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

[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.