Abstract
The most common objection to the Fine-Tuning Argument for the Multiverse is that the argument commits the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy. Simon Friederich has recently composed an interesting version of this fine-tuning argument that avoids this fallacy and better-matches important scientific instances of anthropic reasoning. My thesis in this paper is that this new argument, while it may avoid the fallacy, contains a disputable premise concerning the prior probabilities of the hypotheses at issue. I consider various ways to modify the argument to avoid this problem, but I argue that plausible replacements render other lines unjustified. I also briefly compare ‘indexical’ fine-tuning arguments such as Friederich’s, according to which our universe permits life, to ‘existential’ fine-tuning arguments, according to which some universe or other permits life. I conclude that while Friederich is correct that the new fine-tuning argument avoids the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy, the argument nevertheless depends on an unjustified premise, and this is further reason for proponents of fine-tuning arguments for the multiverse to employ existential arguments rather than indexical arguments.
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Notes
Hacking’s [4] is the landmark paper. In my view it should be called the ‘converse’ Gambler’s Fallacy. The Gambler’s Fallacy infers from a certain set of trials with feature F that some particular trial will lack F, and so strictly speaking, the ‘inverse’ Gambler’s Fallacy should infer from a set of trials that lack F that the next trial will have F. To infer from a single universe that permits life to the conclusion that there is a multiverse of non-life-permitting universes would then be the converse Gambler’s Fallacy. But nothing much turns on this.
A version of his argument, with more context and discussion, will also appear in his forthcoming [9].
See e.g. [8] and the literature about the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy and gambling analogies.
In my view, to reason from any particular universe’s permitting life to a multiverse will inevitably fail. But it is more promising to reason from the fact (R) that at least one universe permits life to the conclusion that a multiverse exists (cf. [14]). This argument need not commit the Inverse Gambler’s Fallacy any more than reasoning from the premise that at least one royal flush has been drawn to the conclusion that many draws have occurred would commit that fallacy. But this is not Friederich’s [5] argument.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Simon Friederich and an anonymous referee for very valuable discussion about the ideas in this article; the manuscript is much improved thanks to their efforts.
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Metcalf, T. On Friederich’s New Fine-Tuning Argument. Found Phys 51, 31 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-021-00449-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10701-021-00449-6