a single atom at any point at all it would not be exactly the right shape for the puddle. Far too many coincidences to hand wave away ....

There is no reason to label our particular hole "regular" rather than "irregular". For all we know there are different combinations of values for the constants (or even entirely different constants) which would produce universes which are far more hospitable to sapient life of some kind than this one is. If there is a multiverse, this could be one of the universes less hospitable to sapience than average.

The reason multiverse theory is so popular is it doesn't matter how uniquely shaped the puddles are.

No, that's not why the multiverse theory is popular - if indeed it is; lots of people seem to absolutely hate it.

 

[PartSkeptic]

Ah, the puddle analogy. I have my own take on this:

If you find yourself living in uniquely shaped irregular puddles, it's not significant. If you find yourself living in uniquely shaped irregular puddles that look like the numerals 314, it's significant.

The universe is like the latter. There are too many coincidences to hand-waved away. The reason multiverse theory is so popular is it doesn't matter how uniquely shaped the puddles are. If there are enough universes, eventually, some puddles will spell out "eat at Joe's". And some worlds will have casinos carved from natural erosion.

We have some progress. I like it.

One reply was that there is only one puddle so there is nothing to compare it with. My answer is that even if that is the case, the unusual shape would be something to wonder about. After all, it is a very intelligent puddle to be able to ponder such questions.

The other reply was that it would still be exactly the right shape - not one atom more (but of course it could be a whole lot of atoms less to the point of no puddle at all). This misses your point that the puddle should be thinking why the puddle is the remarkable shape it is. And a puddle can flow into another proving that multiple puddles can exist.

I also agree that the multiverse hypothesis does deal with the question of a possible WHY seemingly random numbers are what they are. The problem is that the only support for multiverses is the imagination of people who think that parallel worlds/universes could exist.

The multiverse idea is unfalsifiable. The God idea is at least based on observation and deduction - supported by the many people who have experienced the supernatural and God. The evidence is at least there - whether it is scientific proof or not is another matter. It is possible that it might be proved if God chooses to reveal himself.

 

[Pixel42]

We have some progress.

What we have is someone else making exactly the same mistake you are.

 

[Darat]

It is not "hilarious" to think that, if the universe is teeming with life, we should have encountered/heard something. See Fermi Paradox.

There is no "should" about it.

 

[Darat]

...snip...

This is a reductio ad absurdum argument. It depends on every statement being true—yet the argument consists of many speculations which are not known to be true. While we can envision the possibility of interstellar travel, the presumption of it is a leap.

It's an interesting "thought experiment" but it shouldn't be taken as more than that.

What we do know is that 1) the universe is extremely hostile to life such as us, 2) despite our ardent wishes there is no faster than light travel possible for life such as us in our universe.

1 & 2 are more than adequate to explain why we aren't overflowing with aliens walking around.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

The basis of the Fermi Paradox is another case of Big Numbers.
But it is based on unsubstantiated premises.

Basically, it envisions the universe as a giant petri dish in which bacterial colonies can spring up at various points and grow exponentially from there. In such a scenario we would indeed expect colonies to encounter each other within a certain timeframe.

But that isn't the way things are.

A more apt description would be tiny petri-dish boats swimming in a sea of sulphuric acid.

 

[MikeG]

........ the only support for multiverses is the imagination of people who think that parallel worlds/universes could exist.

The multiverse idea is unfalsifiable........

Do you really know both of these statements to be true?

My understanding, and that is minimal, derived only from a few articles in New Scientist, is that multiverses were first uncovered by mathematicians, not dreamt up by astrophysicists. Their putative existence is therefore hinted at in the numbers of this universe, and don't reside solely or primarily in the imagination of anyone. As such, when further number (resulting from real world discoveries) can be fed into the computations, their potential or putative existence can be falsified.

.....The God idea is at least based on observation and deduction........

Sorry, what? You have just made an argument about the unfalsifiability of a minor scientific aside, and in the next breath mention god. Do you know how ridiculous this sounds?

 

[Donn]

Ah, the puddle analogy...If you find yourself living in uniquely shaped irregular puddles that look like the numerals 314, it's significant.

(Not puddles, but I can only produce one near-miracle per day.)

Of course, if you insist on carved Roman Numerals, then you've invented a Roman to carve them before pouring the puddle in, and so have simply begun a recursion.

The universe is like the latter. There are too many coincidences to hand-waved away.

If you do not like waving your hand, come out and say it: what's your explanation? Why leave it vague? You always leave it vague.

 

[Donn]

You have just made an argument about the unfalsifiability of a minor scientific aside, and in the next breath mention god. Do you know how ridiculous this sounds?

How can he not, by now? All I can conclude is that it's his schtick and he's schticking with it.

 

[acbytesla]

I'll disagree slightly. I think that it's feasible with our current technology, much like I considered settling the moon to be feasible, and wouldn't need to be a suicide mission if done right. On the other hand, I also consider them to be a long, long way from being much more than resource-intensive and entirely symbolic gestures, at present.

Fair enough, I think the last estimate I read was about 1.5 years to reach Mars. So we would have to plan for a 3 year trip. Seems like we would require a substantial payload to supply 2 people for that long as well as enough fuel to enter and exit Mars' atmosphere.

 

[Belz...]

One chooses the arguments they prefer according to their belief systems, and there is no scientific or logical proof as to which one is correct.

Nice attempt to equivocate. Unfortunately for you, one side has the evidence, and it isn't yours.

 

[Dave Rogers]

My understanding, and that is minimal, derived only from a few articles in New Scientist, is that multiverses were first uncovered by mathematicians, not dreamt up by astrophysicists.

Mine is that the concept of the multiverse, as we're using it here, stems from the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. Any time a measurement of a particle is made, the result of that measurement cannot be exactly predicted, but the probability of a particular result can be evaluated. The question is, therefore, taking the example of two alternative results each with a 50% probability, why do we observe one result and not the other, given that either is equally possible? The many worlds interpretation of QM suggests that in reality both are observed, but in different branches of the evolution of the universe; in effect, the universe splits into branches at that point. Mathematically speaking it arises from the Schrodinger equation, and its advantage is that it removes the need for the collapse of the wavefunction when a measurement is made, and the accompanying requirement that "measurement" be defined (or some other definition be created of the point at which the wavefunction collapses). This interpretation predates the argument from fine tuning, and is therefore quite certainly not a response to it; however, it would be consistent with one sense in which the argument from fine tuning would be groundless, because physical constants that could take different values would result in universes that contained all possible combinations of physical constants. However, even this assumes that physical constants could take different values to the ones we observe, which is by no means established with any certainty.

But it's certainly false that multiverse theory was first generated as a response to the argument from fine tuning; simple causality refutes that argument.

Dave