This is just a placeholder for something I should write based on my reading of Sean Carroll’s “The Big Picture” particularly chapter 36 on Fine Tuning. I’m still reading and almost finished, having posted 2 or 3 reflections so far. Whether I ever do a full review or not, it is very good despite many details of disagreement on “Life, Meaning and the Universe“.
I really do like his poetic naturalism taking seriously “Ways of Talking” around emergence – as I wrote already – and his Bayesian “valuing your priors” logic throughout – the Wittgensteinian thought of “which idea does it make most sense to believe”. There are however, the usual problems for me when it comes to “consciousness” – ignoring 30+ years of Dennett after “Consciousness Explained” (1991) and the “Intentional Stance” (1987). For a physicist he has as open a take on consciousness and free-will as any, and stays close to the information<>entropy<>fitness-landscape thinking, though I’m not sure he makes a lot of progress on consciousness itself. I will come back to this once I’ve finished.
What did catch my eye was his discussion on Fine Tuning, the Anthropic Principle(s) and the Multiverse(s) in Chapter 36. A good elaboration clarifying the distinction between the multiverse and many-worlds ideas but feel he misses the “Anthropic Perspective”. Eye-catching because as I already mentioned, it was the political denial of anthropic problems with our fundamental view of physics – after Rick “Island” Ryals – that first drew me to Carroll. And incidentally it was Island gave me my best understanding of multiple sequential (real) universes, driven by cosmological constant and boundary conditions thinking. [Also in parallel our anthropic (psychological) perspective(s) in how we see and interact with the world is at the core of Iain McGilchrist’s work, mentioned in the previous post. It’s all connected.]
Anyway, for now, the Anthropic issues are worth some analysis … at some point.
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Post Notes:
Here Carroll in 3 hours of dialogue with Goff and Frankish has a section on Fine Tuning (as well as emergence generally):
Thanks to @seanmcarroll for patiently enduring three hours of discussion with @Philip_Goff and me on today’s Mind Chat. You can watch the recording here https://t.co/SccWSzj2aI pic.twitter.com/DajR6GkO3h
— Keith Frankish (@keithfrankish) November 11, 2021
And here, completely left-field, Hossenfelder finds Krauss “fun”. Connected because of the mention of “science ideology” – progress in itself!
I had great fun talking to @LKrauss1 some weeks ago, you can now listen to us here:https://t.co/NxgggLkdF7
— Sabine Hossenfelder (@skdh) November 14, 2021
And even “lefter” field?
Woke is when naivety is mistaken for wisdom.
What exactly is the difference between “progressive” and “naive beyond comprehension”? https://t.co/Op5NCrjvr8
— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) November 13, 2021
2 thoughts on “Poetic Naturalism Meets Fine Tuning”