Embracing the Multiverse

Why Some Scientists Embrace the 'Multiverse' | RealClearPolitics:

I reference this mostly because it showed up ... and I'm fascinated by physics, especially the quantum stuff and the multiverse theories.

My thinking in this is as follows:

1. One will have faith in either God or in randomness and there will never be a "proof" either way from a material perspective. As this article covers however, to ignore the evidence on the side of intelligence requires a HUGE level of randomness. Note also, that God may well do "creation" through the use of "genetic algorithms" ... directed randomness. It is hard to beat the human hubris of setting up "rules" as to the boundaries in which an all-powerful, eternal and all-knowing God can operate! You WILL have faith ... it is as innate (and I'd say MORE so, because it deals with your spirit) as your heart pumping and breath being drawn.
   
2. Humans are inherently untrustworthy and especially able to fool themselves into thinking they are not  -- maybe because of random evolution, maybe because of a fall to evil ala Genesis, again, no way to know that answer scientifically/philosophically, or to believe it can be "educated away". We DO all believe something, and we act on the basis of those beliefs.
   
3. We arrived where we are today in Western Civilization either because Judaism, Christianity and Greek thought were the ordained design of God to arrive at this point, or because they were the most successful "memes" (genetic and conscious)  relative to human life and civilization. Again, only faith can select.
   
4. Since the west has rejected it's prime roots -- both classical thought and Christianity, it has already committed suicide -- low birth rate, massive debt, soaring suicide rates, exploding corruption, loss of any future direction / shared cultural vision, etc, etc. In my view, whatever happens is STILL "God's Will" ... but if one is an atheist, it would seem a really good time to check the metaphysical compass, because the current results of your belief system are not looking good. 

So every once in awhile, a monkey somewhere in some multiverse randomly plays Beethoven's 5th on a randomly created piano, but even MORE amazing, sometimes Joe Biden utters something that makes sense ... "Gird your loins"!

Where do we go from here? God, guns, gold, canned food?  I think we we need at least a "remnant" that can survive and carry the few worthwhile artifacts of Western Civilization into the future -- AND I believe that God has a definite plan, even when it seems VERY unclear!


'via Blog this'

Is, Was, and Always Will Be (Fabric of the Cosmos)

I haven't completely finished Brian Greene's "The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality" but I’ve decided it is time to comment on it. I'm not going to claim that I understand it, and yes, it certainly did make my head hurt at points. It has one gigantic insight that hits me like a brick between the eyes. I'm not sure I even really know what I'm talking about, and even if I do,  it is hard to fathom. 

An effect of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is that whatever has ever happened, is happening now, or is going to happen in the future, has always been happening, will always be happening, and is happening now. The "thing" that is moving through this "static history" may only be our consciousness, which gives us the impression of the “flow of time” to us. 

An observers view of space-time is relative based on distance and velocity, so if one is 10K light years away from a location (say earth), and changes their velocity toward or away from the location, by even highway speeds, their “space-time slice” relative to the distant location shifts by 100s of years into the past or the future. Up that velocity to thousands of miles per second, and the time scale becomes millions of years. Since there are no “privileged observers”, any of the “slices” are equally valid, and the only way to make that work is if all the slices are there all the time and always have been. The expansion of space-time since the Big Bang means that those slices "got bigger", but they were still "always there" from the perspective of the "smaller" space-time).

The picture he presents is space/time as a frozen “loaf” sitting on a table, with one’s view of reality as a “slice” with a certain angle through that loaf based on location/velocity. If everything that has and is going to happen is always happening, one might question “free will” just a bit. It isn’t important to me to fully understand these things, but I like to have some sort of model that I at least find “interesting” of what is happening in the universe. I’m perfectly willing to leave it up to God, but I do have some questions that I’m looking forward to answers on when I get to meet him.

One "answer" may be the Hugh Everett “Many Worlds (MW) Interpretation” where everything that CAN happen in the universe maybe does. In this model, the old "is light a wave or a particle" question becomes "it depends on which universe you are in". In Quantum Mechanics, the answer is "both, until you observe it, then for your perspective/universe it "resolves" to one or the other.

In MW, at every possible decision point, even at the particle level, there is always another whole universe, or the fact that "somebody" (a conscious being?)  observed it causes a "new" universe sharing the same past but a new future with the pre-observation point. 

In computing terms, this is much like a process "forking" -- everything is the same up to that point for the "new" process, shares the same prior context, but a different future -- in the physics case, possibly different only as a single photon resolving as a wave vs a particle. 

A lot of people find this theory disconcerting because it means “a whole lot of universes”, but since I can’t comprehend one infinity, it doesn’t seem like that much more of a burden to not comprehend infinity to the infinity power ;-) This interpretation has gained some more followers as work on quantum computation has progressed.

So, in the “Moose interpretation”, I think the “universe forking” only happens when consciousness is involved. That is why we see the “uncertainty principle”. If there isn’t a conscious observer, there is no reason to fork (resolution can be "lazily evaluated" for you computer people). As we go through our lives, we generate new universes when we make conscious choices … and the aggregates of those choices interact with each other.

There are a whole set of universes where none of us reading or writing this blog are even here, and there are a bunch of universes where some set of us are in radically different circumstances because our “consciousness track” chosen to date was different.

In some universe I stopped HERE …. But you got to read on to HERE in SOME other universe ;-)