Okay… I wasn’t going to downvote the post because this is the sort of thing I thought was marvelously clever when I was thirteen (so there’s hope) and you’d already been downvoted below posting threshold (so it’d be just punitive), but really?
You have provided a way the universe could be (the word my undergrad prof used for a universe with no causation was “Humeiform”, as opposed to “uniform”): there could be a lot of sub-universes arranged spatially in a single possible world, in which infinitely many universes instantiate every possible sequence of events.
You don’t have any way to explain why we should find ourselves in a sub-universe that seems to fall into miraculously well-regulated patterns, when the overwhelming likelihood if you pick a sub-universe at random is that wacky, irregular stuff will happen all the time. The anthropic principle won’t help you, because there’s no reason in this system for the observers to mostly find themselves in sub-universes with apparent regularity.
Less mysterious? “There is no reason anything should be as it is; it just is, at random” doesn’t eliminate the mystery or even push it back another level or two—it wallows in mystery, it rests its head on a pillow of mystery at night, it has a middle-management job at the mystery factory, and it watches the mystery channel on TV every day. It’s just so saturated in mystery that, having never found this much mystery in one place before, you have chosen to ignore it.
More parsimonious? Perhaps you can say “it’s all random” in fewer words than you can recite a basic physics textbook, but three words that have no evidence backing them, no way to obtain such evidence, and no connection with the world in which we find ourselves have a much lower usefulness density than any verbose, overexplained thing you care to pick out from science. Parsimony is about getting your theory as small as you can without losing information. Your theory, since it contains no information, could be expressed by chirping like a cricket.
The fact that it predicts nothing makes it practically useless and uninteresting. If you think it’s fun, it’s no skin off my nose if you believe it, but believing things because they are fun and not because they inform your behavior in an instrumentally useful way or because you have evidence for them is not what we as a community are getting at, so it should not come as a surprise to you that (given the causal regularities of this website) you were poorly received.
This comment reminds me of nothing so much as a philosophical Zero Punctuation review. In other words, you win the thread. I recommend you imagine hearing this quote in a Yahtzee voice:
“There is no reason anything should be as it is; it just is, at random” doesn’t eliminate the mystery or even push it back another level or two—it wallows in mystery, it rests its head on a pillow of mystery at night, it has a middle-management job at the mystery factory, and it watches the mystery channel on TV every day.
Okay… I wasn’t going to downvote the post because this is the sort of thing I thought was marvelously clever when I was thirteen (so there’s hope) and you’d already been downvoted below posting threshold (so it’d be just punitive), but really?
You have provided a way the universe could be (the word my undergrad prof used for a universe with no causation was “Humeiform”, as opposed to “uniform”): there could be a lot of sub-universes arranged spatially in a single possible world, in which infinitely many universes instantiate every possible sequence of events.
You don’t have any way to explain why we should find ourselves in a sub-universe that seems to fall into miraculously well-regulated patterns, when the overwhelming likelihood if you pick a sub-universe at random is that wacky, irregular stuff will happen all the time. The anthropic principle won’t help you, because there’s no reason in this system for the observers to mostly find themselves in sub-universes with apparent regularity.
Less mysterious? “There is no reason anything should be as it is; it just is, at random” doesn’t eliminate the mystery or even push it back another level or two—it wallows in mystery, it rests its head on a pillow of mystery at night, it has a middle-management job at the mystery factory, and it watches the mystery channel on TV every day. It’s just so saturated in mystery that, having never found this much mystery in one place before, you have chosen to ignore it.
More parsimonious? Perhaps you can say “it’s all random” in fewer words than you can recite a basic physics textbook, but three words that have no evidence backing them, no way to obtain such evidence, and no connection with the world in which we find ourselves have a much lower usefulness density than any verbose, overexplained thing you care to pick out from science. Parsimony is about getting your theory as small as you can without losing information. Your theory, since it contains no information, could be expressed by chirping like a cricket.
The fact that it predicts nothing makes it practically useless and uninteresting. If you think it’s fun, it’s no skin off my nose if you believe it, but believing things because they are fun and not because they inform your behavior in an instrumentally useful way or because you have evidence for them is not what we as a community are getting at, so it should not come as a surprise to you that (given the causal regularities of this website) you were poorly received.
This comment reminds me of nothing so much as a philosophical Zero Punctuation review. In other words, you win the thread. I recommend you imagine hearing this quote in a Yahtzee voice: