There’s a much simpler problem with Cold War-like anthropic reasoning: it requires unjustifiable assumptions about universe-selection priors. It’s generally true that with any Bayesian reasoning you run into trouble if you have a bad prior: in the sense of the map diverging from the territory on evidence updates, and testable predictions coming up false revealing when your prior is leading you astray. But with antropic explanations we only have one data point—that we already exist—and are incapible of making testable predictions. So we are unable to know if our prior is accurate or not, and are completely unable to differentiate between any consistent anthropic explanation which permits our existence.
Anthropic reasoning is useful is one sense only: ruling out universes where our existence is an absolute impossibility. Why are physical constants set exactly right such as to allow formation of atoms? Because without chemistry we couldn’t exist. Beyond that invocation of the anthropic prinicple is useless, and it should raise red flags for any accomplished rationalist.
There’s a much simpler problem with Cold War-like anthropic reasoning: it requires unjustifiable assumptions about universe-selection priors. It’s generally true that with any Bayesian reasoning you run into trouble if you have a bad prior: in the sense of the map diverging from the territory on evidence updates, and testable predictions coming up false revealing when your prior is leading you astray. But with antropic explanations we only have one data point—that we already exist—and are incapible of making testable predictions. So we are unable to know if our prior is accurate or not, and are completely unable to differentiate between any consistent anthropic explanation which permits our existence.
Anthropic reasoning is useful is one sense only: ruling out universes where our existence is an absolute impossibility. Why are physical constants set exactly right such as to allow formation of atoms? Because without chemistry we couldn’t exist. Beyond that invocation of the anthropic prinicple is useless, and it should raise red flags for any accomplished rationalist.