What if facts don't exist?

[ElasticPlanet]

On 3/15/2019 at 8:13 AM, lazypanda said:

So is this evidence towards a multiverse? The infinite universes are maybe just different realities observed by different entities.

The multiverse isn't meant to be one-universe-per-sentient-being or anything like that. It's more like a branching tree of all possible timelines. Once you've followed a different branch of the tree from some other instance of yourself, that's multiple different versions of you the same person, observing different things in different universes. And every little quantum variation that looks to us as if it were random, is creating 'a new universe' for every possible outcome. I put 'a new universe' in scare quotes there because the number of universes is supposed to be infinite in some way that I'm only just grasping, and certainly not able to explain at alll!

[user23974865]

28 minutes ago, ElasticPlanet said:

It's more like a branching tree of all possible timelines. Once you've followed a different branch of the tree from some other instance of yourself, that's multiple different versions of you the same person, observing different things in different universes.

Which leads me to the conclusion that I won't die. Or at least that I'll live way longer than I could reasonably deduce from statistical observation. Because, for any particular arrangement of the universe where I die at some particular moment, there's another arrangement where I somehow don't, even if I'm a thousand years old by then. And naturally, I can only exist and remember things in an arrangement of the universe where I'm still alive. (I'm assuming that the multiverse is a self-contained environment with no communication whatsoever with some other metaphysical environment, of course. Also, when I say "I", I mean "some continuation of this individual consciousness", and, when I say "alive", I don't necessarily mean a DNA-based life form.)

 

This might explain why the fundamental constants of the universe have the exact values that they have and not some other value: because this is the arrangement of the universe where I exist.

 

(Just a humble and trivial philosophical icebreaker... )

[ElasticPlanet]

3 hours ago, burobu said:

for any particular arrangement of the universe where I die at some particular moment, there's another arrangement where I somehow don't

A well known thought experiment. I mentioned Max Tegmark before, and I think he had something to say about this one in his Mathematical Universe book... but I can't find it right now...

 

3 hours ago, burobu said:

 

This might explain why the fundamental constants of the universe have the exact values that they have and not some other value: because this is the arrangement of the universe where I exist.

The anthropic principle. The only downside I've heard about using this idea in a quantum multiverse is, the number of universes is supposed to be infinite. Whereas the rules of statistics we normally use are meant for finite numbers of things, and that's a problem. Or rather, I've read in a book that it's a problem, and if it was explained at all, I can't remember any of the explanation now!

[user23974865]

40 minutes ago, ElasticPlanet said:

A well known thought experiment. I mentioned Max Tegmark before, and I think he had something to say about this one in his Mathematical Universe book... but I can't find it right now...

I don't actually read many books, so this idea of mine may be more common than I think, but I haven't come across this particular way of framing it. What I find the most unsatisfying about the usual way how the anthropic principle is framed is that it's supposedly about "people" or "humanity". I don't see anything fundamentally special about organic matter as opposed to inorganic matter, let alone people versus other life forms. What I can't deny, however, no matter how puzzling and unsettling it may be, is that I am special in this reality that I experience, no matter what "I" am. There's a fundamental difference between me (the observer) and everything being observed. I know I exist. I don't know that you exist. I don't know that my hands exist.

 

I picture it (consciousness) as a coordinate in the extra dimension spanning across all possible four-dimensional arrangements of the universe. The entire past and future history of this particular arrangement is roughly synonymous with my consciousness. I find the idea very elegant because it "answers" some fundamental existential questions by outright invalidating them. Particularly: "I'm not a static and monolithic entity, I'm a dynamic system, so: At which point in time exactly did I start existing? At which point in time exactly will I cease to exist? What would be the smallest chunk of me that could be considered 'me'? Where exactly is the boundary between 'me' and the chair I'm sitting on? Or the rest of the universe, for that matter?" Basically, existence makes a lot more sense if it's unbounded. It still doesn't "explain" why I only experience this particular perspective and no other, but maybe this universe is one particular data set, and "I" am the computation of some optimization problem over this data set. I'm happy enough with that.

[lapat67]

@burobu, what is special about life is that it locally increases order, despite the second law of thermodynamics. Order out of chaos.

[user23974865]

59 minutes ago, lapat67 said:

@burobu, what is special about life is that it locally increases order, despite the second law of thermodynamics. Order out of chaos.

Life is an emergent phenomenon though. It's entirely made out of entirely ordinary non-living elements. So the distinction is still based on abstraction. A different consciousness might conceptualize things under completely different distinctions instead.

 

Take this question, for example: are the oceans alive? The intuitive answer is no. What about fish contained in it? The intuitive answer is yes. But is water in the fish's digestive tract part of it? The intuitive answer is no. But what about water in its organs? The intuitive answer is yes. But what about water causing abnormal swelling in those organs? The intuitive answer is no. But what about water in healthy tissue in the middle of that swelling? The intuitive answer is yes. But what about water inside cancer cells contained inside that healthy tissue? The intuitive answer is no. And yet, there is nothing other than imaginary boundaries separating each of those pockets of water from the other ones. It constantly flows between them all and also between the inside and the outside of each creature.

 

So it's fractal pockets of decreasing entropy inside pockets of increasing entropy inside pockets of decreasing entropy and so on and on just like the rest of the universe. If there is a difference, it's quantitative, not qualitative.

[Guest Jetsun Milarepa]

On 3/15/2019 at 5:35 AM, RoseGoesToYale said:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613092/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/

 

So... objective reality may not exist. The scientific method might be bunk. It's possible for people to experience two different realities that conflict.

 

Just, thoughts? My mind's kind of blown right now...

This is taking me back to my days in the Tibetan monasteries.... The two truths, my favourite topic, Madhyamika Prasangika.

There were no physicists 2500 years ago, but their philosophical skills were being well exercised!

Has prompted me to get the old books out now....

[lapat67]

I really liked the way Karl Popper used the knife*, that we don't need to agree before we start whether reality is essentialist or non-essentialist, we know there is a reality because it can disagree with us. The way that all of 18th century science said Newton was right, but reality said no. Which I take to mean that if we can make incommensurable observations that's indeterminacy, not a sign that reality is multiple.

 

*Lila, by R. Pirsig; a colloquial form of this is "to cut through the crap", though Pirsig used the image of the knife to talk about the Aristotelian A is B or not-B, and that, though Pirsig didn't quite arrive at the general semantic insight, he did draw attention to the multiple ways that "reality" can be divided into B or not-B vs. C or not-C.