Discussion 1 to Meditation 447
Some Problems
by Maarten van den Driest
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If I understand Dan Shanefield's point correctly, he says that string theory explains the presence of low-probability events such as they human eye that 'just happened to have been formed here, by random evolutionary processes' and other such stuff.
Although I like you imaginative suggestion, I have several problems with is.
- Things that have a very low probability are almost sure to happen if you try enough times. Winning the lottery is pretty unlikely but if you try a billion times you should get some results.
Also, the eye didn't just pop into existence. It 'evolved' slowly over the millenia, step by step, every step being an improvement. Remember that we had an entire planet 'trying'. You could say interesting stuff was bound to happen.
- Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean it is real.
I am not a physicist and don't know where you get the number 2 to the power of 500 but it is very big. However, tossing a coin a hundred times gives us 2 to the power of 100 different possible outcomes. You'll get something like HTTTHHTHTHTHTTTHH..HHTT. The number of different possible outcomes is gigantic. However, no one would claim that after you run the experiment once, all those other possibilities really exist somewhere. Some physicists expect us to believe this not only of coins but of entire universes.
- Explaining something is pretty difficult.
It is not enough to quote some phenomenon that could just possibly open up some possibilities. For that matter, we could just as wel say that God did it. It's possible, it could be...
The biological theories on evolution give us a powerful explanation of observed data. They explain what we see around us, give a mechanism by which it all very well could have happened and allow biologists to make predictions and check those as well. That is what I call an explanation.
- Any antropocentríc 'explanation' basically says that things are what they are because we are here and see that they are so. Why do we have a universe that permits humanoid life? Because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question. This argument exists in several forms and can be useful but if practical verifiable explanations for specific phenomena exist, I say we use those.
String theory is an ill-understood system of mathematical ideas that could potentially unify lots of other mathematical ideas. I suggest we leave the field to the experts.