Anthropic Bias Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy Nick Bostrom
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The appeal to the surprisingness of E is therefore quite ineffective. In order to give the appeal any force, it needs to be backed up by some argument for the claim that:  ,  but not both  and  . But suppose we had such an argument. We could then sidestep considerations about surprisingness altogether! For it follows already from ,  , and P(K) being “not too small”, that  , i.e. that fine-tuning is strong evidence for the multiverse hypothesis. (To see this, simply plug the values into Bayes’ formula,  .)
To make progress beyond this point, I think we need to abandon vague talk of what makes events surprising and focus explicitly on the core issue, which is to determine the conditional probability of the multiverse hypothesis/chance hypothesis/design hypothesis given the evidence we have. If we figure out how to think about these conditional probabilities then we can hopefully use this insight to sort out the quandary about whether fine-tuning should be regarded as surprising. At any rate, that quandary becomes much less important if we have a direct route to assigning probabilities to the relevant hypotheses that skips the detour through the dark netherworld of amazement and surprise. This is what we shall now do. Directory: preprints preprints -> Digitally-assisted discovery and proof preprints -> Reorienting the Logic of Abduction preprints -> Supplementary Material Table 1 Download 9.31 Mb. Share with your friends:
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