I love this from Mr. Rifkin's post: "If, ultimately, some version of cosmological natural selection is proved true, as I think it will be, it will go well beyond giving the best logical explanation for why our universe's parameters allow for complexity and life."
The question is, however: What would a 'proof' of cosmological natural selection look like? Finch beaks and swimming iguanas notwithstanding, would it mean unimagined/-able quantum particles, chemical elements that would be otherwise impossible in this particular branch of the multiverse, slow or frozen photons? We can't peer inside a black hole's emergent other side to see such a thing. I'm afraid my imagination is too limited to conceive of such a proof. And perhaps that's the philosophical work to be done.
That is a GREAT question, which I have been pondering for quite a while.
I think proof, or at least extremely strong evidence, will, pretty much by definition, have to come from inside this universe. (Certainly in our lifetime.) And that is tricky, but not, I think impossible. If our universe is an evolved entity, then its development and organisation should show traces of that evolutionary history, and if we look for, and find, those traces, then we should be able to work out a crude outline of the evolutionary history of universes from that.
By analogy, if you had only a single living creature from earth to work from, you could probably work out, just from that individual, that it had evolved from earlier, simpler creatures. (It is made up of cells, so cells probably came first; cells contain nuclei, which contain identical strands of DNA, which split and then duplicate in cell division, so that's probably the material carrying the information from generation to generation; the cells contain mitochondria with __different__ DNA, so they might have an earlier, separate history from the rest of the cell, and may have come together at some earlier point in evolutionary history; and so on.)
In fact, I think we are very close to having such evidence: our universe, immediately after the Big Bang, seems optimised for supermassive black hole formation (through direct collapse of the extremely smooth gas at that point). If that turns out to be the case, it's strong evidence for an evolved universe, because early, primitive universes would have presumably mostly just gone from big bang to a few supermassive black holes almost immediately. (It takes a LOT of complexification to get galaxies and stars and stellar mass black holes; presumably that only evolved over many later generations.) That is, our primitive ancestor universes would have been great at supermassive black hole formation, and little else. So our universe would have inherited that, and built on it... Oh dear, this is turning into a post, rather than an answer to a comment! But yes, it's a great question... and I think we can answer it. Proper post on this coming, at some point!
I love this from Mr. Rifkin's post: "If, ultimately, some version of cosmological natural selection is proved true, as I think it will be, it will go well beyond giving the best logical explanation for why our universe's parameters allow for complexity and life."
The question is, however: What would a 'proof' of cosmological natural selection look like? Finch beaks and swimming iguanas notwithstanding, would it mean unimagined/-able quantum particles, chemical elements that would be otherwise impossible in this particular branch of the multiverse, slow or frozen photons? We can't peer inside a black hole's emergent other side to see such a thing. I'm afraid my imagination is too limited to conceive of such a proof. And perhaps that's the philosophical work to be done.
That is a GREAT question, which I have been pondering for quite a while.
I think proof, or at least extremely strong evidence, will, pretty much by definition, have to come from inside this universe. (Certainly in our lifetime.) And that is tricky, but not, I think impossible. If our universe is an evolved entity, then its development and organisation should show traces of that evolutionary history, and if we look for, and find, those traces, then we should be able to work out a crude outline of the evolutionary history of universes from that.
By analogy, if you had only a single living creature from earth to work from, you could probably work out, just from that individual, that it had evolved from earlier, simpler creatures. (It is made up of cells, so cells probably came first; cells contain nuclei, which contain identical strands of DNA, which split and then duplicate in cell division, so that's probably the material carrying the information from generation to generation; the cells contain mitochondria with __different__ DNA, so they might have an earlier, separate history from the rest of the cell, and may have come together at some earlier point in evolutionary history; and so on.)
In fact, I think we are very close to having such evidence: our universe, immediately after the Big Bang, seems optimised for supermassive black hole formation (through direct collapse of the extremely smooth gas at that point). If that turns out to be the case, it's strong evidence for an evolved universe, because early, primitive universes would have presumably mostly just gone from big bang to a few supermassive black holes almost immediately. (It takes a LOT of complexification to get galaxies and stars and stellar mass black holes; presumably that only evolved over many later generations.) That is, our primitive ancestor universes would have been great at supermassive black hole formation, and little else. So our universe would have inherited that, and built on it... Oh dear, this is turning into a post, rather than an answer to a comment! But yes, it's a great question... and I think we can answer it. Proper post on this coming, at some point!