MustardGorilla
Hi MustardGorilla, I now read your essay once again.
You nicely and reasonably worked out the first fluke, although I would suggest that even before human beings began to systematically examine the mathematical precisions of the heavens, they must have had a deep intuition that the world is, in certain areas, deeply ordered. For example humans self-evidently know that their bodies usually follow their inner intents (surely within the limits of what can be achieved by human bodies), for example lifting an arm etc. This is also a kind of order, although not a mathematically predetermined one, and not subject to rigorous proofs, since bodies can also misbehave (illness etc.).
Since mathematics starts with counting, it is no wonder that it exists, since in everyday life, things are countable. The wonder, at least to me, is that it can be extended to ever more abstract objects in the minds of human beings, like for example an uncountable infinity. Here I would be cautious whether or not such an uncountable infinity has any counterpart in the natural world, although that infinity can be proven to be consistent with the basic assumptions of mathematics. This surely poses the question whether or not a consistent mathematical object and its constituents must have any counterparts in the physical world, or are just a concatenation of logical operations in the human mind.
The next fluke you rightfully mention is solar and lunar eclipses:
“What if we had no eclipses? And if the sky were cloudy all the time, we would have no Astronomy. No stars, no moon, no planets, and no celestial mechanics. Where would we even get the idea of a clockwork universe?”
Very good question in my opinion and a remarkable fluke indeed. Someone like me is tempted to say that it looks a bit like fine-tuning for the purpose of discovering the wonders of creation for everybody to see if one is willing to look.
Your third fluke is also surely remarkable. In the dark ages, there were no bibles written in other languages than Latin or Greek around in Europe, this had to wait until Guttenberg came along. Only the curches had complete scripts of the holy texts. People must have relied on what had been preached from the pulpit. Only after Guttenberg people where able to study the holy texts and think about them. This must have been a real step towards proving and / or disproving what was said from the pulpit. Unless this happened, people were already creative in developing ever more sophisticated tools for everyday life as well as ever sophisticated theories about the regularities in the world. After the bible was accessible for everyone, civilisation refined its system of justice, based on what has been found in the bible and on what has been found out about logical deduction / induction. We therefore should do a little justice to christianity, since Newton and surely others were inspired by the bible to blieve that within creation there must be deep order. If they did not believe that, they rarely would have figured out what we know today.
Your next assumption, the inevitability of computers and even AI, can really be seen as the consequence and the success of a deterministic, clockwork world view that had its beginnings with the ancient astronomers, and its subsequent refinement towards an exclusive worldview of mechanistic causality: Aristotle's final causes more and more lost their meaning within science. The more astonishing it is for me that with the new era of AI, these final causes seem to have a revival in somewhat new clothes: AI is supposed to deliver the final answers to questions that human beings haven't been able to answer yet. AI itself is seen as somewhat the teleologically pre-determined end point of fundamental scientific research. But that is only a belief, based on the successes of the clockwork world view. However, according to the bible, there exists another mode of prediction, it is called prophecy. There are many prophecies that already fullfilled. To name only one, the one that made christianity possible in the first place, was discovered by a retired Scotland Yard Inspector. His name was Sir Robert Anderson, and he deciphered a prophecy in the book of Daniel, Chapter 9, 25-27, so that we can determine the day Jesus Christ has ridden into Jerusalem on a donkey. We therefore can also deduce when Jesus began to preach, he was 29 years old (in the epistles it is stated that he was around 30 years old when he began to preach).
This is only one of many examples which, together with biblical archeology and language examination show that the book of Daniel must have been written long before Christ was born. Understanding Darwinian evolution without genetics is a matter of fact, but we should not forget that is also a matter of fact that we have no clue how the first self-replicating thing (something very, very complicated which must be stable and reliably copy itself for Darwinian evolution to at all take place) came into the world.
“What if Science had developed without reliable mathematics and a belief in universal laws? … Eventually, they would get computers and neural nets and scale up to large language models. They would make science problem-solving engines where they would feed in data and get valuable predictions.”
No, I think this is fantasy. To faciliate a computer, to produce semi-conductors and all the rest, you surely need some reliable mathematics and moreover a kind of conceptual framework how nature works, at least in its coars-grained appearance.
“If we had gotten to large language models before classical mechanics, we might have developed a very different idea of science. Science would be all about feeding large datasets into black boxes for artificially intelligent predictions.”
Again no, since you need tested, reliable theories to build something that complicated like a computer array. In other words, you need a sufficiently accurate model in your head how nature behaves, otherwise building a computer like we have today counterfactually makes no sense at all.
All in all I found that your essay expresses some memorable flukes, worth thinking about in my opinion!
