Letters to the Editor
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Occam's Razor, Baby
The core of these ideas have been floating around for quite some time. But the distortion of preconceptions on both (or more) sides seems to remain more or less constant.
Me, I'll stick with Occam's Razor: the simplest explanation goes to the head of the class. And that doesn't require that life and consciousness must exist. It's enough that they can exist.
Indeed, given a muiltiverse view, it's inevitable that sooner or later (in a trans-temporal sense, of course!) life and consciousness will emerge, not because they must, but simply because the odds against go down, down, down, as the number of multiverses go up, up, up. It's a probabilistic argument, not a causal one.
This logic has been out there since the 80s at least. There's nothing really new about it.
The universe-as-computer with fuzzy laws getting sharper argument is more recent. But it's entirely beside the point, really. It's much simpler, and more elegant to simply say that universes without consciousness don't get observed. Their wave functions never collapse. When consciousness appears, it doesn't alter the rules of the universe it's in. It simply observes them as suitible for consciousness to exist with.
These are the only universes that ever get seen--directly, from inside, at least. Happy accidents.
This is, in fact, everything that Davies seems to require by what he says. The fact that he wants more--and is willing to invoke arguments that entail needless complexities--seems to me a relic of his Western monotheistic heritage. Being raised a Unitarian, exposed to all sorts of religions at an early age, among which Buddhism and Taoism appealled especially, I don't share his tacit expectations or desires.
This doesn't mean I'm right and he's wrong, of course. We are, no doubt, quite a ways from being able to test any of this. I just think that it's helpful in the meantime to make as much of our underlying expectations or desires explicit as possible.
From my perspective, the monotheism seems to breed a sort of deep, existential anxiety that requires guarantees of meaning and meaningfulness, which Davies speaks to through his theorizing. But if one doesn't share those anxieties, one can be perfectly content with multiverses simply creating life and consciousness for entirely probabilistic reasons.
In fact, I'm even quite comfortable thinking of consciousness as the basic stuff out of which all this comes--the potential-for-being out of which multi-verses arise. It's not something I have to prove. It might not even be the kind of thing you ever could prove. It's simply an interesting perspective. And if you're not too existentially anxious, then why be bothered if that's all it ever can be?