It never stops fascinating me how otherwise reasonable people are ready to believe in literal magic just because we’ve renamed it. Sequences have called out this failure mode explicitly and yet here we.
If I say that psychic power ofsoul granted to us by God systematically protects our civilization from extinction, who would treat me seriously? Clearly this is just some New-Age quasi-religious nonsense.
But what if, instead, I say that anthropical effects ofconsciousness granted to us by metaphysics systematically protects our civilization from extinction? Now suddenly even some reductive materialists, who were supposed to know better, are nodding their heads, while considering this possibility.
If instead I say: “Anthropic Shadow and Strong Self-Sampling Assumption” nearly noone notices any problem, even though the substance of the claim keeps being same. Funny, right?
Notice your confusion. If some theory implies that we live in a fantasy world of unbroken prophesy… then with all likelihood this theory is wrong.
However, if the SSSA is invalid, then we could just build AGI and banally die soon afterwards, as the doomers expect.
Basically this. Very boring, I know. I would also prefer if reality optimised our entertainment more.
There is at least one anthropic miracle that we can constantly observe: life on Earth has not been destroyed in the last 4 billion years by asteroids, supervolcanoes, or runaway global warming or cooling, despite changes in Solar luminosity. According to one geologist, the atmospheric stability is the most surprising aspect of this.
Meanwhile, A. Scherbakov noted that the history of the Earth’s atmosphere is strangely correlated with the solar luminosity and the history of life, which could be best explained by anthropic fine-tuning, in the article “Anthropic principle in cosmology and geology” (Shcherbakov, 1999). In particular, he wrote that the atmospheric temperature was closely preserved in the range of 10–40 °C, and on four occasions the Earth came close to a “snowball” steady-state, and on four occasions came close to turning into a water vapor greenhouse where the temperature could reach of hundreds of degrees centigrade. However, these life-ending outcomes were prevented by last-minute events such as volcanic eruptions or covering of volcanoes in the ocean by water, which regulates the CO2 level following an eruption. Such “miracles” are best explained by observation selection effects. link
You can treat is as a miracle, but don’t pretend that observation selection effects explains it any better than divine intervention. Otherwise you may feel as if you actually became less confused about the problem just by using different terminology.
It never stops fascinating me how otherwise reasonable people are ready to believe in literal magic just because we’ve renamed it. Sequences have called out this failure mode explicitly and yet here we.
If I say that psychic power of soul granted to us by God systematically protects our civilization from extinction, who would treat me seriously? Clearly this is just some New-Age quasi-religious nonsense.
But what if, instead, I say that anthropical effects of consciousness granted to us by metaphysics systematically protects our civilization from extinction? Now suddenly even some reductive materialists, who were supposed to know better, are nodding their heads, while considering this possibility.
If instead I say: “Anthropic Shadow and Strong Self-Sampling Assumption” nearly noone notices any problem, even though the substance of the claim keeps being same. Funny, right?
Notice your confusion. If some theory implies that we live in a fantasy world of unbroken prophesy… then with all likelihood this theory is wrong.
Basically this. Very boring, I know. I would also prefer if reality optimised our entertainment more.
There is at least one anthropic miracle that we can constantly observe: life on Earth has not been destroyed in the last 4 billion years by asteroids, supervolcanoes, or runaway global warming or cooling, despite changes in Solar luminosity. According to one geologist, the atmospheric stability is the most surprising aspect of this.
You can treat is as a miracle, but don’t pretend that observation selection effects explains it any better than divine intervention. Otherwise you may feel as if you actually became less confused about the problem just by using different terminology.