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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6718686" data-attributes="member: 82106">OK, so probability is meaningless and if something can happen (and pretty much anything COULD in principle) then we can just assume it did! You've literally removed all meaning from the scientific process. You've left the reservation and are now just another garden variety mystic who's universe simply 'just happened to be as it is'. There's 2 different things being conflated here actually. First is basically an invocation of a very extreme version of the Strong Anthropic Principle, when you say that &quot;we just happen to be right by pure luck&quot; you're just saying &quot;well, we're here, so no matter how improbable I calculate the odds to be it says nothing about the way the universe works because we just happened to luck out and get this one&quot;. The other one is the question of the details of how things played out given a fixed set of physical laws. Nothing in our understanding of physics says that we will be able to utterly deterministically calculate the current state of the universe from its initial conditions, even if we DO perfectly understand the rules it evolves by. This is trivially true today as we know that these laws are statistical in nature, and that small quantum mechanical statistical outcomes can generate different macroscopic results. Thus knowing the exact state of the big bang at time 0 won't ever tell you if the coin I flip today will come up heads or tails. It probably won't even tell you if the Earth we live on would inevitably exist as it does. HOWEVER, it would tell you that the universe would contain many Earth-like planets and what kinds of chemistry would happen on their surfaces.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 6718686, member: 82106"] OK, so probability is meaningless and if something can happen (and pretty much anything COULD in principle) then we can just assume it did! You've literally removed all meaning from the scientific process. You've left the reservation and are now just another garden variety mystic who's universe simply 'just happened to be as it is'. There's 2 different things being conflated here actually. First is basically an invocation of a very extreme version of the Strong Anthropic Principle, when you say that "we just happen to be right by pure luck" you're just saying "well, we're here, so no matter how improbable I calculate the odds to be it says nothing about the way the universe works because we just happened to luck out and get this one". The other one is the question of the details of how things played out given a fixed set of physical laws. Nothing in our understanding of physics says that we will be able to utterly deterministically calculate the current state of the universe from its initial conditions, even if we DO perfectly understand the rules it evolves by. This is trivially true today as we know that these laws are statistical in nature, and that small quantum mechanical statistical outcomes can generate different macroscopic results. Thus knowing the exact state of the big bang at time 0 won't ever tell you if the coin I flip today will come up heads or tails. It probably won't even tell you if the Earth we live on would inevitably exist as it does. HOWEVER, it would tell you that the universe would contain many Earth-like planets and what kinds of chemistry would happen on their surfaces. [/QUOTE]

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