Ask HN: Do you believe in multiverse theory? Why or why not?

The fact that you exist and are aware enough to believe anything at all is so stupendously unlikely that the only possible explanation is that you're living in one of the only universes where it's possible for you to live, and have consciousness; that's the only one you're conscious of, because it's the only one you can be conscious of.

Ultimately though, from the time you're born, the number of universes you can possibly exist in will get fewer as more and more branches lead to death. You'll only be aware of the ones you still survive in, of course, but those will probably include fewer and fewer people.

Eventually, you'll be the last living person. Lonely, miserable and immortal.

It's an untestable hypothesis, thus unscientific, for the moment. Thus, we're all qualified to speculate, just as we are in matters of religion, politics, etc.

It's my personal belief that the multiverse makes great science fiction.

It's also my belief that it, along with "quantum woo" is used to hoodwink people.

Color me agnostic, at best.

I am entirely unqualified to understand any of the multiverse theories beyond the explanations offered by analogies in popular science writing.

But in short: No. I'm as hard a determinist as can be, to the point that I believe that any nondeterminism in quantum mechanics have deterministic explanations which are yet to be uncovered.

I am also entirely unqualified to understand quantum theory.

For me it depends if I believe that the big bang repeats itself at some point. Time is irrelevant if you are dead. A bit like being woken up for school or work and believing you just fell asleep a moment ago. So in case the universe dies a heat death and some kind of fluctuation leads to a new big bang and the process repeats infinitely, you will at some point indeed live the same life again.

Long story short, you will again need to go to work or school and not even death can save you from that. A bit like it already feels in life too.

But if that were true a multiverse would just be another iteration of the existence of the universe with a different path. That they maybe don't happen concurrently isn't relevant, they are just out of phase. So I would guess that counts as a multiverse too, even if it isn't founded in physics, some string theory landscape or possibilities that were not realized.

No, because there is no scientific evidence and it can be used as propaganda for the rich:

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe

[2] https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...

This is a big rabbit hole to go down, but you can't entirely ignore Everett's many-worlds interpretation with a "not falsifiable" claim. The nature of probability is an important one to ponder.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.11591.pdf

Not, because it's evidently not falsifiable

Generally if trends will be transformative you see it from the get go.

Zuckerberg keynote was received very coldly and the cartoonish avatars can't possibly be taken seriously in a working enviornment.

The whole metaverse can't be even defined as a space to work or play. If it's a space to play then how is it different than VR headsets and why it merits a whole world to upsell it as an ecosystem?