The Individual Anthropic Principle (Warning: Strange 3 am Philosophy Ahead!)

[jducoeur]

Here's a strange musing that occurs to me from time to time. I don't think I've written it before; forgive me if I'm repeating myself. (Memory is weak at this hour.)

I've long been enamored of the Many-Worlds Hypothesis. This is one of the explanations for some aspects of quantum physics: in a nutshell, it essentially says that everything that can possibly happen does in some sense happen -- that the world is constantly forking, a zillion times a second, into a plethora of alternate realities. It's "Worlds of If" on steroids. A lot of physicists hate it because it involves numbers that become insanely large (even by cosmological standards) very quickly, but I don't find that a compelling counter-argument by itself. And it does help explain a lot of philosophical conundrums, even while it forces one to reconsider the meaning of a lot of comforting concepts like Identity.

I'm equally fond of The Anthropic Principle. This is a way of wending one's way through Many-Worlds, and addresses the problem that our universe seems to have a bunch of rules and constants that are at once irritatingly arbitrary-seeming, and yet seem necessary in order to support life. Some people would take that fact as evidence of Intelligent Design, but the Anthropic Principle simply observes that, if the universe *couldn't* support life, we couldn't make the observations. So if there *are* a near-infinite number of realities out there, of course we will happen to evolve in the ones where we are able to exist, no matter how finely-balanced those realities have to be.

I am amused, though, that no one seems to follow these arguments through to their ridiculous but logical extreme. If everything is possible, and I (as an individual) can only make my observations in a reality where I exist, then I am, in a strange sense, immortal. Oh, virtually every reality winds up with me ending in my alloted six score and ten, but I'm never going to wake up one day and say, "Hey, look -- I'm dead." The other realities -- the ever-less-likely ones where I just keep somehow surviving -- will always be the ones where I am around to make my observations.

Mind, that isn't a wholly good thing: "alive" isn't the same thing as "happy". Carry this logic all the way through, and you get that narrow slice of probability where I wind up, the last brain in a jar, screaming its lonely way through time until dark energy finally rends its atoms asunder in the heat death of the universe. There's a creepy science fiction vignette for you.

And as previously mentioned, the Many-Worlds Hypothesis forces one into a much more nuanced definition of Identity: saying that I am immortal doesn't quite mean the same thing when "I" am not a very well-defined concept. But that's a posting for another day (or night)...

Comments

[antoniseb.livejournal.com]

I am not a promoter of either the many worlds or anthropic principle ideas, but I don't rule them out. The difficulty is that we don't know enough about the universe to be able to measure things that can tell us if either are true or not yet. At present I think it makes sense to think about one (to a few) moves ahead of what we already know. I'm guessing that we may be able to test the many worlds idea in primative ways by the end of this century, and that we'll never know if the anthropic principle is right.

re: no one seems to follow them to their ridiculous extreme

[etherial.livejournal.com]

That was the first conclusion presented when I firsst heard the many world theory.

[gyzki.livejournal.com]

There may be a gigabazillion different worlds out there, but I'm only aware of the one. I'm not only unaware of the ones where I'm dead, I'm also not aware of the ones where I was crippled by a bus at the age of 6, or the ones where I won crown, or where I married Jane and you married Carol. If we're only aware of the one we're aware in ("ooh, nicely put" "why thank you"), then the others are only useful to the extent they calm down certain physicists and metaphysicists; I don't see how they matter for any practical use (besides keeping one awake at three in the morning).

my alloted six score and ten

130 seems a bit optimistic; the psalm's "threescore and ten" (70) is still more realistic :-)

[jducoeur]

Ah, yes -- the danger of writing at 3am, when proofreading skills are not at their maximum. Oops.

As for mattering: metaphysics is a topic of interest to me in and of itself. That borderland between philosophy and physics holds a lot of fascination for me, even if it's always (more or less by definition) limited to guesswork and speculation.

Or to look at it differently: metaphysics informs religion. I take my metaphysics very seriously, and I have a somewhat religious bent. That means I need to reconcile the two. So it does have a slightly practical effect on my personally -- it's gradually driving my religious viewpoint towards something that appears closest to a mystical flavor of traditional Buddhism. One of my long-term projects is to read into that more deeply; the complication is that it appears to be the less-popularized variety that I'm interested in...

[umbran.livejournal.com]

If we're only aware of the one we're aware in ("ooh, nicely put" "why thank you"), then the others are only useful to the extent they calm down certain physicists and metaphysicists; I don't see how they matter for any practical use (besides keeping one awake at three in the morning).

Yeah, and verily. If you can't communicate or detect the thing, why worry about it at all?

In terms of the science, the Many Worlds interpretation is a big offender in terms of unnecessary multiplying of entities. Unless or until these other worlds can be detected or communicated with, it is in that sense a rather... inelegant solution.

[jducoeur]

It's a matter of focus, I believe. From a scientific viewpoint, Many-Worlds isn't terribly helpful at this time (save that it's one possible way of wrapping one's head around some of the weirdnesses of Quantum Mechanics). But I find it rather elegant on the metaphysical level -- a bunch of basic philosophical questions clarify considerably in the presence of it. The number of raw entities is ludicrously large, but *conceptually* I find it relatively straightforward. (The problem with Occam's Razor is always in trying to find the appropriate definition of "simple".) It co-exists rather poorly with some of the assumptions that are hard-baked into much of Western philosophy (eg, the Identity problems referred to before), but I find it a very useful tool to help me re-examine those assumptions.

One thing I'm finding in my musings on metaphysics is that I seem to be more unusual than I had realized. Utility just isn't very *relevant* to me here -- it's a matter of sheer curiosity, but that's plenty enough reason for me. I'm endlessly fascinated by The Hard Problems, and while I may not be able to come up with provable answers, I can at least narrow the field somewhat, and find out what works to satisfy that curiosity. And frankly, part of it is a creative and logical exercise: what happens when I play through these ideas, and where do they take me?

I mean, it isn't as if I actually have much personal *use* for either quantum mechanics or cosmology. But they fit into that same slot of Trying To Understand. In some cases I may not be able to get definitive answers, but that doesn't change the desire to continue seeking through the mists...

[umbran.livejournal.com]

I'm equally fond of The Anthropic Principle. This is a way of wending one's way through Many-Worlds...

Hm. You're over-specifiying a bit. The various versions of the Anthropic Principle are philosophical toys that stand on their own. They may be applied to the Many Worlds interpretation, but are not at all dependent upon it.

[jducoeur]

Good point. Indeed, I was reading into one of those just the other day -- the notion that our world is basically a single instance of a 3-space brane in a larger 11-space, and that it appears that 3-spaces just happen to be much more *stable* than most of the other possible branes. (I do want to find out more on that one, to understand the logic of why 3-space and 7-space are believed to be less susceptible to destruction than the others.)

Being fond of Many-Worlds, I tend to over-focus on it. But you're quite correct that the Anthropic Principle works for any scenario that has many potential "universes" in it...

Potentially spoilery relevance

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

There's a Benford book, Cosm, with a fascinating and relevant idea at the center of it. The book is mostly about how painfully political the academic world is, but the idea behind the book would've made an interesting short story.

..err...spoilers.

 

 

 

 

Spoilers Below.
Basically, having gained the ability to create universes within this one, researchers realize that only some of the ones they create are viable. Furthermore, only a smaller subset of those are universes in which the universe-creating capability is created. Essentially, this means that those are the only "fertile" universes; the rest are basically neuters, incapable of reproducing. The anthropic principle then suggests, unless we are (incredibly) the first universe to create a new universe, that we live in a universe which is just the latest in a long chain of universe experiments, and that the viability of the universe is due to successive refinements.

Re: Potentially spoilery relevance

[hungrytiger]

Interesting concept. Is the book any good or is it just a neat idea wrapped in a mediocre story with poorly written characters. Benford's suckered me into those before with some of his neat ideas.

Re: Potentially spoilery relevance

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

I read it a long time ago, when I was willing to overlook characters in favor of ideas, so I can't really judge. I suspect the characters are just there to let him vent about academia and move the plot along...

Re: Potentially spoilery relevance

[jducoeur]

Intriguing. It's a bit "turtleish", but an amusing observation nonetheless. Does he deal with the possibility of that scenario looping? (That is, universe A creates B, which creates C, which creates A again.)

Most of my thinking along these lines has been to specifically come up with a metaphysics that is *not* subject to the "turtles all the way down" problem. It's difficult -- the one I've been leaning towards gets downright mystical, and just a smidgeon unsettling...

Re: Potentially spoilery relevance

[alethea-eastrid.livejournal.com]

hmm. I seem to recall this *exact* plot as a self-contained short story. (no, I don't know where. "when" is at least a decade ago, probably more--high school, I think.) Either I'm misremembering a book down to the bit I liked, or it did make an intersting short story.

[hungrytiger]

Can't say as I've read up on a lot of this, but my amateur preference has always been for an idea I came up with, which I call The Collapsing Wave theory.

Yes, the world does fork a zillion times a second, but almost all of those forks are from meaningless changes (quick... think of a number; there we just created a zillion forks). In my theory, worlds that are effectively the same merge back into each other (so all the worlds in which you thought of different numbers have merged back into this world since there wasn't any change significant enough to keep them apart).

Chaos theory doesn't like my philosophy, but that's too bad for chaos theory. My opinion is that the large-scale potential future changes which chaos theory predicts don't carry enough current force during the moment of Qquantum/Planck time that the worlds have split to keep the weight of the worlds from coming back together. The total force of those future changes only exists if the futures of the different universes are created at the moment of the split, but that gets into other philosohpical problems.

The question that my theory then raises is what change could possibly be big enough to keep multiple universes which have split for an instant of time apart. And to that, I don't know, maybe a Big Bang.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

A physics question that's bugged me in Many Universes is whether it requires energy to "create" the alternate universes, and if so, where it comes from. If your supposition of merging universes is true, that would provide symmmetry at least -- allowing for a visualization of "boiling universes", like the boiling of particle/anti-particle pairs at zero-energy; if merges matched splits, we'd get net zero energy integrated over time. Also no net change in the number of universes, which kind of kills the point of Many Worlds, but whatever.

Certainly merge conflicts from alternate universes would explain where my socks go when I'm not looking.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

So long as it is for a short time (the split is "virtual") then the energy doesn't matter. We are allowed to borrow huge amounts of energy from the void for very short times.

If what is created really is a separate universe, such that there's no communication after the split, we're also okay. "Energy" is really measured relatively - so, if you can't have relations, the other thing effectively has zero energy.

If you can communicate between the branches after the split, you have to worry about the energy exchange between the two. But then, it isn't that you've created a new universe, but you've extended the one you previously had, and for technical reasons that really doesn't satisfy Many Worlds.

[umbran.livejournal.com]

Chaos theory doesn't like my philosophy, but that's too bad for chaos theory.

From where I sit, your idea is just fine, because chaos theory does not apply to everything. Only some very specific sorts of systems are susceptible to the "butterfly effect". Collapsing back on all those variables that don't notably change the future is just fine and dandy.

[mneme]

To be fair, even in many worlds, I don't think -everything- happens -- not everything has a non-zero chance of happening.

[jducoeur]

Correct -- hence, the important qualifier "anything that can happen".

Of course, in the presence of particle tunneling, it's hard to limit the possibility set. It's just that most states are fabulously improbable to get to from the initial state. One of the most interesting philosophical questions with Many-Worlds, which I'm still playing with, is how probability figures in all of this. It becomes a *very* subtle problem...

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

For instance, there's nothing in the physics that rules out a version of Earth is which, by sheerest coincidence, magic appeared to work. Or to put it another way, in which physical laws appeared, for some time, to be different than what they "actually" are. Of course, for every such universe, there would be an much larger set of ones where that "magic" suddenly ceased "working" one day.

It's even conceivable that we live in such a universe. Maybe, back in the Middle Ages, magic *did* "work". Or for a scarier twist, maybe *we* will wake up one morning and discover that what we held to be physical law turns out to have just been a series of coincidences.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I am amused, though, that no one seems to follow these arguments through to their ridiculous but logical extreme.

You just spend too much time reading comics, and not enough time reading short SF :-) I've read at least a couple that deal with this sort of thing.

[jducoeur]

Fair accusation. While comics occasionally have really good thoughtful SF, it isn't the norm...

[querldox.livejournal.com]

Read Larry Niven's All The Myriad Ways (which I'm guessing Peter David may have been referencing via a newspaper headline in the latest Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man) for a story that takes the theory to a logical, personal, extreme a bit different from your brain in a jar one.

[jducoeur]

Huh. Interesting -- I surely must have read this, since I had a major Niven phase once upon a time and read essentially his entire ouvre to that point. But it's been enough years that the details of the story have slipped my mind. I'll have to re-read it...