That’s a very attractive scenario. But I don’t think ‘Someone had to be the first’ is sufficient to explain why we are the first. On your view, intelligent life takes some time to get going, but then is incredibly abundant for as long as stars and metals abound. On standard cosmological models, star formation will continue for some 100,000 billion years (or at minimum 1,000 billion years). Anthropically, our occurring only 14 billion years into our universe’s lifetime is then profoundly surprising. If a lot of intelligent life precedes us (and/or intelligent life is generically rare and will never be very abundant), then our location remains surprising, but a lot less so.
Your theory predicts what we see given that we evolved very early in our universe’s lifetime, but if we don’t build in our temporal location then it actually strongly predicts the opposite—that we’ll open our eyes and see a galaxy teeming with life, many tens or hundreds of billions of years after the beginning of the universe.
I don’t claim it’s sufficient, I just claim it’s possible. And while it’s true that most civilizations would see a galaxy teeming with life, somebody’s gotta be first.
Anything’s possible. If your claim is interesting, it’s because it’s probable, at least relative to its explanatory rivals.
The problem with ‘somebody’s gotta be first’ is that it’s either a fully general explanation or no explanation at all. Suppose you and a hundred billion of your friends are each assigned a distinct number between 1 and a hundred billion. You’re assigned the number 1. Should you dismiss this surprising outcome because ‘someone had to get 1’? No. Not without a lot of evidence that it’s a coincidence, anyway. The fact that someone had to get 1 only means that it was possible, on the terms on the game, for you to get 1. It doesn’t make that possibility, when it occurs, any less surprising or confusing. The goal of explaining our observations isn’t to show that they’re possible; it’s to show that they’re a lot more likely than they would have been in the absence of the explanans.
‘Someone had to win’ isn’t a full explanation on its own, no. (If it were, it would be a fully general explanation schema; ‘something had to happen’, for example, can explain any event.) Rather, ‘someone had to win’ is an explanation for an unlikely victory when you posit a large sample space. In most cases, selection bias will also play a role in the explanation—it will account for the prima facie salience or interestingness of the event.
If selection bias and the size of the sample space don’t help make you any less confused about why some X happened to you, then revisiting ‘someone had to X’ shouldn’t alleviate your confusion.
That’s a very attractive scenario. But I don’t think ‘Someone had to be the first’ is sufficient to explain why we are the first. On your view, intelligent life takes some time to get going, but then is incredibly abundant for as long as stars and metals abound. On standard cosmological models, star formation will continue for some 100,000 billion years (or at minimum 1,000 billion years). Anthropically, our occurring only 14 billion years into our universe’s lifetime is then profoundly surprising. If a lot of intelligent life precedes us (and/or intelligent life is generically rare and will never be very abundant), then our location remains surprising, but a lot less so.
Your theory predicts what we see given that we evolved very early in our universe’s lifetime, but if we don’t build in our temporal location then it actually strongly predicts the opposite—that we’ll open our eyes and see a galaxy teeming with life, many tens or hundreds of billions of years after the beginning of the universe.
I don’t claim it’s sufficient, I just claim it’s possible. And while it’s true that most civilizations would see a galaxy teeming with life, somebody’s gotta be first.
Anything’s possible. If your claim is interesting, it’s because it’s probable, at least relative to its explanatory rivals.
The problem with ‘somebody’s gotta be first’ is that it’s either a fully general explanation or no explanation at all. Suppose you and a hundred billion of your friends are each assigned a distinct number between 1 and a hundred billion. You’re assigned the number 1. Should you dismiss this surprising outcome because ‘someone had to get 1’? No. Not without a lot of evidence that it’s a coincidence, anyway. The fact that someone had to get 1 only means that it was possible, on the terms on the game, for you to get 1. It doesn’t make that possibility, when it occurs, any less surprising or confusing. The goal of explaining our observations isn’t to show that they’re possible; it’s to show that they’re a lot more likely than they would have been in the absence of the explanans.
I would be surprised because that violates the pigeonhole principle.
(Yeah, I’m a programmer.)
Isn’t “someone had to win” the rationalist explanation for most lottery winners?
‘Someone had to win’ isn’t a full explanation on its own, no. (If it were, it would be a fully general explanation schema; ‘something had to happen’, for example, can explain any event.) Rather, ‘someone had to win’ is an explanation for an unlikely victory when you posit a large sample space. In most cases, selection bias will also play a role in the explanation—it will account for the prima facie salience or interestingness of the event.
If selection bias and the size of the sample space don’t help make you any less confused about why some X happened to you, then revisiting ‘someone had to X’ shouldn’t alleviate your confusion.