On Monday, November 19, 2012 6:27:56 PM UTC-5, Russell Standish wrote: > > On Mon, Nov 19, 2012 at 02:45:43PM -0800, Craig Weinberg wrote: > > > > What I am asking is why does the idea of a multiverse help explain why > any > > one universe exists in the first place. > > > > This could be one of two different questions, both of which are > evrything-list 101: > > 1) Why a universe, given a multiverse. A universe is the internal (ie > 1p) view of the multiverse. >
Why does a multiverse need an internal view? Especially since our experience is that all participants in the universe already provide 1p internal views of the same universe. > 2) Why a multiverse instead of a universe. The answer is the zero > information principle + Occams razor. Multiverses are actually much > simpler than universes. > Keeping with the simplicity theme, I'll just paste something I wrote this morning for a conversation on Facebook, and then for a post on my blog (this way I don't need to recreate the universe just to say the same thing I've already said... makes 'sense', right?): To me, the problem with MWI is not that it’s exotic, or that it is too bold, or that it seems silly, or that it’s that it is unparsimonious, it is that it is radically hypocritical. It’s one thing to throw out Occam’s Razor in the service of explaining reality as it seems to us to actually be, but it’s another to throw it out for the purpose of preserving Occam’s Razor for mathematical purposes. MWI is like proposing that “The shortest distance between two lines is the creation of a fantastic number of universes.” This is only compelling if you are trying to squeeze something which is not arithmetic into an arithmetic framework. What I see clearly is that the whole of arithmetic - algebra, topology, information, etc, is nothing compared to the richness of sensory coherence. Mathematics is a powerful tool because it is like a sterile skeleton of sense-making which can imitate anything that can be imitated (Church-Turing basically formalizes this). But my conjecture formalizes the understanding that awareness is defined specifically as *that which cannot be imitated or substituted*. Math is useful if you are trying to make sense of a lot of things, but sense isn’t useful to math in any conceivable way. Math is a way of making sense, but it has no possibility of participation, so it must be a character within the story of the universe rather than the universe being an idea within math. *This is where MWI goes wrong. It puts an infinity of carts before each other so that we won’t notice there’s no horse.* I am saying, if we are going to make the creation of the universe infinitely easy, then why have a creation requirement at all? If every change to every molecule on every hair on a dust mite’s head needs its own Andromeda galaxy to help make that change…and really every *possible* change on every hair on every dust mite in the Andromeda galaxy also needs universes in which each of the first dust mite’s possible changes exist, then why have these changes at all? Why hop between a matrix of static possibilities if those possibilities are already realized? > I don't see that regressions, infinite or otherwise, have a role to > play in either question. > > -- > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > Principal, High Performance Coders > Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected]<javascript:> > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/everything-list/-/e2hUoOOBrPwJ. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
