Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse

Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse

Phillip Goff

Specifically, multiverse theorists commit the inverse gambler’s fallacy, which is a slight twist on the regular gambler’s fallacy. In the regular gambler’s fallacy, the gambler has been at the casino all night and has had a terrible run of bad luck. She thinks to herself, “My next roll of the dice is bound to be a good one, as it’s unlikely I’d roll badly all night!” This is a fallacy, because for any particular roll, the odds of, say, getting a double six are the same: 1/36. How many times the gambler has rolled that night has no bearing on whether the next roll will be a double six.

In the inverse gambler’s fallacy, a visitor walks into a casino and the first thing she sees is someone rolling a double six. She thinks “Wow, that person must’ve been playing for a long time, as it’s unlikely they’d have such good luck just from one roll.” This is fallacious for the same reason. The casino- visitor has only observed one roll of the dice, and the odds of that one roll coming good is the same as any other roll: 1/36. How long the player has been rolling prior to this moment has no bearing on the odds of the one roll the visitor observed being a double six.

Philosopher Ian Hacking was the first to connect the inverse gambler’s fallacy to arguments for the multiverse, focusing on physicist John Wheeler’s oscillating universe theory, which held that our universe is the latest of a long temporal sequence of universes. Just as the casino-visitor says “Wow, that person must’ve been playing for a long time, as it’s unlikely they’d have such good luck just from one roll,” so the multiverse theorist says “Wow, there must be many other universes before this one, as it’s unlikely the right numbers would have come up if there’d only been one.”

Other theorists later realized that the charge applies quite generally to every attempt to derive a multiverse from fine-tuning. Consider the following analogy...

Kind of a rehash but perhaps better told:

The mistake at the heart of the multiverse

Goff

Proponents of the multiverse argue that the fact our universe is fine-tuned for life points to the existence of a multiverse. More universes, they claim, leads to a higher chance that there would be at least one universe with the right conditions for life. But Philip Goff here argues this argument is the result of faulty reasoning - the result of what is known as the inverse gambler's fallacy.

Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse

Phillip Goff

Maybe there is something I'm not seeing here, but it isn't a fallacy that the more times the gambler rolls the dice in a session the higher the probability that he will roll the double-six sometime in that succession of rolls in that session. Perhaps each in a hypothesized endless succession of randomly constituted Universe-creating Big Bangs is equivalent to the throw of the dice, in that eventually the laws of nature of that particular new Universe will just happen to promote life and be fine-tuned, and essentially be us. That would be the double-six of Universes. 

Yes, each particular "roll of the dice" has the same individual probability of being a double-six, but that is not the case for the likelihood that it will come up sometime in a long perhaps indefinitely long succession of rolls, where that probability increases the longer the succession. It seems to me that the multiverse theorists are right in this particular point, even though their theory has other flaws that invalidate it.

Maybe there is something I'm not seeing here, but it isn't a fallacy that the more times the gambler rolls the dice in a session the higher the probability that he will roll the double-six sometime in that succession of rolls in that session. Perhaps each in a hypothesized endless succession of randomly constituted Universe-creating Big Bangs is equivalent to the throw of the dice, in that eventually the laws of nature of that particular new Universe will just happen to promote life and be fine-tuned, and essentially be us. That would be the double-six of Universes. 

Yes, each particular "roll of the dice" has the same individual probability of being a double-six, but that is not the case for the likelihood that it will come up sometime in a long perhaps indefinitely long succession of rolls, where that probability increases the longer the succession. It seems to me that the multiverse theorists are right in this particular point, even though their theory has other flaws that invalidate it.

The problem is in the general roll of the dice case you cannot estimate the number of rolls by observing a single roll.

Similarly, when you only have one universe you cannot use observed conditions as an argument for other unobserved universes.

Another way to look at this is let's say I turn the corner and see someone roll 10 dice that all come up 6. If I were to then exclaim there are actually people all over the city rolling 10 di[c]e in different street corners it would be an error of reason.

[Laird]

The mistake at the heart of the multiverse

Paywalled, unfortunately (but with a free trial apparently available).

Paywalled, unfortunately (but with a free trial apparently available).

Weird, I just read it yesterday.

I didn't think I was logged in but I guess I was...

[Laird]

Weird, I just read it yesterday.

I didn't think I was logged in but I guess I was...

That's the second time that's happened. I guess all those magic podcasts have rubbed off on your browser.

That's the second time that's happened. I guess all those magic podcasts have rubbed off on your browser.

Less a mystery here b/c I do have the free IAI account.

[Laird]

Oh, right, you did say you were logged in. I missed that in my pattern-seeking zeal.

Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse

Phillip Goff

Philosopher Ian Hacking was the first to connect the inverse gambler’s fallacy to arguments for the multiverse, focusing on physicist John Wheeler’s oscillating universe theory, which held that our universe is the latest of a long temporal sequence of universes. Just as the casino-visitor says “Wow, that person must’ve been playing for a long time, as it’s unlikely they’d have such good luck just from one roll,” so the multiverse theorist says “Wow, there must be many other universes before this one, as it’s unlikely the right numbers would have come up if there’d only been one.”

It's absolutely hilarious how far the determined Physicalist will go just to deny intelligent design and fine-tuning, preferring to opt for an undetectable set of unscientific unknowns... unknowns whose existence is never explained, either. How does a set of multiple physical universes with different conditions even happen? Can they even explain how that's supposed to work, and why it would ever happen?

It is illogical that there is more than a single universe that simply has many, many layers. It's sort of in the word...