To Destroy Literally Everything

According to Evgeny Morozov, there are two kinds of walls: stone walls and virtual firewalls (The Net Delusion, 2011, p. 45.). Regarding the previous one, it is hard to build, but relatively easy to destroy. A house of cards is an extreme example of it: difficult to create and easy to ruin. Opposite to it, it is relatively simple to build (to write) a firewall, but it is impossible (or, at least, almost impossible) to destroy if you don’t have a physical access to the computer which runs it. This is because both the stone wall builder and invader act on the same level: on the level where the wall itself exist. Opposite to it, a firewall attacker has to work on the level of the actual system, while the programmer creator constructs the firewall from a “higher level” or, if you prefer, from an external point. Notice that some there are “harder to ruin than to build” systems can exist in the physical reality, as well: e.g. the pro WWII French Maginot Line of a concrete fortification system is such a construction. But the two level nature of firewalls is more important from our point of view, so it shall be used as a metaphor. Applying this wall approach to our Universe, it is obvious that a house of cards world unsuitable either for life or intelligence since it is too sensitive to any disturbance: We can imagine a multiverse with continuously appearing and promptly disappearing cosmoi. This multiverse differs from ours: Edward Teller was afraid during the WWII that an exploding hydrogen bomb, because of the extremely high temperatures, would destroy the whole Earth, but we don’t have neither weapons to ruin our planet, nor our Universe even today (opposite to the alarm bells in connection with the possible dangers of the CERN’s supposed miniature, artificial black holes). Namely, the physical system of our world seems to be both intelligence and technology proof (and at least to a certain level seem to be even foolproof). It can be imaginable a universe which is vulnerable even to a relative low level technology. It was a popular belief in the cold war era that the answer for the Fermi paradox was that every alien civilization perished because of the nuclear weapons. This scenario is adaptable in a slightly modified form for a cosmic level supposing that the stability of the physics of different universes are different. Traditionally the end of a universe is interpreted as a “matter of fact” question, but from our point of view it, can be interpreted as a version of Anthropic Principle where the level of technical development is correlated with the physical laws’ strength to determine the whole universe’s fate. Of course, it is not known whether our world’s relative long existence is a result of only a stone wall style stability and it wouldn’t be too difficult to ruin this using a near-future technology. Or, we live in a firewall style world where we can act only under the level of physics. In this case we can destroy the physically existing Universe at most: Writing about Global Catastrophic Risks, Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic discuss “only” the possibility of a disaster destroying “the potential of our future light cone of universe to produce intelligent… beings" (2008, p. 2–3.).
It would be even more fatal to create a super bomb–e.g. an artificial black hole–which can destroy everything but keeps intact the laws of physics. But this not the end of the possibilieties since it is imaginable that we could destroy somehow not only the physically existing Universe but the physical laws themselves too.

The origin of the multiverse

According to Aristotle our world which had a potentially infinite past and it’s spatially extension was finite, but a potentially infinite past is unacceptable today, since it necessarily ends in our present. So it is completed – and so it cannot be potential (but a potentially infinite future is still a possibility). Obviously, Aristotle’s finite space conception is similarly contradictory for us, as it is based on the belief in a finite, spherical shell of the stars that surrounds the Universe.
Newton believed in actually infinite space and finite time – namely, according to him the World was created some thousand years ago (of course, if we do not accept the existence of a final point in history, then it has a potentially infinite future).
The Big Bang Theory uses a finite spacetime model.
Last but not least, according to a common interpretation, the multiverse hypothesis presumes that both space and time is actually infinite and the Big Bang is only a bubble in the infinite sea of other bubbles. This resembles to the Steady State Theory, since it declares a spatiotemporal infinity without a beginning (and it is ironic that this obsolete model, which is forgotten in traditional cosmology, survives in this form). As far as I know, nobody examined the question of the possible origin of the multiverse as a scientific problem. Of course, if you believe that it has no origin (since it is spatiotemporally infinite), then it is a meaningless question.
But we can play either with the idea of a spatiotemporally finite multiverse that includes  only finitely many universes.The fact that we cannot able observe other worlds, does not mean that there are infinitely many of them.
Or there is a possible multiverse model where time is finite (or potentially infinite), but its space is actually infinite. In other words: it is a multiverse that was born a finite time ago but it is spatially infinite since the beginning, and it resembles to Newton’s model in a certain way. The appearance of infinity is always problematic in physics, so – at least from this point of view – this model with an instant spatially infinity is not more contradictory than the traditional multiverse interpretation with an infinite past.

The tree of cosmological natural selection

According to Lee Smolin, it is not a well-founded idea to apply Newton’s paradigm about the nature of physical laws without an approximation to the whole Universe, since it is based on a local observation and it suggests the existence of timeless laws which can be applied to a timeless space.
What is more, the Newtonian interpretation is unable to explain why the observed laws exist instead of others. Similarly, both our Universe’s high homogeneity and that this Universe is so far from thermal equilibrium are in question. Boltzmann answered the second problem arguing that it was a result of the fact that our world was born in an incredibly low-entropy state (it is the “past hypothesis”). But he simply replaced the original problem with a new one, since it is not known why was so low the entropy originally.
Generalizing this problem, the Newtonian paradigm is “a theory [which] has infinite of solutions,” but we observe only one Universe.
To solve this problem, one can introduce the multiverse hypothesis without changing the Newtonian paradigm. According to this logic, our Universe is a part of a bigger ensemble and we live in a biofil cosmic environment, because all of the possible universe-variations are realized, and we are simply lucky enough to find ourselves in a world of life-friendly conditions. But there is no testable predictions to falsify the multiverse proposal.
Smolin’s answer is the “cosmological natural selection”. It states that “the laws of nature have evolved over time” and he “decided to copy the formal structure of population biology by which populations of genes or phenotypes evolve on so called fitness landscapes.” The reproduction happens via black holes and the result is the birth of new baby-universes which inherit the physical laws of their parent universes’ laws in a slightly changed form (thanks to small, random changes). This process selects the more successful (=more back hole reproductive) universes and we presumably live in a successful universe which laws offers favorable conditions for black hole creation. And it is not a surprise, since life seems to be improbable without long-lived stars and carbon – which are necessary to the formation of black holes.
But this coincidence seems to be strange. Why the preconditions of black holes and life are the same?

• Perhaps it is only an observational bias and the physics of stars and the appearance of life are different phenomena without real connection, but there are other hidden, but cruical factors  – although we still didn’t realized them. Obviously, this explanation cannot be excluded, although it seems to be improbable.
• Perhaps the presence of long-lived stars, back holes and carbon are necessary preconditions of life, and these and only these preconditions lead to life.
• Or – and it seems to me the most probable – life can appear not only in carbon based universes, but our laws which leads to the creation of heavier elements allows its appearance. In other words: there are other, biofil universes without carbon, and it is another question whether there are another universes with different physics and different physical processes to reproduce themselves – perhaps even via more efficient solutions than the black holes. Namely: adapting Smolin's evolutionary approach, evolutionary processes are able to find only local maximums and the history of the descending baby-universes can be portrayed as an evolutionary tree. And it not sure that our branch is the most successful.

How (not) to avoid the G-world in cosmology?

The first chapter’s title in Mary – Jane Rubinstein’s recently published book entitled Worlds Without End. The Many Lives of the Multiverse is: How to Avoid the G-word.
Namely, the God.
It is an interesting trend that not trying to avoid the G-word is an acceptable attitude for some modern cosmologist, although the Creator’s existence or non-existence hasn't play a role in modern optics or mechanics (what is more, it is not a question in the explanation
At the beginning of the 17th century Galileo argued that there were two books written by God. One of them was the the Bible and another was the book of nature. Although it was a common belief of that age that both of them used the same language, according to Galileo, the second one used the language of mathematics. [John Hedley Brooke: Science and Religion, p. 104] Supposing the existence of a Creator who created the World for humans, it is an open question why He had decided to use two different languages, and why an exotic and complicated system was introduced to describe the physical reality created by Him. In other words: why the physical reality is so complicated that it is impossible to describe it in everyday words? Was it a necessity to hide the structure of the world behind a complicated and non-evident formulism?
Obviously, Galileo’s concept based on a kind of Neoplatonic mathematical mysticism. According to it, the fundamental structure of our Universe is not only can be described by mathematics, but the nature itself is purely mathematical. But it is not an answer for the question why decided God to choose this language.
On the other hand, a group of physicists in the 17th century refused the Aristotelian concept which stated that an explanation cannot be complete without pointing out a final cause. Since Aristotle didn’t favor mathematics as a language of world description, Galileo’s approach offered a way to deny any argumentation based on final cause, and Descartes decided to focus on immediate causes of physical events. [Brooke, ibid, p. 72]
Since then it became a tradition in natural sciences to study those immediate causes and omitting either a final cause or the intervention of a Creator. But – to oversimplify the problem – when somebody studies either the “fine-tuned” nature of our Universe or the supposed existence of multiverses, there isn't an opportunity to study his or her subject from Descartes’ approach, because there is no an existing physical event to examine.
According to Bernard Carr, “If you don’t want God, you would better have a multiverse.” Namely: if you don’t want to refer to God, then you can replace Him with the idea of Multiverse – or vice versa. The “Multiverse replaces God with what is perhaps an equally baffling article of faith: the actual existence of an infinite number of worlds.” [Rubinstein, p. 29]
We have two different strategies to handle the causes. One can choose Descartes’ approach to always focus on immediate ones – and then he or she can ask another question about the solved problem’s immediate cause. We can move forward step by step – its mathematical analogy is the potential infinity where every piece of the result is finite and it can be achieved in a finite number of steps, but this process never has an endpoint.
The other approach is more problematic. If we are allowed to ask for a not immediate cause, then we could ask what caused that cause, etc. [Rubinstein, p. 21] and the result is an infinite regress without end.

Super fine-tuned worlds and infinitely many universes

The typical “our Universe is fine-tuned for life” argument states that small changes in certain constants result a lifeless Universe. For example, a 2% percent stronger strong nuclear force’s consequence would be a lifeless Universe, since the formation of heavier elements never would happen under such conditions. “Although our situation is not central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent” says Anthropic Principle’s advocate Brandon Carter [In Modern Cosmology and Philosophy (ed. by John Leslie), 1998, p. 132.].
But as Stephen Jay Gould pointed out “any complex historical outcome – intelligent life on Earth, for example – represent a summation of improbabilities and becomes thereby absurdly unlikely” [ibid, p. 187]. So our special situation is not necessarily a consequence of the fine-tuning.
Similarly, Feynman joked on his luckiness, since he had observed accidentally the ARW357 license plate although the probability of it was practically zero.
And there are other problems with arguments about fine-tuning.
First of all, life is sensitive to some physical parameters. Opposite to it, computing is insensitive to the changes of almost all of them. But it doesn’t mean that our biology is extremely fine-tuned (or extremely matches) to our Universe’s conditions. Probably either a higher or a lower speed of light would not prevent the rise of life. We can play with the idea of a universe where the result of a minor modification of any parameter would result a dead world. It is not the case in our Universe, so we do not live in a so “super fine-tuned” world.
Second of all, “to be privileged” means that the given situation is not average but applying this to the biofil universe concept, there is an unspoken presupposition behind it. If we assume that there are some other universes then uniqueness has a meaning. In other words: if we hypothesize that only a finite number of other universes exist then the “privileged position” is interpretable. But if we are suppose that infinite other worlds (no matter how we define them) exist then we have to believe that infinitely many universes of them are identical with our one. What is more, in this case the number of lifeless; the biolfil and the computable universes are equal – after all, any kind of them have infinitely many identical copies. Thus the meaning of “privileged to some extent” is uninterpretable.

Is the Universe roughly-tuned for computing?

This short paper proposes an alternative theory to Anthropic Principle. According to our interpretation, the Universe is not "fine-tuned" for life, but "roughly-tuned" for computation and its biofilness is only a phenomenon. This standpoint allows us to extend Seth Lloyd's concept about the ultimate physical limits of computing to examine the computing capabilities of any imaginable universe. In addition, I draw up a universe classification based on it.
Read more: http://arxiv.org/abs/1501.01754