My current approach to the Presumptuous Philosopher problem is to undermine it using the concept of the Anthropic Volume Knob.
The idea is that for any cosmological theory T, as long as it predicts intelligent life, one can trivially devise a theory T’ equivalent to T in terms of empirical predictions but has its anthropic “volume” raised or lowered to an arbitrary degree. For instance, you can “double” the anthropic volume by putting T’ = T + “oh and there are two of these universes existing in parallel, not interacting in any way”. You could “halve” the anthropic volume by putting T’ = T + “oh and before the big bang there was a coin toss to determine whether or not there should be a big bang.”
But I want to say that if T’ has been obtained from T merely by fiddling with its anthropic volume knob then we ought to regard T’ as “the same theory”. In other words, I don’t think that the difference between T’ and T is meaningful. Theory A, predicting a great abundance of intelligent life loses its ‘anthropic advantage’ over theory B, predicting a sparsely populated universe, because B is ‘essentially the same’ as the empirically equivalent theory B’ whose anthropic volume has been turned way up to match A.
My current approach to the Presumptuous Philosopher problem is to undermine it using the concept of the Anthropic Volume Knob.
The idea is that for any cosmological theory T, as long as it predicts intelligent life, one can trivially devise a theory T’ equivalent to T in terms of empirical predictions but has its anthropic “volume” raised or lowered to an arbitrary degree. For instance, you can “double” the anthropic volume by putting T’ = T + “oh and there are two of these universes existing in parallel, not interacting in any way”. You could “halve” the anthropic volume by putting T’ = T + “oh and before the big bang there was a coin toss to determine whether or not there should be a big bang.”
But I want to say that if T’ has been obtained from T merely by fiddling with its anthropic volume knob then we ought to regard T’ as “the same theory”. In other words, I don’t think that the difference between T’ and T is meaningful. Theory A, predicting a great abundance of intelligent life loses its ‘anthropic advantage’ over theory B, predicting a sparsely populated universe, because B is ‘essentially the same’ as the empirically equivalent theory B’ whose anthropic volume has been turned way up to match A.