Let's Carry on Carriering Part IV

In this post I continue analyzing a web post by self-recommending professional atheist Richard Carrier. 

The other parts of this series can be seen in the links below:

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part I

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part II

Quantum Non-Linearity: Let's Carry on Carriering Part III

Before going on with the rest of Richard's post, below I recap Richard's proposition 8 and comment on it again.

***

RICHARD: Proposition 8: If every logically possible thing that can happen to Nothing has an equal probability of occurring, then every logically possible number of universes that can appear has an equal probability of occurring.

This is logically entailed by the conjunction of Propositions 6 and 7. So again it cannot be denied without denying, again, Proposition 1.

MY COMMENT: In the above quote Richard is telling us that given this entity he calls Nothing we can infer that every logically possible universe that can arise from Nothing has an equal probability of occurring. As I have said in the previous parts, probability isn't a property of the object we are taking cognizance of (in this case the object is Nothing) but a function of the observer's level of knowledge about an object; the negated way of saying the same thing is that probability is a measure of the observer's ignorance. In the above, therefore, Richard is merely telling us that he has no idea what Nothing is capable of generating and that all logically feasible bets are therefore of equal probability; this equality correctly follows from the principle of equal a priori probabilities, a principle which applies to any observer who has no information which leads him/her to expect one bet over another. In this instance one of those bets includes whether or not Nothing will generate the high contingencies and complexities of random patterns. Because Richard is admitting that he knows 0.0% of nowt about Nothing these observer-based betting odds say nothing at all about what Nothing will actually generate. 

I will now continue analyzing Richard's post from where I left off in the last part (Part III).  From this point on his work is a teetering tower of endeavor with its foundations resting upon the implicit assumption that probability is a physical property which he also assumes must logically entail a totally random process; that is, a process which generates random patterns. 

***

RICHARD: And this is true regardless of the measure problem. There are lots of different ways you can slice up the “outcome” of a totally random process that’s unlimited in how much can happen—how much “stuff,” and in how many configurations, that can arise. But insofar as the “stuff” that pops out is connected to other stuff, it necessarily causally interacts with it, and that logically entails a single causally interacting “system,” which we can call a “universe” in a relevant sense. But when there is Nothing, nothing exists to make it even likely, much less ensure, that only one such “universe” will randomly materialize.

Of course, even within a single causally interacting “system,” (= a "universe") and thus within a single “universe,” it is not necessarily the case that every part of it will have the same contents and properties. Eternal inflation, for example, entails an initial chaotic universe will continue splitting off different bubble universes forever, and everyone will have different laws, contents, and properties, insofar as it’s possible to. And this is actually what we usually mean by “universe” now: one of those regions of the whole metaverse that shares a common fundamental physics (the same dimensionality of spacetime, the same fundamental constants, and the same causal history). Other regions may differ, e.g. if we fly far enough in space, maybe a trillion lightyears, we might start to enter a region of the universe where the laws and constants and shape and contents start to change.

MY COMMENT: Probabilities are defined in terms of ratios of sets of possibilities: The measure problem concerns the difficulty observers have in defining probabilities when trying to form ratios from ill-defined sets of possibilities, particularly potentially infinite sets of possibilities. If one is faced with sets of possibilities for which it is not easy to define clearcut size comparisons, then calculating probabilities (which are based on ratios of possibilities) becomes problematic. In this instance Richard is discussing the question of what class of possibilities constitutes what we would like to call a "universe" and how we measure the probability of a "universe" against the immense set of "all" possible universes. The comparison of these spectacularly vague and huge sets and the accompanying calculation of the relevant probabilities are sensitive to the methods of comparison.  (See here). 

At the start of the above quote Richard is telling us that his proposition 8 isn't affected by the measure problem; well, that may be true: For his purposes it is often enough to show that one set is  clearly much, much larger than another thus implying that the probability in question is all but zero and therefore its negated probability is all but unity. But for Richard to take us any further one first has to swallow his two seemingly unconscious assumptions: Viz:

1. That probabilities are an intrinsic property of an object when in fact they are an observer relative extrinsic property in so far as being a function of an observer's knowledge about an object. 

2. That the existence of a probability necessarily implies something capable of generating random patterns (certainly not true!).

Regarding assumption 1: Going over the point I have repeatedly made: The one-on-one element-by-element comparison between two sets needed to create ratios of possibilities and underwrite the calculation of the probability of a universe is only intelligible if we first assume, a priori, the existence of highly sophisticated third person observers for whom probability ratios (which are a measure of observer information level) are meaningful and interesting. Without the assumed existence of sufficiently cognitively sophisticated observers, probability is an unintelligible notion. Probability is not a property of something "out there" whether of universes or other; it is a measure of an observer's information about the object in question.

Regarding assumption 2:  That this seems to be some kind of habit of mind is more than hinted at when Richard says in the above quote about “the stuff” that pops out which presumably is the “outcome” of a totally random process. However, to be fair to Richard it is true that the term "probability" is often used as a metonym for randomness because the algorithmic intractability of random patterns makes them difficult to know and therefore random patterns very often entail a probability.  One of Richard's pratfalls is that I think he's conflated the use of the term "probability" as a metonym with the object it is frequently associated with (i.e. random patterns). As we will see, given a probability he wrongly infers that he has in his hands a random generator of universes; a non sequitur if there ever was one. 

***

RICHARD: However, we needn’t account for this in what follows. If it is the case—in other words, if universes in the broad sense (causally interacting systems) can themselves contain even more universes in the narrow sense (regions of a shared fundamental physics), then what follows, follows with even more certainty. Because then there are even more “universes” to make the point with. You will notice eventually how this simply makes the math even stronger, and gets us to the same conclusion with even greater force. Because all adding this does to the math, is increase how many universes a Nothing will inevitably randomly produce.

MY COMMENT:  If for the sake of argument we allow Richard's two assumptions above to slip past us then it's true that the measure problem doesn't affect his conclusion: Although we may be unable to come up with the rigorously correct ratios of possibilities it is often clear that the sets of possibilities Richard is comparing are obviously vastly different in size and so it is clear that the probabilities concerned are as near as can be to either 100% or 0%.

But the conclusions Richards draws from this exercise of probability calculation are based, once again on the falsehood I've emboldened at the end of the above quote: Viz: Richard thinks he's proved to himself that the logical truism he calls Nothing will inevitably randomly produce...“stuff” that pops out.

Richard's argument is that if we do at least know we are dealing with huge numbers of possible universes this is only going to add more grist to his mill by feeding his gluttony for immense numbers of possible outcomes. But unfortunately for Richard there is no wind or water to drive his mill: As we can see from his last sentence above, he's assuming that observer-defined probabilities necessarily entail a random pattern generator which he is hoping will drive his system of universe creation. Well, whatever complex logical necessities Nothing contains one thing is clear; the generation of random patterns is not known to logically follow from the Unknown and Mysterious logical necessity Richard calls "Nothing" and about which Richard can tell us very little. And again: The generation of random patterns doesn't follow as a logical necessity from observer defined probabilities whether those probabilities are calculated correctly of not.

Richard's misconceptions around probability and randomness are continuing to run through his thinking.  He needs to revisit his bad habits of mind about probability and randomness. 

***

RICHARD: The converse is also true. If it is somehow the case that there can’t be disconnected systems, that somehow it is logically impossible for Nothing to produce multiple “universes” in the broad sense, then it must necessarily be the case that it will produce, to the same probability, multiple universes in the narrow sense. Because there is only one possible way left that it could be logically impossible for both (a) Nothing to produce more than one causal system and (b) that system be entirely governed by only one physics, is if this universe we find ourselves in is the only logically possible universe. And if that’s the case, then we don’t need any explanation for it. All fine-tuning arguments sink immediately. The probability of any universe existing but this one (given that any universe exists at all) is then zero. And the probability of fine tuning without God is then exactly and fully 100%.

MY COMMENT:  A largely Valid point here: Richard is admitting that Nothing is such a big Unknown that it is conceivable that by some logic we don't yet understand Nothing entails that only one causally connected universe can exist and that this is the universe we observe (if perhaps only a small part of a much broader causally connected universe). But I doubt he'll bite this bullet: His concept of Nothing is his subliminal stand in for "The Unknown God" in so far as this mysterious Nothing somehow implies the highly organized universe we see around us. 

***

RICHARD: I doubt any theist will bite that bullet. I’m pretty sure all will insist that other universes are logically possible. 

MY COMMENT:   Theist or not I think we can be agnostic about whether or not other universes are logically possible. After all we know so little about this mysterious entity which Richard keeps calling "Nothing"; we don't even know if the logic of Nothing rules out cosmic configurations that otherwise to us seem logically possible. 

***

RICHARD: And if other universes are logically possible, it must necessarily be the case that it is logically possible either for different regions of a universe to exhibit different physics or different universes as closed causal systems to exist (with, ergo, different physics). Therefore, by disjunctive logic, if the second disjunct is ruled impossible (“different universes as closed causal systems can exist”), the first disjunct becomes a logically necessary truth (“different regions of a universe can have different physics”). Even if one were to say “there are infinitely many outcomes logically equivalent to a single universe with a single uniform physics” and “therefore” there are as many such outcomes as any version of multiverse and so “it’s fifty fifty” or “the measurement problem gets you” or whatever, Cantor strikes: as all the infinite such possible universes are already contained in possible multiverses and yet there are infinitely many more multiverses possible which cannot be included in the previous infinite set, the cardinality relation of possible multiverses to possible singleverses is still infinitely more; ergo, the probability of getting “a singleverse” rather than “a multiverse” is infinity to one against.

MY COMMENT:    Yes, I agree the number of possible multiverses, if compared against the number of possible singleverses, will be infinitely greater.  But if this relationship is to be transformed into a probability as per the last sentence (Viz the probability of a singleverse against a multiverse) Richard once again must assume the pre-existence of a sufficiently sophisticated observer to make the calculation of his probability meaningful. But Richard's logic here although valid is irrelevant; these observer relative probabilities imply nothing about what Richard's "Nothing" will in actual fact generate. 

***

RICHARD: Therefore, when there are no rules governing how many “universes” can randomly arise from Nothing, there must necessarily be either a random number of universes in the broad sense (causally separated systems) or a random number of universes in the narrow sense (regions of different physics within a single causal system), or both. Including, of course, the possibility that that number, either way, will be zero. Which is what it would mean for Nothing to produce nothing, to remain eternally nothing. Ex nihilo nihil, in other words, is simply describing one possible outcome of a true Nothing: the outcome of there being zero things arising.

But as we just confirmed, there is no rule or law that entails the number of things that will arise uncaused from Nothing is zero. In fact, zero is just one possibility out of countless other possibilities: countless other numbers of things, and thus universes, that can arise. And Proposition 6 entails each possible outcome has the same probability as each other possible outcome. Which means no outcome (such as “zero”) is more likely than any other (such as “one” or “ten billion” or “ten to the power of twenty trillion”). Hence, Proposition 9....

MY COMMENT:   And again, the bulk of the deliberations above are irrelevant. Richard's attempt to make numerical comparisons between classes of possible universes and thus arrive at one or other end of the probability spectrum is futile without building in his two hidden prior assumptions: To repeat: 1. The a priori existence of a sufficiently sophisticated cognitive perspective to make the probability calculations meaningful 2. In this particular connection, the a priori existence of the super contingency of random pattern generators to a give meaningful hook to the observer's probability calculations.

That Richard's "Nothing" is a huge Unknown to him is evidenced by the fact that above we find him considering the case where, for all he knows, Nothing has no known rules to limit the classes from which probabilities can be calculated. He then, yet again, wrongly thinks that from these probabilities he can logically infer a random pattern generator.  Moreover, random pattern generation is a rule in itself which contradicts any notion that Nothing has no rules. 

***

RICHARD: Proposition 9: If when there is Nothing every possible number of universes has an equal probability of occurring, the probability of Nothing remaining nothing equals the ratio of one to n, where n is the largest logically possible number of universes that can occur.

MY COMMENT:  Given that our Richard is admittedly working completely in the dark as to what the logic of Nothing entails then given such an advanced state of ignorance it is true that every possible universe has an equal probability of being generated by Nothing; and this includes the possibility of literally nothing being generated by Nothing. Well, there is only one way to generate absolutely nothing, so therefore Richard is right in telling us that the probability of nothing is 1/n, where n is the largest logically possible number universes that can occur. But yet again: We can't move from this state of hyper ignorance, expressed as a probability, to the conclusion that from this ignorance we can then infer a random generator of universes is at work. The quantified ignorance expressed by a probability evaluation tells us nothing about what Nothing will actually generate, least of all whether it will generate the hyper-complexities of random patterns.

***

RICHARD: But Proposition 6 entails n is transfinite. There is no maximum possible universes that can arise. This creates difficulties for continuing mathematically here, because no one has fully worked out a mathematics of transfinite probability. We can bypass that problem, however, the same way Archimedes originally did, by adapting the Method of Exhaustion. We’ll get there in a moment.

MY COMMENT:  No dispute that n is transfinite. But you bet there's going to be huge difficulties in defining intelligible probabilities here because measure problems make the definition of coherent ratios of possible universes highly problematic. But let's wait see what Richard's method of exhaustion entails. Something to look forward to in Part V.  

***

RICHARD: Proposition 10: If Nothing produces a random number of universes, nothing exists to prevent the contents of each of those universes from being equally random.

In other words, if it is logically possible for any universe, upon coming into existence, to have a different set of attributes than another, then each possible collection of attributes is as likely as every other. This follows by logical necessity from the absence of anything that would make it otherwise. And Nothing lacks everything, including anything that would make it otherwise. To deny this Proposition therefore requires producing a logical proof that some logical necessity makes it otherwise. Good luck.

MY COMMENT: Richard has not established that Nothing generates universes at random. All we've seen is that from the carefully measured human ignorance expressed as probabilities he's then assumed that this mysterious object he's called Nothing at least has the possibility of generating the high contingencies & complexities of randomness.  In fact in the above he does venture to assert something about Nothing; that is, that Nothing lacks everything, including anything that would make it otherwise. And yet he's somehow inferred that if Nothing produces a random number of universes, nothing exists to prevent the contents of each of those universes from being equally random. That is, he's allowing Nothing the possibility of generating the highly sophisticated complexes of random patterns. He has inferred that a lack of logical restriction logically entails the possibility of random patterns being generated. So, Richard where's the logical proof that there is some logical necessity which allows Nothing the possibility of generating these high contingencies? Good luck with that one Richard!

...to be continued

Examining Mr. R. Carrier's use of Bayesianism. Part IV

A gross theological caricature

(See here for Part I, Part II and Part III)

In part IV of this series, I'm continuing to comment on the following post by a Mr. Richard Carrier:

Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist • Richard Carrier Blogs 

As Richard stares out at our strange cosmos and considers the question of theism and whether or not a cosmos like our's would have been produced by the kind of God conceived by most theists, this is what he thinks:

It cannot be predicted that this [Universe] is what a God would produce, or that it is what he would want to produce. Whereas it is exactly 100% predicted to be what we’d see if there was no God

I would certainly question Richard's second sentence here: What kind of universe/cosmos would I have predicted if there was no God? As we saw in the previous parts I certainly wouldn't have predicted our own remarkable universe in all its organized complexity, it's surprising organized contingencies and above all an organization which gives it a very strong propensity to generate life....... especially that propensity to generate complex organic objects! After all, only in recent history have humans started to master systems capable of generating other systems.  Why wouldn't I have predicted all this in the absence of God? .... because the evidence of our experience is that organization of all types, both simple and complex, are associated with the activity of human (and animal) intelligence. Therefore, when I see a cosmos so organized that we can distill out of it those highly succinct mathematical laws of physics, laws which are crucial for the generation & maintenance of life, my intuitions turn to thoughts of an a priori intelligence being active. Moreover, the fact is that the laws we distill from cosmic organization can never have the property of Aseity (that is of self-explanation). This is because these laws are mathematically descriptive devices destined to always leave us with a hard core of irreducible, incompressible and enigmatic contingent information; those laws are therefore logically incapable of delivering the logical necessity of Aseity. Some atheists at least do understand this. Take for example atheists Galen Strawson and Sean Carroll: Both appear to understand that all probing human inquiry into the form and pattern of the cosmos must eventually bottom out with unexplainable brute fact: Aseity is beyond the reach of conventional descriptive science.  This is a mathematical truism. See the following links for more details...

Quantum Non-Linearity: Galen Strawson on "Why is there something?" (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

Quantum Non-Linearity: Something comes from Something: Nothing comes from Nothing. Big Deal (quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com)

There have been some who have tried to get round all this by suggesting that somehow quantum mechanics can be used to redefine nothing in such a way that it tells us how it is possible to get something from nothing: But this line of thought is achieved by mere empty linguistic tricks: One can use the same tricks to claim that this simply amounts to a redefinition of something! (See footnote *2)

***

And yet I'm inclined to agree with Richard's first sentence in the quote above:  I don't think I could have predicted that the kind of God I think I know would have created the specifics of our universe, not only because of its strange impersonal and dispassionate vastness but also because of the much closer to home, well aired and time-honored conundrums around suffering and evil. Yes, I might have predicted a highly organized universe, but organization covers a multitude of possibilities, and it seems a multitude of sins. So, I do have some sympathy with honest atheists on this point. (But types like Richard don't want sympathy & measured opinions; they want abject submission to their thinking; his attitudes match those of the hardened fundamentalists of Biblical literalism).

Moreover, based on our experience of intelligent activity in this world (which by & large is human and animal) we have to admit that not only does intelligent activity have an immense space of creative options open to it making anticipation of specific activity in the absence of evidence all but impossible, but also that intelligent activity has a fair measure of inscrutability. For example, the ancient stone circles we see dotted around Europe entail a high level of organization both in their configuration and the logistics of their construction and yet as to their purpose we have to resort to hypothesis and speculation. Furthermore, coming from a vacuum of evidence I could not have predicted from first principles that early cultures (probably as a consequence of that time honoured search for cosmic meaning & purpose) would build stone circles. Because of the huge variety open to intelligent behavior I can't move from an evidential vacuum to stone circles. But the reverse is possible: Given the evidence of stone circles I can link that to known aspects of the human psyche, a psyche I share. This means we have at least some inkling of the motives driving the human organization of inanimate objects and therefore have a chance of interpreting the meaning of this activity; in this case that the stone circles probably represent a culture's attempt to engage with the numinous and seek to give shape, meaning, and purpose to the universe; I personally think I understand that mystical endeavor. 

Likewise, as we look out onto the cosmos itself, we observe high levels of organization in a pattern we couldn't predict even if we knew beforehand that a creating deity was behind it. But conversely, if we are sufficiently primed theists, we at least stand a chance of getting a purchase on cosmic purposes via theological hypothesis and speculation. But if we reject God's attempt at self-revelation and we reject the necessity of the epistemic bootstrap of faith (See Hebrews 11:3&6), we will remain as much in the dark about Divine purposes as we are about those enigmatic stone circles. For it is possible in my view to come up with at least a hypothesized framework as to the meaning of the cosmos. 

***

But now I ask myself this: What would I have predicted if there is no God of any sort? My first intuitive response to that question would be absolute empty nothingness; but this is patently not the case: Our conscious perceptions tell us that the universe exists and therefore we do have an evidential handle on this question. In fact, as I said in Part III of this series, if the evidence was that the universe is completely random (That is, a Big-R superverse), I would interpret that as evidence of the absence of the God I think I know. As Sherlock Holmes observed in the story of The Cardboard Box where he was commenting on a particularly tragic case of crime...

“What is the meaning of it, Watson?” said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. “What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, which is unthinkable. But to what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever.”

(See the introduction to my book on Disorder and Randomness where I first used this quote)

But whilst I'd agree that our intuitions suggest that Big-R points to atheism, the reverse isn't true: Viz: Given atheism I wouldn't have been able to predict a Big-R universe: The consequences of the absence of God are just as inscrutable as God himself. In any case a prediction of Big-R isn't a straightforward deduction from the absence of God. Let me explain...

Firstly, in a Big-R universe I wouldn't exist to perceive anything and neither would anyone else. Being an idealist where I regard conscious cognition and perception as an important underwriter of reality, I would therefore question the coherence and intelligibility of Big-R notions.

Secondly, randomness represents the very opposite of a logical truism; A logical truism, once understood, has zero surprisal value and therefore no information, whereas randomness has maximum surprisal value and maximum information. If you are looking for the logical necessity of explanatory completeness or aseity you won't find it in randomness. The existence of randomness entails maximum contingency and maximum mystery. It is first and foremost the very opposite of a logical truism, the very opposite of "necessity".  It therefore explains nothing in the sense of explanatory completeness; rather it just leaves us with a conundrum as to who or what is managing to generate the most complex pattern of all, a pattern that requires a maximum of computational effort. 

***

In the following quote we find Richard continuing to dig even deeper into the hole he is already in....

RICHARD: Thus, Fine Tuning is not a “peculiar” thing for us to observe. It is not distinctive of God-made universes; it is, rather, distinctive of godless universes. It is literally the only thing we could ever observe—unless God existed and made the universe. Because only then could the universe possibly have been made conducive to life without the Fine Tuning of our peculiar fundamental constants. Hence God-made worlds will tend to not be Fine Tuned.

MY COMMENT:  As we saw in Part III, so-called "fine tuning" is just a small facet of a much bigger story of a remarkable order which has facilitated the human project of distilling out of the pattern of that order some remarkably elegant mathematical forms which from my standpoint have a very divine feel about them. They look to be the very epitome of an incredibly intelligent design. And let me repeat, further "explanation" of these forms can never deliver aseity but could only ever be a further enhancement of the succinctness of their form; but increasing mathematical succinctness can't go on until one has nothing left to compress; an incompressible kernel of contingency will always remain using mathematics as we know it. 

***

Richard Carrier has a very low view of our Cosmos. In spite of its exceptional and highly stable order, an order strongly conducive to the emergence and maintenance of life Richard still courts the Big-R hypothesis, the random bizarro universe that can be used to explain away anything. Take a look at the following...

RICHARD: This is a crucial realization. Fine Tuning of our observed fundamental constants is only necessary when a God is not doing the designing; it is only necessary when observers only evolve through billions of years of gradual cellular scaffolding, and life at all arises only by chance chemical mixing, and only after billions of years of the meandering random mixing of chemicals across a vast universe billions of light-years in size filled with random lifeless junk, which is almost everywhere lethal to life, and only hospitable to it in tiny specks of the chance arrangement of randomly mixed conditions. Only those conditions require Fine Tuning. Quite simply put: only Godless universes have to be Finely Tuned.

Which means when you observe a universe like ours (old, huge, deadly, and producing life only in the most awkward of ways and rarest of places), you can expect it to have been Finely Tuned by chance accident, not intelligent design. Intelligent design would more likely make a universe as large and old as needed to contain the life it was made for, and would create life directly (not employ billions of years of cellular scaffolding), and imbue the world with only those laws of physics needed to maintain it to its purpose (no weird fundamental constants, no weird fundamental particles). It would not produce a universe almost entirely hostile to life. There would be no lethal radiation-filled vacuum. No dead worlds or lifeless moons. Stars would not be uninhabitable monstrosities. Black holes would never exist.

MY COMMENT: And again: Chance fine tuning is a very bad argument for atheism; it neglects that the values of the "fine-tuned" variables only make sense in the context of the highly organizing effect of a set of remarkable laws and which together with those laws constitute pre-conditions which considerably enhances the chance of life. As I've said above, because of the huge space of possibilities open to intelligence and on top of that intelligence's inscrutability it is difficult to anticipate in advance what intelligence will do. But the reverse is an easier path. Given the works of intelligence we, as intelligences ourselves, can work backwards with a chance of interpreting the purpose of its works. To my mind all those dead worlds are the evidence of a search, reject and select computation, a declarative procedure that may well use teleological constraints.

The emphasis on fine tuning in Richard's quote above completely misses the plot; namely, that what is actually being fine-tuned is a remarkable cosmic computation machine of immense dimensions. And yet according to Richard's theology God simply doesn't do things like this; instead, God does things without logic and without sequence; it is ironic that Biblical literalists often think in a very similar way. But contrary to this kind of thinking is the evidence of our experience of the way intelligence works: Viz: It works using an experimental search, reject and select activity; the cosmos appears to be a tableau of intelligent activity, a tableau of creative activity.

And while I'm here a note to self: Here's a speculation for me to think about. The fine-tuning constants could have many, many non-zero decimal places after the decimal point. Therefore, if ordinary parallel processing rather than expanding parallelism is the search space method being used to develop the cosmos, the fine-tuning constants could be a sneaky way of feeding information, a priori, into cosmic evolution, thereby speeding the search up. 

***

Epilogue

In Part III I introduced the idea that the cosmos can be thought of as a fantastically large computation, a computation which is expressible in a very abstracted form as an equation relating the information content of the created configuration to a function of two variables: 1) The starting information and 2) the minimum possible number of computational steps. This equation looks something like this: 

I = S + Log T

Equation 1

Where I is the information content of the configuration created, and S is the minimum length of the algorithm needed to generate the configuration using a minimum number of execution steps of T. See here where I give more details on this relation.  (See also here). For a parallel computation the time taken for the computation will be proportional to T, but if as I feel is entirely plausible for our universe expanding parallelism is somehow being employed, the computation is achieved much faster. 

As we saw in Part III according to the theology of Richard Carrier, God, if he existed, would just do stuff abracadabra style; that is Richard takes it for granted that T ~ 0 and that creation has no sequential duration; in his theology God just does his stuff by downloading reified brute fact via his mighty magic commands. As we saw this is also the theology of the Biblical literalists (See footnote *1 below for the theology of the North American ID community). 

***

As I have said so often; there is a sense in which the elegant & succinct mathematical forms distilled from the high organisation of the cosmos "explain" absolutely nothing in the deepest sense of the word. Explanatory mathematical objects as we know them are less an act of explanation than that of compressed descriptions; as such they can never break the explanatory completeness barrier and deliver aseity. 

Our world is just one of the possible worlds that can be reified from the platonic realm. This fact is going to be hard to take for those who hanker after the secular notion that somehow the so-called material world can be so closed ended that it delivers an aseity of its own. Rather, it is just one of many possibilities that can be dragged out of the platonic world, reified and because of its organization, described with succinct "distilled" mathematical forms. It is in fact a work of art rather than a work of necessity; there is good art and bad art, but all is art, and art is but realized possibility. Our science gives us the pattern of the creation but not its fundamental origins; as many people have put it; the objects of science give us the "how" but not the "why?". But "why?" is only intelligible as a question in the context of an assumed a-priori sentience; in the context of this assumed conscious cognition the concepts of intention, goal and purpose have meaning. So, is our ravenous curiosity going to be satiated with answers that merely tell us about the "How"?  For some people at least that does seem to be the case. 

As we try to make sense of the cosmos we use a combination of induction, abduction and deduction: The generalizations of induction sometimes help prompt the production of theories but perhaps more often a theory is abducted with a giant intuitive leap of inspiration. Crucially, however, a theory arrived at by inspiration must then be tested via the predictions of deduction. This testing methodology has grown up around the relatively simple conceptual objects which control the physical regime, but it is a methodology that is far less effective when dealing with the inscrutabilities & complexities of the personal, the psychological, the sociological and above all the liminal world of the numinous. These phenomena are far too complex, erratic and full of exceptions to easily admit formal methods. The numinous in particular is the domain of anecdotal evidence, the domain of personal revelation. 

***

The evidence of our senses is that our cosmos is highly organized, and that this unique organization is such that it facilitates those descriptive conceptual devices and tokens we call the laws of physics which ride on top of and can be intellectually distilled from this order. That this order is being created and maintained everywhere and everywhen by an a priori intelligence is not an implausible proposition for many of us, even if for some it seems too large an epistemic step to make.  But I'll concede that it is not a proposition that can be formally tested like the relatively simple physical regime can be tested; testing such a complex entity is more akin to testing the partially veiled and complex world of sociology and human thought. So, although individuals may feel they have tested their faith anecdotally the anecdotes they tell won't convince everyone, least of all the evangelical atheists. But we do have this: Theism has the potential to at least make sense of the cosmos in terms of purpose and meaning whereas vanilla science, which only tells us the "how", cannot do this.  Moreover, as an idealist I would contend, that the reality of the particulate cosmos is unintelligible unless one first posits an a-priori up and running conscious cognition. Particulate matter only makes sense as the mathematical constructions of a conscious, thinking & perceiving sentience. For me Hebrews 11:3&6 is a necessary first principle of epistemology.

But of course, I can't expect an evangelical atheist like Richard to agree with any of this as it is very much dependent on personal anecdote rather than formal observational protocols. All I can advise is that people like Richard will just have to get out on their bikes and find some anecdotes of their own. As far as I'm concerned, all bets are still on!

***

Depending on how I feel I might complete this series by looking at Richard's tongue in cheek theology which he expresses in the picture that heads this post. Viz: God needs blood to fix the universe, but only his blood has enough magical power to do it, so he gave himself a body and then killed it. I wonder where Richard got his grist to come up with that one? I just wonder. The guilty parties probably know who they are.

Footnotes

*1 On North American Intelligent Design (NAID): Although I'm fundamentally an Intelligent Creation person I must once again disown any intellectual sympathy with this community, especially so as they fall into the welcoming embrace of the far-right, merging Christianity with politics. 

I personally don't have any intellectual commitment to the engine driving evolutionary change as currently conceived and yet I would heavily criticize the line taken by the NAID community: They have entrenched themselves in a tribal culture which is married to a set of misleading conceptual cliches: Viz: anti-evolutionism, "blind natural forces", anti-junk-DNA, "chance vs necessity" and subliminal deism. (See here for more). The NAID community make a sharp distinction between so-called "blind natural forces" and intelligent activity. The consequence is that they have adopted an epistemic filter which makes hard going of the identification of the basics of the physical regime as a work of hyper-intelligence; thus, in a sense chiming with Richard Carrier's view that the physical regime is a product of mindless blind Kaos; how utterly ironic!

If we assume that the cosmos is created and maintained everywhere and everywhen by the Divine will, then immediately the NAID category of "blind natural forces" becomes problematical. This is because in the context of intelligent creationism those forces can hardly be classified as blind and natural; in fact, the cosmos as the reification of artistic possibility rather than of necessity is highly unnatural. Although the NAID community are by and large like myself old cosmos creationists they nevertheless have subliminally taken on board the category of God as a super-duper conjurer creating stuff instantaneously as fully formed configurations, stuff that just springs into existence like a rabbit out of a hat. If this statement of their views is caricatured and unfair they had better tell me why it is. 

The particularly North American notion of God as a magician appears to be associated with the view that somehow the T term in equation 1 classifies as a "natural force" and therefore we must have T ~ 0. For them admitting T >> 0 is an intolerable bogy that is shockingly close to admitting some kind of evolution; to them it is the evil thin end of the "natural forces" wedge of secularization.  But in my opinion for the Everywhere and Everywhen God T is just as much a divine creation as is S. 

*2 Footnote: Falling into the linguistic trap of "nothing":

Richard tells us this: 

Why Nothing Remains a Problem: The Andrew Loke Fiasco • Richard Carrier Blogs

 What I showed is that once you actually allow for there to be nothing—nothing whatsoever—then a quasi-infinite multiverse is the inevitable, in fact unstoppable outcome. Because removing all barriers to what there can be or what can happen entails allowing all potential outcomes an equal chance at being realized (given only a single constraint: that logically contradictory states have a zero probability of coming to pass). There is nothing there to prevent that, nothing around to keep “nothing” a stable absence of everything. “Nothing” is, by its own defining properties, unstable.

That's not how probability works. Probability isn't a dynamic capable of generating something from nothing: it is about the level of observer information. Moreover, the physics of probability is about describing random patterns and not about the "instability of nothing". Probability and randomness are in no way an argument for the impossibility of "nothing"; trying to use them to generate aseity is well beyond their scope of usage. 

I've seen similar misinterpretations of the Uncertainty Relationship: As Richard is doing here, the principles of probability and randomness are glorified by raising them to the level of a kind of transcendent god-like dynamic or propensity capable of at least creating randomness from nothing. They don't see randomness as being only the mathematical description of a class pattern we meet in the universe rather than being a transcendent creative dynamic.

Another point: The principle of equal a priori probabilities concerns human information levels. That in itself isn't a sufficient condition that automatically translate into reified patterns of randomness.

Examining Mr. R. Carrier's use of Bayesianism. Part III

My apologies for having to display this theology!

This is Part III of my series where I'm looking at the following post by a Mr. Richard Carrier...

Why the Fine Tuning Argument Proves God Does Not Exist • Richard Carrier Blogs

See here for the other parts: Part I & Part II. In the last part of this series, we left Richard wanting to take cognizance of all the evidence relevant to the question of the origin of the creation's "fine-tuning" constants.....

***

RICHARD: The real problem here is that this leaves out pertinent evidence. Because we are here testing two competing hypotheses to explain observations: either (A) chance accident produced that alignment of constants or (B) someone or something intelligently selected them.

MY COMMENT: As we saw in part II this statement of the problem isn't coherent; the big question about so-called fine-tuning isn't just confined to a few constants, but a highly improbable physical regime (calculated unconditionally) governed by unique organizing principles of which the so-called fine-tuning constants are just one aspect. Richard should be asking if these principles are a chance accident, and if so that takes us into the question of whether there is an infinite sea of randomness out there of which our highly organized universe is but a very, very tiny corner of chance occurrence. But as we saw in the last part there is no evidence for our observable cosmos being an unimaginably tiny part in a random superverse, what you might call the "Big R" hypothesis.

Anyway, here's Richard's conclusion to his question and it is clear that his theological assumptions as to how "gods" are supposed to work drive this conclusion (my emphases)....

***

RICHARD: So when we bring all the pertinent evidence back in, the evidence indicates support not for Theory B (intelligent design), but for Theory A (chance accident). Fine Tuning is therefore evidence against intelligent design. It could never be evidence for it, because gods don’t need fundamental constants at all, much less all the weird ones we have. No intelligent agent needs quarks or electrons or electromagnetism or even gravity—things can just behave as commanded or designed: where things need to fall, they just fall; where stars need to shine, they just shine; where things need to stick together, they just stick together. One might respond that, still, it is possible an intelligent engineer would choose all these weird and unnecessary ways to create and sustain life. But that is fully accounted for here. What matters is not whether it’s possible. What matters is how probable it is. 

Because: If (a) we exist and (b) God did not design the universe, then (c) we should expect to observe several things, and lo and behold, those are exactly the things we observe; yet we do not expect to observe those things if God did design the universe. By definition that which is expected on x is probable on x; that which is unexpected on x is improbable on x. So if the evidence is probable if God does not exist and improbable if God exists, then that evidence argues against God, not for God.

Hence what matters is not what’s possible. What matters is its relative probability. In the case of Theory A, the probability of all these observations (the vast age, the vast size, the vast quantity of lifeless content, the vast lethality of the universe; and the bizarrely long, meandering, particular way life arose and developed into observers asking these questions) is essentially 100%. And you can’t get “more” than 100%. It’s as likely as likely can ever be. These observations are therefore maximally probable on Theory A. By contrast, none of these observations are at all expected on any plausible theory of intelligent design. Indeed, they are on Theory B predicted not to be observed.

MY COMMENT: In the above I have no issue with the core idea of conditional probabilities; namely that the probability of an outcome can be considerably enhanced if the conditions x or evidence x implies that it is a favored outcome.  Where the issue lies is with Richard's rather subjective assessment of what constitutes favourable evidence and/or conditions for his atheism. Take a look at the following......

In my short monograph on Forster's and Marston's (F&M) application of Bayes theorem to the question of God's existence I interpreted their use of probabilities in frequentist terms (itself a debatable maneuver) using this Venn diagram: 

Here the overwhelming number of cases favouring a habitable cosmos represented by "H" are found among the cases where there is an intelligent creator represented by the area "G".  If one is to accept this diagram (debatable!) it is then a trivial Bayesian calculation to show that given conditions/evidences "H" then it implies that the probability of God is almost unity. 

Now let's do the same for Richard's take on the situation. Interpreted in frequentist terms, he's saying this:

Richard's view is that our cosmos, with its huge volume of space-time sterile to life, can barely be claimed to be habitable and moreover to him the cosmos seems all very random; hence for Richard our cosmos lies somewhere in the region above labelled with "R".  According to Ricard, then, our cosmos is hardly the sort of affair that an intelligent and wise designer would create and therefore in his assessment region R has a very small overlap with region G. So, given this assumption of his, it then trivially follows that conditions/evidence labeled by "R" imply atheism with a probability of all but 100%. 

Clearly then F&M and Richard draw opposite conclusions from the evidence of the cosmos.  And it's not as if F&M, although Christians, are out and out antievolutionists after the manner of the right-wing North American Intelligent Design (NAID) community.  But let me say this: As we saw in Part II Richard seems to have underestimated the miracle of organization that is our observable cosmos and over emphasizes the role of randomness. I see the habitability of the cosmos, evolution or no evolution, as a very big deal indeed and not just a fluke of unadulterated randomness; I see Richard's vision of a bizarro "Big-R" superverse as not only hopelessly meaningless, but also lacking evidence. So, although I have to admit to feeling rather insecure about the use of Bayes to God, whether I was atheist or theist, I'm probably more on the side of F&M than I am that of Mr. Richard Carrier. 

As we will see below Richard's argument is based on his a priori theological conceptions and what he thinks (wrongly as it turns out) the way engineers who create stuff should work (my emphases):

***

RICHARD: Intelligent engineers aiming to create life don’t make the laboratory for it vastly larger and older and more deadly than is required for the project. Indeed, unless those engineers intend to convince that life that they don’t exist, they don’t set up its habitat to look exactly like a habitat no one set up. This is the least likely way they would make a universe. But set that point aside. The conclusion already sufficiently follows from the first point: there is no reason to expect God to have made the universe this way. It cannot be predicted that this is what a God would produce, or that it is what he would want to produce. Whereas it is exactly 100% predicted to be what we’d see if there was no God. So no matter what you try to propose, you can never get that probability to be 100% if there was a God. You can propose all sorts of excuses, all sorts of “maybes,” but you will never be able to prove those proposals to be 100% certain to be true. There will always be some significant probability that those “excuses” simply aren’t true, that God simply doesn’t have your imagined motives or limitations. And indeed, when there is no evidence for or against any one such motive or limitation, its probability simply is 50%. It’s as likely as not.

MY COMMENT: Well, OK I can accept that Richard should draw parallels between divine creation and what he thinks human engineers do in the act of creation. After all, human engineering is something we have experience of; where else do we get our evidence from? We can only use our experience, and any intuitions based on that experience to probe the question of a divine intelligent designer and creator.

But when Richard says above that the kind of universe we see is exactly 100% predicted to be what we’d see if there was no God. is that actually true? 

As I've already said in Part II the cosmos, whether current theories of evolution are correct or not, is a remarkable piece of work that is far, far from the "Big-R" that Richard gives every impression he thinks it is; it is in fact a highly organized system of surprising contingencies, organized contingencies of very low statistical weight and therefore of very low unconditional probability. So, unless we are rather taken with Richard's Bizarro Big-R superverse concept, the observable cosmos is a most singular and arresting piece of construction.  But just how was it created if it is not part of a Big-R superverse? Let's see....

***

Some years ago I was reading a book by a rather foolish fundamentalist Biblical literalist and I read these lines: 

.. the Bible teaches that the stars were created in an instant of time at the verbal command of God (Psalm 33:9). It is an awesome thought that God needed only to speak a word and billions upon billions of stars instantly appeared." (p15)

"... God supernaturally and instantaneously created the stars on the fourth day of creation" (p24)

"When we read of God's supernatural and instantaneous method of creation we must stand in awe of Him." (p34)

"When we consider God speaking the vast Universe of stars into existence, we can do nothing but stand in awe of Him"

This Biblical literalist is quite sure he knows the vital property distinguishing "natural" processes from "supernatural" action - it is of course that creators create their creations instantaneously by means of the pronouncement of suitable magic words. In commenting on Proverbs 8:27-30 where we read about God invoking wisdom as the craftsman of creation he concludes "God did not use evolution because a craftsman carries out instantaneous and deliberate actions whereas evolution involves a long random process" (p31). However, there are two glaring errors here: 1) Craftsmen don't create instantaneously. 2) To call evolution "random" is a gross misrepresentation. This literalist is captive to a false dichotomy: Viz: He contrasts what he believes to be the very random processes of evolution with what he feels are the instantaneous and deliberate acts of the craftsman. The irony is that Richard's views in terms of the concepts he employs aren't a lot different: As we've seen he is impressed by the notion of a Big-R universe. Moreover, take a look at the following which I've already quoted from Richard in a previous section of this post....

No intelligent agent needs quarks or electrons or electromagnetism or even gravity—things can just behave as commanded or designed: where things need to fall, they just fall; where stars need to shine, they just shine; where things need to stick together, they just stick together.

That is, in the mindset of both our Biblical literalist and Richard Carrier divine creation should entail no underlying logic, no process and no history; things just happen just-like-that, abracadabra style. Basically, the caricature of divine creation conceived by both Richard and our Biblical literalist is that the act of creation is brute magic.  Richard and our literalist just can't conceive that God might use the resources of time and space (humanly speaking huge amounts of them) as a demonstration of the process and computational cost needed to create life. For them God is a magician who merely commands stuff into existence and Richard's theological notions in terms of concepts employed doesn't look to be a great advancement on the Biblical literalist.

We cannot but help notice that our Biblical literalist is as laughably wrong as anyone can be about the actions of a craftsman; those actions are certainly not instantaneous; if they were we might justifiably accuse the craftsmen of being magicians in league with Devil. In fact, in some ways the work of the craftsman resembles the inconceivably more sophisticated work in the womb; that is, a stage-by-stage process moving incrementally closer to an end product as time progresses. These stages proceed against a background of inherent dependencies, e.g. a craftsman can't make a silver candlestick until some silver has been smelted and an embryo can't develop without a union of the appropriate genetic components not to mention the underlying organic chemistry fundamental to all living things. Of course, it is easy to claim that an omniscient omnipotence could create in one grand slam instantaneous act a fully mature human, but the sequential dependencies I talk of here are conceptually fundamental. A silver candlestick depends on the existence of silver but silver is not obliged to exist in the form of a silver candlestick. Likewise, humans depend on a prerequisite organic chemistry which itself depends on more fundamental conditions such as the construction of atoms. There is a forced logical sequence here that we cannot escape from whether we believe in instantaneous creation or not. If God instantaneously created a mature object that would not detract from the fact that the object itself may have inherent sequences of logical dependencies.

Some concept of sequence, then, is built into things no matter how they are arrived at. But the sequencing we see in embryo growth and artifact construction is much stronger than this "dependency" sequencing. Both processes pass through a series of stages separated by increments. Each stage is usually a little closer to the final product; although this is not necessarily true in the case of the craftsmen art where sometimes a search for solutions means backtracking may occur. But the fundamental aspect of both is the incremental separation between stages. The end product is the result of an accumulation of these incremental changes. The common theme is that of a quasi-continuity of change; you pass from one state to another through a series of intermediate states, thereby forming an incremental sequence of change. I would not, however, want to use the generic term "gradualism" here because some processes like, say, an explosion, is both incremental and yet very rapid. The key notion is one of at least an approximate continuity of change in as much as successive stages are only separated by relatively small displacements.

But we must take our faulting of both Richard and our Biblical literalist yet another stage further. As we know the process of designing is also a "search" process, an experimental trial and error endeavor that in some cases has definite goals in mind and in other cases involves chance discoveries that are perceived to have utility and only then are selected to become part of the technological tool kit. There is also the complex cognitive thought process occurring in the mind of the designer, which although not visible are all part of the experimentalism as ideas are mulled over in the mind and either rejected or selected for realized reification in material technology. 

All these factors combine to give us an exponentially branching network which constitutes a potentially huge search space making the space-time of the observable cosmos look like a very tiny place indeed. But the search space is considerably reduced if the creator is primed with an informational head start; that is, if the creator has useful a priori knowledge. The form of the equation which relates the information content of the configurations created as a function of starting information and the minimum possible number of computational search steps looks something like this: 

I = S + Log T

Equation 1

Where I is the information content of a configuration arrived at, S is the minimum length of the algorithm/knowledge needed to generate the configuration using a minimum number of linear execution steps of T. See here where I give more details on this relation.  (See also here).  This relation tells us that a creative agent/process can take a lot less time if that agent has a large amount of primal starter information S. But assuming a parallel processing paradigm then when S is lacking content information in I is generated only very slowly with Log of the number of execution steps T. 

It is a strong theological intuition that a proper concept of God entails an omniscient being and therefore One who has a full quota of S and hence has little need of the generation steps T. I guess that it is this intuition which influences our fundamentalist and Richard both of whom are quite sure that when it comes to creation brute omni-power means that God can just do stuff all but instantaneously and doesn't need any process with a history behind it; that is T ~ 0.  But of course, that's not true of human designers for which the cognitive process of design and creation entails thought, sequence, experiment, and the trial-and-error search for good information all of which is, above all, a process with a history. In that sense both Richard and our literalist fundie have got it so wrong about designers; designers search. test, reject & select, backtrack, correct, and develop; they don't just do stuff instantaneously but rather leave behind a history of research & development; history, and plenty of it, is implicit in all human artifacts. 

***

As we know our own universe displays a history; it is an object which has developed and didn't spring into existence "just like that". It is this history which biblical literalists are committed to denying with great scientific difficulty. Of course, Richard, like myself, believes in cosmic history, but he's trying to push past us the theological notion that theists should all be like Biblical literalists and postulate T ~ 0 where God stuff just falls into place at command; he is asking me to accept that creation should have little or no algorithmic logic and history behind it and he is also asking me to accept that a cosmos with logic and a long history is evidence that God doesn't exist. Moreover, as we've seen he gives the impression that he's positing a "Big R" superverse. But that, as we've also seen, has little or no evidence going for it and can be justifiably called a bizarro universe as it can be used to explain anything. And while on the subject of bizarro explanations: To me, the concept of the abracadabra God, a concept shared by Biblical literalists, also qualifies as a bizarro God because just about anything goes; see for example my "Beyond Our Ken" series. In fact, it may be that much of Richard's theological concepts stem from his experience with the North American Intelligent Design community and fundamentalist organisations like Answers in Genesis.

For myself the Big R supervesre is as unlikely as the abracadabra God. Neither notions have evidence in their favour; Big-R predicts instabilities in the organisation of the cosmos, instabilities we don't observe, and abracadabra predicts a universe without a logical history, a universe Beyond our Ken.

It is clear our universe has a history of development and this is particularly evident with life and geology, although may I say that I'm not committed to any particular engine/mechanism of evolution. However, I would tentatively submit the idea that the size of the creation is a divine revelation to humankind of the computational costs of a universe such as ours, a universe which is so obviously specialized for developing and supporting life. Another speculative notion which I would like to submit is that our universe may well use expanding parallelism and teleological constraints in order to generate life; this would get rid of the "slow" Log T term in equation 1 above, an equation which pertains to vanilla parallel processing. However, all that is very speculative, and the last thing I want to do is to be like Richard and our foolish literalist fundie who have made their minds up and think everyone else should follow suite, or else be called nasty names by them and their followers. 

Lastly let me comment on this quote from Richard: 

Intelligent engineers aiming to create life don’t make the laboratory for it vastly larger and older and more deadly than is required for the project...etc etc,

That may well be true. But the minimum space-time dimensions of a cognitive "laboratory" depend entirely on:

a) the initial knowledge of the engineers, that is the value of S, and 

b) the configurational complexity of the task in hand which dictates the minimum value of T given S. 

So, if the level of providence the Good Lord has provisioned our universe with measured in terms of its initial algorithmic complexity (S) and the time and space set aside for cosmic development (T), then the incredible sophistication and complexity of life very likely dictates the large space-time dimensions of our cosmos.  From where I stand the cosmos looks very much like an ingenious piece of computational engineering built around equation 1 above. It certainly isn't a tiny piece of an immense Big-R cosmos, or something created last Thursday with a built-in bogus maturity (The omphalos hypothesis).

In part IV I will continue to examine Mr. Richard Carrier's theological assumptions.