The deist view on this would be that our planet was custom built by an engineer to support life, as against some natural theory of planet formation.
A multiverse theory is no more or less ridiculous or arbitrary than the planet formation theory. The only difference is that we can observe other planets, but cannot observe other possible universes. The deist explanation of creation of the universe is however no more predictively powerful than the theory of planet engineering.
Maybe in the digits of Pi as in the book CONTACT
Or perhaps... :)
There was a tweet a few months back about a cloud formation resembling the map of United Kingdom. One way of seeing at something like that is saying, there could be no way a cloud formation resembling a complex geographical map on earth without an intelligent species making it. Another way of looking at is given how many billions of years earth has been in existence, eventually clouds could form resembling many things on earth.
I wouldn't surprised if we tomorrow discover some sequence of digits in Pi that show these kinds of behavior.
In short, over long periods of times, odds of these events happening approaches 1.
I might have looked in the wrong places but I have looked a little why the multiverse is a good explanation but I haven't found anything of the sort.
The best explanations I have seen seem to amount to "we got lucky with our universe, the best way to explain that luck is that there are a lot of universes". I haven't seen any reason why it shouldn't be "we got lucky with our universe, the best way to explain that luck is that it was done on purpose". Would you be willing to explain how you get from observed data or well regarded theories to a multiverse?
Say all of our experiments are explained by Theory X. Then positing Thoery X + God is a model with strictly more moving parts and equal explanatory power as Theory X alone.
On a wider level, explanations like "God did it" tend to operate on the same level as calling the phenomenon "magic"---it's an analysis that doesn't really provide any actionable information on how to influence said phenomenon.
In that way, I personally see "magic" and "God" as operating more in the realm of storytelling. Practically, I find good storytelling is helpful for things like identity-building and theatre, but if I wanna build a bridge then my money's on minimum Kolmogorov complexity, i.e. Occam's Razor.
The multiverse is an inductive line of reasoning that infers things to explain away observances. But is it measurable?
I'm not saying we should "God away" the questions, but coming up with inferences that we can't actually measure (and don't answer the question of where the multiverse comes from) really doesn't do much scientifically or philosophically.
In terms of complexity, both theologies necessitate the existence of a space which is inaccessible to our own measurements. You can't favor or disfavor one over the other since there is no distinction in explanatory capabilities, and the complexity exists in an immeasurable state. In a sense, both theologies basically state that the universe is the way it is because it was made that way, and the means of that making is described via effectively bullshittery in both cases.
What a multiverse "explanation " of the observed constants adds to that is a prior that puts probability mass on every possible state, from which we can get the possibility of our personal universe. (I think that's a bit dubious, since it only shifts around the arbitraryness to some meta-heuristic about priors, thus the scare quotes.)
Similarly, you could imagine a theology that takes all the same laws of physics and interprets them as "God's plan", which again is just a different perspective. But to get additional predictions, you then need to have some idea of what God's plan specifically is, which tends to require thick books of ancient stories that still don't explain everything clearly.
So in the end you could disfavor both theories based on the difficulty of getting them to explain what they are intended to explain.
One has more side effects than the other. Your requirement that the creating entity exist “apart from the universe” and not “interfere with the workings of the universe” is not generally accepted by deists. It is also not a required consequence of the deist hypothesis.
I think this is the part I don't understand. I have heard no evidence-based explanation for what lower level mechanisms cause our universe that imply a multiverse.
>Say all of our experiments are explained by Theory X. Then positing Thoery X + God is a model with strictly more moving parts and equal explanatory power as Theory X alone.
In pricipal I agree with you. In this case I think we disagree. In my mental model, Theory X in this case is the multiverse. At which point you say X + God is more complicated and I agree. I think instead of X + God as the explanation it should instead just be God. In which case I don't see an objective way of saying if Occam's razor would favor multiverse or God.
The example I have in mind is the Everettian interpretation of QM. Formally, we have a Hilbert space and decoherence. We can interpret decohered regions in the Hilbert space as separate universes. These mechanics are an artifact of the mathematical formalism.
Interestingly, the Copenhagen "interpretation" would get ruled out by Occam's Razor since it adds the notion of wave collapse on top of the formalism without experiment being able to differentiate between the two.
> I think instead of X + God as the explanation it should instead just be God.
If that works for your needs, then more power to you. We can also jump a meta-level with Occam's Razor though.
Say we take a firm stance on only wanting to keep around models that are constrained by scientific experiment. Then we need, say, the Standard Model and General Relativity, but I'm not sure the God Did It model would survive said filter.
For scientific progress (i.e. the cooperative human effort of science), such a hard-nosed approach seems to have worked unreasonably well so far. For questions of personal world-view and how that affects your subjective experience, then I doubt such a dogmatic stance is universally ideal.
Anyway, I ramble.
To use a CS analogy, many-worlds says that the tree branches the maximum number of time at each nodes. Multiverse claims there are infinitely many trees. Do I have a different understanding then you when it comes to what constitutes a multiverse?
> Say we take a firm stance on only wanting to keep around models that are constrained by scientific experiment.
My initial asking of this question is that it appears to me that the multiverse is not constrained by scientific experiment. I have read most of the comments and your gets the closest to something predictive but even then, it is still just one interpretation of QM. The other option is that there is something in string theory that implies multiverses but as of yet string theory is just theory and from what I understand string theory doesn't require a multiverse, it requires more dimensions which might cause a multiverse.
I ramble as well.
Belief is a psychologial attitude towards a claim.
Atheism is a sort of psychological preference for SIMPLER things to be in the role of causes. It simply rebels against what Daniel Dennett calls a "skyhook". Dawkins pretty much straight up admits this in his books when he says he would be fine with an explanation from simple origins.
Also, we want to apply the same rules we have been applying. Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 argument for example, or Occam's Razor.
But as we can see from eg quantum mechanics, our rules for understanding are only useful in a certain context, that includes our observational starting point. We really don't know what kind of rules there might be.
Even the idea of rules implies there is some simple reason for something. But we now know (with AlphaGo for instance) that there may be more complex explanations than can really be understood by a human mind, even in turn based games. Let alone fluid dynamics or a heterogenous multi body gravitational problem, chaos theory and so on.
It is quite arrogant to think that what has worked for us humans so far will let us probe to the end of every inquiry about the universe.
Enter... the multiverse theory. The proud partner of the anthropic principle, for those who care about the frequentist interpretation of probability.
(Because if you don't, then the question doesn't even arise. Just say "because that's the way things are" instead of "because we're in that particular universe".)
It's a bit similar to throwing enough time and space at a problem. For example:
"how did the first replicating organism come about if Kolmogorov complexity of the smallest one is so high in terms of chemistry that it would be astronomically improbable to come about by chance?"
"Panspermia"
"Ok but that just pushes the problem back to other planets. How about the first?"
"Well, primordial soup + lightning + billions of years + trillions of planets ... and maybe buckyballs"
"That is just theories, where is the testing"
"It's the best we got. One day science will tell us the answer. Your theory isn't even scientific."
So we have to be careful not to equate science (an approach) with atheism (a bias).
But here is my question in conclusion:
At the end of the day, given how many times scientific understanding was overturned, what is really the difference between KNLOWLEDGE and BIAS?
Perhaps you haven't looked that hard?
The idea of multiverse as the "best way to explaining our luck with our universe" was in the bottom of the list of concerns to theorize a multiverse - if it appeared at all:
>Indeed, invoking an infinity of unseen universes to explain the unusual features of the one we do see is just as ad hoc as invoking an unseen Creator. The multiverse theory may be dressed up in scientific language, but in essence it requires the same leap of faith.
— Paul Davies, The New York Times, "A Brief History of the Multiverse"
So while it may be at the bottom of the list, it very much appears.
Imagine if our solar system was inside a nebula and the only star we could see was Sol. Until we figure a way to send a probe outside the nebula we have no idea if their are more stars or not. Do you see a way to "send a probe outside" and see if there are more universes or not?
Well, it turns out that the early universe went through a phase of incredible, extraordinary expansion called inflation. The inflation was boosted by something called an inflaton field, and due to quantum properties the inflaton field could spontaneously destabilize and spawn a bubble universe, each of which with a different Calabi-Yau manifold. It's possible that we are inside such a bubble universe, and outside of us the inflaton field is continuing to expand and producing more bubble universes. If this is the case, then it's not much of a surprise why our universe has the properties it does. Out of the 10^500 possibilities, a bubble universe spawned with the right Calabi-Yau manifold for life, and (unsurprisingly) we find ourselves living in that universe. This is the landscape multiverse theory. (I originally read about this theory in Brian Greene's excellent book The Hidden Reality, which describes many other multiverse theories too.)
Now, something important to note is that all this is still highly conjectural. String theory has many pleasing theoretical properties, but about zero physical evidence to support it. What then is the difference between string theory and deism? The difference is that for string theory (and more generally other multiverse theories) we actually have physical and mathematical theories that describe them. Deism doesn't. For string theory, we have papers, conferences, books, equations, and physicists and mathematicians who study this problem. We have something to work with. What do we have for deism? Well, pretty much nothing. No data, no theories, no anything. Deism is a fall-back theory when nothing else works out, and it has no theoretical roots and makes no predictions. This may change in the future, but as of now, deism is a scientific dead end. Of course, I don't know if string theory or another multiverse theory will pan out (indeed, the failure of the LHC to detect supersymmetry is raising some eyebrows), or even if deism actually turns out to be correct. However, on a scientific basis, string theory has more going for it now.
So the equivalence you're trying to draw is more of an opposite. Saying "our universe was done on purpose" is the opposite of saying "we got lucky with this universe," in much the same way that carefully placing 4 coins heads-up on a table is the opposite of flipping the same coin 4 times.
Once you're willing to entertain gods as an explanation, then no other explanation is needed, or will suffice. You don't need to go so far as elementary physics before considering a god. You can just look around and say "a god created this one second ago, including our memories."
From the other perspective, if you want to consider the idea of a god scientifically, then the obvious question is, where did the god come from? If they were powerful enough to purposefully create our universe, then they must have REALLY gotten lucky to have evolved that way in their own universe, right?
If theories are going to be useful, they'll have to predict something which can be confirmed with follow-up observations.
Does the multiverse theory predict something which can be confirmed with follow-up observations or that is falsifiable in some way? I don't actually know the answer to this, but I've heard a similar criticism of simulation theories. Unless we add some more specific information to the theory, it's not really a scientific theory for that reason. How would a simulated/created universe look?
That would be why it's called the "many-worlds interpretation".
The OP's point on deism vs multiverse vs simulation (added later in the thread) is actually fairly interesting. Reductio ad deism.
If you can name something that the multiverse predicts that could be confirmed with observations (possible observations we will not be able to make in my lifetime) I would appreciate it. My current understanding is that there is nothing predictive about the multiverse theory thus my initial question.
By whom or what is not useful to the exercise, and is omitted. Usually that part is important to deists.
I think as long as we have a "something", we will want to understand where that comes from and what else there might be that is not that something.
Some argue a self-existant eternal universe, and some a self-existant eternal Creator.
Personally, I believe the Creator view, but both stances are articles of faith that would be impossible to prove definitively.
Because the Creator theory is non-falsifiable. I forget which physicist used the phrase, but that would be termed, "Not even false."
They both seem so meta as to be faith based, but I don't know enough to state for sure, so I'm happy to be proven wrong :)
Edit: and can the theory explain where the multiverse comes from, or anything about it? To me, it seems like another way of trying to answer the question with more questions, but no way of discovering the answers. A sort of "God of the gaps" line of reasoning that just s/God/multiverse/ the entire thing.
If you answer one set of questions, you get another set of questions. So what? Should we just make up an answer and stop asking? I don't find that very intellectually satisfying.
You're right that there's no evidence for a multiverse yet, so it's just one of many conjectures. If the point you're making is that the notion of God is just as unsupported as the notion of a multiverse, yeah, I'd accept that. They're both "Not even false." Occam's Razor them both.
I'm not contending that the idea of God has the same evidence as a theory of a multiverse, but rather what makes the multiverse falsifiable?
If neither are falsifiable then I'd say they're on equal footing, and it would seem odd to me that scientists feel comfortable using one as an explanation but mock the other.
> Should we just make up an answer and stop asking? I don't find that very intellectually satisfying.
Are you asking to find answers or to continually keep asking? Personally, I'd rather have a complete and holistic answer, which for me seems the most satisfying.
But either way, I hope our personal intellectual satisfaction isn't driving the answers we agree upon.
No reason not to consider it, but the evidence against it is overwhelming. Specifically, the evidence is overwhelming that whatever the ultimate cause is, it is computationally simple, that is, its Kolmogorov complexity is small. That is fundamentally at odds with most people's conception of God.
Whenever mathematics is applied to the real world, there are always simplifying assumptions made. Otherwise, the problems become intractable. It does not matter what area that you investigate, you will find that assumptions are made to simplify the mathematics.
For our purposes, these "simple" equations work, but they are still limited approximations of what we see around us.
Not the fundamental equations. Yes, a lot of complexity emerges from those, just like a lot of complexity emerges in the Mandelbrot set. But as far as experiment has been able to determine, the equations of GR and QM are exactly correct.
It is true that either QM or GR (or both) as currently formulated will break down near the event horizons of black holes, but there is no reason to believe that once we figure that out the result will be significantly different in character than all the other laws of physics that have been worked out up to now.
> either QM or GR (or both) as currently formulated will break down near the event horizons of black holes
These seem to be in conflict. Black holes is exactly what I was talking about.
From what I've understand there's no unified theory or anything close to a unified theory for certain objects in space, which means the landscape is very open for some weird, weird stuff. Physics is already extremely weird.
> there is no reason to believe that once we figure that out the result will be significantly different in character than all the other laws of physics that have been worked out up to now
I would consider both general relativity and quantum mechanics to be drastically different things compared to what came before, going from "this is reasonable" to "WTF", so I can't agree with this statement at all.
Yes, that's true.
> Physics is already extremely weird.
Yes, that's true too. It is weird. But it's not complicated (in the strict computational sense).
> I would consider both general relativity and quantum mechanics to be drastically different things compared to what came before
In one sense yes, but not in the sense that matters for this discussion. GR and QM are conceptually very different from Newtonian mechanics, but they are similar insofar as they can be written down as simple (in the technical sense) mathematical equations. So there's no reason to expect that the next surprise will be different in that regard.
I'm not really sure when you decided on this, as I don't really evaluate the complexity of something based on whether it follows math. I evaluate it based on the nature of the logic and abstraction that needs to be used to follow it.
The fact that you can approximate the location of particles with a math equation doesn't really feel to me that we're doing the same thing, even mathematically, that we were doing in Newtonian mechanics. That seems very much in line with "These "laws" of physics can be written as simple mathematical equations only because these equations make various simplifying assumptions.".
What do you think math is?
> The fact that you can approximate the location of particles with a math equation doesn't really feel to me that we're doing the same thing, even mathematically, that we were doing in Newtonian mechanics.
Huh? Are you referring to the fact that QM is probabilistic? That's not a simplifying assumption, that's a reflection of how the world actually is.
So, with that out of the way, The fundamental equations all have simplifying assumptions. Even the equations of GR and QM are based on simplifying assumptions. Otherwise, you wouldn't have various scientists disputing their veracity.
I have copies of a certain portion of some work done in the 1960's which look at the assumptions made for the development of QM. The particular author quite clearly demonstrates the various assumptions made in the development of QM. In his case, he removed some of those assumptions and redeveloped the various models. He came up with a different formulation. I have over the years tried to have a good look at the work in question to see if there is things that can be engineered from the work.
There is a certain level of mathematics that I am still trying to wrap my mind about. It is used in both models (QM and his). From my perspective, it does away with the strong force as unnecessary by making a modification to electromagnetic theory and it gives what you see in experimental results.
Does it have merit, I don't know. But I am happy to put it on the same footing as QM as a possible explanation of what we see.
There is a model that also does away with gravity as a separate force. The model in question formulates gravity as a residual effect of electromagnetic theory. Does it have merit. Again, I am putting it on a similar footing. My attempts to use a CAS have only been partially successful as I need to understand a bit more about Maxima first and what I can do with it.
For me, these are ongoing interests (among many) which I dabble in when I have time on my hands. I am looking at one paper that does an analysis of SR and as yet I have not finished studying this paper. The author's main conjecture is that SR only works because Einstein made some simplifying assumptions by which SR then gets the measured results. His conjecture is that if those assumptions are not made then SR gives the wrong results. Does it have merit, I can't say at this point. It again hinges on whether or not I can get the work into Maxima. For the same reasons above, I only look at this when I have time on my hands.
Many people assume that the E = mc2 is a specific formulation of Einstein's work. Yet in my engineering undergraduate days in the late 1970's, the same formula was developed directing from Classical Electromagnetic Theory with no recourse to anything that Einstein did. But even here, it is not a simple equation that is correct, you have to know what the E represents and what the m represents. It is context sensitive and you have to know what the assumptions are.
Only crackpots dispute the veracity of GR or QM. Assigning semantics to the symbols used in writing down mathematical equations is not the same thing as making a "simplifying assumption." Anyone who could actually demonstrate the slightest deviation of either GR of QM from physical reality would win the Nobel prize in physics. Indeed, one of the problems with physics nowadays is that no such deviations are known, which is actually impeding progress. It is known that GR and QM cannot both be absolutely correct because their mathematical structures are incompatible. But to decide how to fix them we need some experimental data to tell us which one is wrong (or if both are wrong) and we don't have any such data. All attempts to find it so far have failed.
You make an assumption that it is only "crackpots" who dispute the veracity of GR or QM. If someone does dispute this and provides some evidence to the non-veracity of GR and QM, what is the likelihood of them even getting published in any high profile journal?
We have plenty of evidence across many fields where dissenting voices are shouted down and are called "crackpots" because they don't follow the consensus view. Some of these even get the Nobel Prize decades later for what they were condemned for at the time.
All theories (and I have found none to the contrary) use some form of simplification and assumptions that remove complexity. This is in every field, especially in all fields related to science and technology.
If we did not do so, the problems would become intractable. The wonderful thing is that even with these simplifications and assumptions we can get something that works and is useful. It just doesn't mean that those models and theories are correct or true. It just means that they work well enough for us to get things done.
100%. They will win the Nobel prize too. The operative phrase here being provides evidence.
> We have plenty of evidence across many fields where dissenting voices are shouted down and are called "crackpots" because they don't follow the consensus view. Some of these even get the Nobel Prize decades later for what they were condemned for at the time.
Yeah? Like who?
> All theories (and I have found none to the contrary) use some form of simplification and assumptions
Yeah? Like what?
You keep making this claim, and you keep not providing any evidence or examples. That is the mark of a crackpot.
One factor is that mathematical notation was shaped to describe natural laws (over many different laws). Though I agree that this doesn't seem to fully explain the simplicity and generality.
However, I do want to note that Occam's razor can justify whatever you like, if you're allowed to define the language you use without it counting as entities (like choosing a prior for Bayes').
No, that's actually not true. This is one of the cool things about Kolmogorov complexity, it is actually independent of the computational model. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invarian...
The probability that the first cause (FC) is computable is basically zero, so it most likely won't have a Kolmogorov complexity. For example, not even entropy is computable[1][2], let alone FC.
It is of course possible that whatever caused the big bang was computationally complex. There is no way to eliminate that possibility. But if it was, it left no evidence behind.
The definition has "unwilling to spend money or use resources; stingy or frugal" but I'm not sure what you're describing as less frugal. Is it a way of saying the deist explanation is more likely?
If a multiverse theory could give a way to get a universe out of nothing, it would be a lot more elegant than a deity theory. The deity theory after all is incomplete, it just supposes that our universe is embedded inside some sort of "outer" universe where deities live, but that outer universe also has to be created somehow.
I want to reiterate that I think the side you are arguing for is ultimately the "right" one, but I'm not sure I buy this argument.
Sometimes parsimony is having a fundamental thing that other things "reduce" to, that other things are explained in terms of. Someone intent on adding a deity can insist that it's not merely one extra thing among a dozen things. Instead, it is the one fundamental thing that gives rise to the dozen things. And therefore is more parsimonous.
I wonder if the right thing to do here is bite the bullet and admit that, yes, such a thing would be simpler, but you merely think you have a simpler thing when really you have smoke and mirrors.
Adding a deity to the explanation requires adding an "entity" completely nonexistent in the current models that are the basis for the multiverse, i.e. those within quantum theory and cosmology.
I think the deist can insist "My explanation is the most parsimonous. I have just the one thing, a deity. You have a kludge of a dozen different forces and laws and variables."
The "parsimony", the "simplicity", the unit in which we count entities - is that of Kolmogorov complexity. "A dozen different forces and laws and variables" is significantly simpler, Kolmogorov-wise, than a thinking entity. There is orders of magnitude less things to specify about the former than about the latter for a complete description.
The root of my question is I am uninformed of anything with quantum theory or cosmology that makes a multiverse more likely than deism. Do you have specific examples from quantum theory or cosmology that makes a multiverse more likely?
Neuton's laws of gravitation/motion can explain why a ball travels in an arch, why the moon rotates around the sun and why an apple fell on his head. It's frugal in the sense that a dutch oven is frugal. You can use it to make pie, bread, soup...
>Since neither has any explanatory power that is not already contained in the phenomena they are offered to explain,
That is what these different explanations have in common, for sure. However, you seem to be defining that as parsimony. But there may be a lot of different explanations that are equally wrong, that differ in how complex they are, and those differences are differences in parsimony.
No, it's just, essentially, the numerator of parsimony; the denominator is the complexity added to the model; but a zero numerator makes consideration of the denominator irrelevant. (Normally, you compare parsimony of explanations with non-zero explanatory power, so the denominator matters a lot.)
Occam's Razor.