Life in a random universe: Sciama's argument reconsidered

Random sampling in high dimensions has successfully been applied to phenomena as diverse as nuclear resonances, neural networks and black hole evaporation. Here we revisit an elegant argument by the British physicist Dennis Sciama, which demonstrated that were our universe random, it would almost certainly have a negligible chance for life. Under plausible assumptions, we show that a random universe can masquerade as `intelligently designed,' with the fundamental constants instead appearing to be fined tuned to achieve the highest probability for life to occur. For our universe, this mechanism may only require there to be around a dozen currently unknown fundamental constants. More generally, this mechanism appears to be important for data science analysis on constrained sets. Finally, we consider wider applications.