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 :-)

[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.

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.

[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.

[mneme]

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

[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.

[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.