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.
Showing posts with label multiversum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label multiversum. Show all posts
17 February 2015
03 January 2015
Life, Universe and multiverse
According to Bernard Carr, “the Multiverse picture reduces the strong anthropic principle to an aspect of a weak one” [in Universe or Multiverse, Oxford Univ. Press, 2007, p. 4], since it explains our Universe’s biofil features by hypothesizing the existence of the multiverse. If we accept the existence of (infinitely) many other universes, it is not a surprise to find ourselves in a universe fine-tuned for life. It is a consequence of the selection effect: we can live in a universe which is suitable for life, while there many, lifeless worlds (obviously, without any intelligent observer).
This reasoning based on some unspoken assumptions.
Although Abraham Loeb argues [The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe, 2013] that there was an opportunity for the appearance of the life already 10 – 17 million years after the Big Bang, it seems to be evident that because of the physical laws, a relative huge and old universe is needed for the appearance of life. Still in Loeb’s example, the criterions of the life didn’t appear immediately after the beginning. So at least in a world governed by our laws of physics, we have to wait for some time before the first organism can be created. Obviously, it is an interesting question whether a universe with different physical laws can produce life within the first seconds. And it is a more interesting question that how long time needed for the formation of the intelligence in another Universe. Ad absurdum, one can imagine a world where the basic elements of life are cooked in the twinkle, but evolution is another story, since it based on natural selection. So a lot of steps is needed to reach a certain complexity. The appearance of the intelligence at a very, very early period of the Universe would be a powerful argument for the existence of a Creator.
Turning back to the original questions, it seems to be a well-founded argument that there are some criterion of the emergence of life and intelligence. It isn’t possible them to come into being without some physical conditions.
It is imaginable that to the emergence of a biofil universe many other universes’ existence needed. After all, life requires a relative long past with relative huge spatial extension, and ad analogiam, it cannot be excluded that a universe fine tuned for life requires the existence of other universes.
Obviously, it seems to be a not too serious concept. But Carr’s concept is based exactly on this, since he leads back the existence of our biofil environment to the existence of other universes. According to him, our Universe was chosen by chance, but I can imagine that there is a connection between our Universe and the others, and this connection isn’t based on a kind of chance, but on some kind of physical laws.
What is more, arguing that only a few (or only one) habitable universe exists, Carr suggest that life is not a general phenomenon, but an exception. But at least theoretically it is imaginable that life is necessarily associated with the presence of the matter (although not every, but) in several universes.
Or, ad absurdum, we can play with the idea of an “Ultimate Anthropic Principle” which prohibits the born of any lifeless universe. Who knows – we have only one example for a biofil world, and it isn’t enough for generalization.
This reasoning based on some unspoken assumptions.
Although Abraham Loeb argues [The Habitable Epoch of the Early Universe, 2013] that there was an opportunity for the appearance of the life already 10 – 17 million years after the Big Bang, it seems to be evident that because of the physical laws, a relative huge and old universe is needed for the appearance of life. Still in Loeb’s example, the criterions of the life didn’t appear immediately after the beginning. So at least in a world governed by our laws of physics, we have to wait for some time before the first organism can be created. Obviously, it is an interesting question whether a universe with different physical laws can produce life within the first seconds. And it is a more interesting question that how long time needed for the formation of the intelligence in another Universe. Ad absurdum, one can imagine a world where the basic elements of life are cooked in the twinkle, but evolution is another story, since it based on natural selection. So a lot of steps is needed to reach a certain complexity. The appearance of the intelligence at a very, very early period of the Universe would be a powerful argument for the existence of a Creator.
Turning back to the original questions, it seems to be a well-founded argument that there are some criterion of the emergence of life and intelligence. It isn’t possible them to come into being without some physical conditions.
It is imaginable that to the emergence of a biofil universe many other universes’ existence needed. After all, life requires a relative long past with relative huge spatial extension, and ad analogiam, it cannot be excluded that a universe fine tuned for life requires the existence of other universes.
Obviously, it seems to be a not too serious concept. But Carr’s concept is based exactly on this, since he leads back the existence of our biofil environment to the existence of other universes. According to him, our Universe was chosen by chance, but I can imagine that there is a connection between our Universe and the others, and this connection isn’t based on a kind of chance, but on some kind of physical laws.
What is more, arguing that only a few (or only one) habitable universe exists, Carr suggest that life is not a general phenomenon, but an exception. But at least theoretically it is imaginable that life is necessarily associated with the presence of the matter (although not every, but) in several universes.
Or, ad absurdum, we can play with the idea of an “Ultimate Anthropic Principle” which prohibits the born of any lifeless universe. Who knows – we have only one example for a biofil world, and it isn’t enough for generalization.
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