Recently I've been thinking about why we live in a world with stable laws
of physics, out of the plethora of all possible worlds. Why does the sun
rise every day, why is the intensity of the Earth's gravitational field
constant, why do causal relations ("the constant conjunction between causes
and effects", as Hume put it) persist in time?
While the anthropic principle might be used to explain why the laws have
been stable in the past (because this stability is probably necessary for
the evolution of living or conscious organisms such as humans), it doesn't
seem to explain why we should expect that the laws will continue to be
stable in the future. In fact, it may seem that such a stability is very
unlikely because there are many ways our world could be in the future but
only one way in which it would be a deterministic extension of the world it
has been until now.
But in the book Theory of Nothing by Russell Standish I have found an
argument that seems to claim the *opposite *(if I understand it correctly):
given
the way our world has been until now, this world is more simple if its
regularities (such as laws of physics) continue than if they are
discontinued, and simple worlds are more likely (more frequent in the
collection of all possible worlds) than more complex worlds. (A simpler
property is instantiated in a greater number of possible worlds than a more
complex property.) Such a deterministic world is fully defined by some
initial conditions and laws of physics, while a world whose regularity is
discontinued at some point would need an additional property that would
define the discontinuation and thereby make the world more complex.
Can it work like that? If so, I guess the probability that the laws remain
stable is growing with the time that they have actually been stable. So
now, after more than 13 billion years of stable laws of physics in our
universe, is the probability that they remain stable overwhelmingly high
(practically 100%)?
Here is a link to the book:
https://www.hpcoders.com.au/theory-of-nothing.pdf
(the persistence of laws of physics is discussed in chapter 4, parts 4.1
and 4.2)
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