Posts by Neil Morrison
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Here's an experiment that might provide support for Davies' theory - reverse causation
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There's a debate on evolutionary universes - here
I haven't read it all yet but carbon chemistry (necesssary for life of course) playing a significant role in black hole formation is pretty good evidence.
Evolution I think is being used here as a metaphor, but maybe there's more to the analogy - if reproductiojn happens on such a grand scale then why not consciousness as well? Maybe something a bit "God" like.
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Hayden, yes I interpreted the Pastafraians bit as referring to Paul Davies. Thanks for the clarification.
One would have to change all the constants in-order to get a life generating universe - but that is the puzzle. Out of all the possible combinations of values for the fundamental constants only a very small proportion give rise to a universe that will have life. Otherwise we don't get atoms, or stars, or the lifespan of the universe is too short etc. One puzzle is what sort of mechanism allowed for this fine tuning.
One possible explanation is the multi-verse model. An infinite number of universes come into being and those few with the right initial conditions will have life. It's a version of the weak anthropic principle. We see the universe is fine tuned because that's the only type of universe that can be observed.
But Davies is putting forward another possibility - the fine tuning is a sort of retrospective action by life itself. It's a fascinating, if perplexing, theory.
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The Goldilocks universe wasn't put forward as an argument for God. I would have thought the challenging thing about Davies' views was that life could somehow retrospectively influence the universe's creation.
(the numbers represent things like the relative strenghts of the fundamental forces so it's not a querk of any particular number system)
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Hayden, you might like to check out Paul Davies' background before dismissing him as a "Pastafarian".
That the universe happens to be just right for life and that even an extremely small variation in the fundamental constants would mean no life what so ever - not different life - is a bone fide puzzle in physics circles.
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In a recent New Scientist podcast (I don't know how to link to it) physicist Paul Davies discusses the problem of how the universe appears to be just right for life. If any of the fundamentals of the universe were just a fraction different then no life could have evolved.
There's a couple of ways of dealing with this but what Davies puts forward is interesting in terms of the relationship between science and morality. He suggests a possible explanation for the Goldilocks universe is that life, having evolved, changes the way the universe originated - so making life possible. It sounds too bizarre to be taken seriously but we're dealing with quantum physics etc where the bizarre is true and more bizarre than we can imagine.
So, if this could occur then it would presumably be ongoing. i.e. life can continue to change the structure of the universe. And as we have evolved consciousness we can now chose how to act and so chose how to influence physical reality. There's a lot of speculating going on here but there's nothing unscientific about this. Our actions could have consequences far greater than we imagine and what drives our actions - our morality.
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Dealing with death is an over looked role of religion, we get a bit fixated on the moral thing. Religion does provide ways of dealing with death. I'm more in the Woody Allen school on this, but it's one of those Big Issues there's no good answer to.
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Religion can breed intolerance and lots of rather unpleasant behavior. But so have other types of creeds. Communism managed to provide people on the Left with the excuse to kill more people than the Right did last century.
It seems to me that Communism played a psychological role very similar to the one that religion has played at particular times.
As for evolution, religion has not been the only antagonist. Sociobiology and its successor evolutionary psychology have come under attack from secularists for challenging the belief that the mind is a social construct.
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It's very mischievous of God not to have given Dawkins the gene for religiousness.