Letters to the Editor
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What a relief
Thanks Salon for an insightful article into Davies' world. These questions form the core of many spiritual traditions around the world and tie in with the work of others such as Swimme and Kaku. The questions will be with us long after the vagaries of the Hiltons and Libbys.
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Then there's the REAL strong anthropic principle:
"The universe exists because I do."
Just to clarify: that's me, not you.
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Life imitates art
Sounds a lot like Olaf Stapledon's great SF book Star Maker (1937) (ISBN 0-8195-6692-6).
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Gentlemen, start your metaphors...
From the article:
And we may find that the big-bang theory goes out of favor at some point in the future. And then what? Religious people will have backed the wrong horse. So it's fraught with danger to seize on these cosmological ideas.
Very much like the new-age writers who seized on certain popular ideas in physics in the 70s, (string theory, anyone? look at all the pretty dimensions!) ideas that in the late 90s underwent an enormous amount of revision and change, all of which has left said new-agers looking decidedly last age...
In a larger sense this is simply illustrative of the fundamental difference between the process of science and the process of religion. Science says "Here's the best interpretation we've been able to come up with -- all this may change if we get some new data tomorrow." Religion says "Our ideas are inherently correct and eternally unchanging and you will offend us if you question them."
But I encourage religious leaders to ignore these warnings and continue making the oft-used statement "Scientists are just now coming to understand these eternal truths" because at the end of the day exposing the faithful to even bad, obsolete science may just fire off a hunger for a system of discussing our place in the universe that's not based on magical thinking.
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Nice Work
Nice work Salon.
Americans are religion addicts. The last thing you need to be introduced to is another new "faith".
How about just going cold turkey.
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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?
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Of Course...
Then there's the REAL strong anthropic principle:
"The universe exists because I do."
Just to clarify: that's me, not you.
it would be Anonymous who said that.
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Wow, I have never heard this one before!
Why is Salon posting such an old and goofy conceit as if it were something new? The living things made of dark matter, if any, have a much better claim to the anthropic principle than do we. We are some solar-powered self-organized junk growing like yeast cells in the outskirts of a galaxy, not IMHO, the grand reason why the universe exists.
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A Computer
I really enjoy the science/philosophy mashup that the quantum age has brought us. It's literally fantastic, yet somehow it feels like this stuff will pan out. The mindblow school of thought is just too interesting to ignore.
Computers have become a popular universe-analog when talking about the big picture. And why not? The universe is made of stuff that behaves like hardware (matter), and the laws of physics, which behave like software. The fact that we live in a universe where it's possible to build a computer, like the one you're reading this on, proves that computation is a natural part of reality.
Perhaps it's a bit surface-level to say that the universe is "a big computer" - the metaphor is too literal. Makes people think about Tron. Or ask "then where is the computer?" as if that destroys the possibility. If you say "The computer is inside itself," you sound like a couch bound hippienaut LSD professor.
Better to say that computers are mirroring, on a tiny scale, a fundamental aspect of the universe -- Information processing. And that subatomic particles are closer in nature to pixels than to microscopic billiard balls.
It's also possible that an actual bearded God cast Keanu Reeves in The Matrix to discredit bleeding edge scientists, and that when God speaks, his rich baritone voice is heard though a studio reverb effect.