My email to Philip Goff, in response to his Scientific American essay, in which he argues against multiverse explanations for our complex, fine-tuned universe
My brain keeps jamming up when I try to think it through. The universe explodes into being only to consume as much of itself as it can in a black hole, thereby creating a new universe which may, if its lucky (!?) consume even more of itself even quicker. As a by-product of consumption we get galaxies, stars which set up the conditions for planets, biology, life. For the cosmologically brief moment matter exists before being consumed in a black hole we have the possibility of conscous life, you, me, giraffes, dogs, bats. Is that right? Is our material destiny really a black hole and into the unknown moment where even the laws of physics cease to exist?
Thank you! Yeah, it's getting even better over time. I think it's slowly becoming a place where people who are interested in this Darwinian evolutionary approach to the universe can discuss it. And it turns out there are a lot of them! There may have been pent-up demand: it's been a theory without a public-facing home for a long time. (As John mentions in his comment, though, there is an active community of publishing scholars over on the list-serve, EDU-Talk, at the Evo-Devo Universe website, but of course that's not public-facing. Do contact them if you are such a scholar and are interested.)
Beautiful post Julian! The way I try to explain the increasingly non-random nature of universes under selection is through the example of accretive developmental genes, which are fine tuned for the robust production of replicative complexity. How many of our 26 (and counting) fundamental constants are similarly fine tuned? Development is not evolution. It is a very special subset of predictable convergent processes. Multiverse theories that don't include the possibility of universal development arent ready for prime time. We research CNS and related hypotheses.atevodevouniverse.com. All publishing scholars are warmly invited to join our free list serve, EDU-Talk.
John! So nice to see you here. (For those who don't know, John is a leading figure in the further development of the theory of cosmological natural selection over the past couple of decades, particularly with regard to explaining why intelligent life might be selected for. We met at the N2 Conference in Berkeley last year, and I can confirm that he's an all-round good egg.) Yes, the development of our specific universe shows strong signs of such fine-tuning of the basic parameters of matter. It's clearly an evolved developmental process, where aspects of the development have been strongly selected for. (Galaxy formation, for instance.) I know you are busy, but I'd love you to write something about this for us sometime, as this is your area of expertise... Let's talk offline.
My pleasure sir! Thanks for all the fantastic work you are doing, both in your synthetic research and in the very accessible way you explain these key concepts to everyone. So helpful for understanding the purpose and meaning of life in our biofelicitous universe.
Yes! Sorry, I screwed up the link under "Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse". (I was a bit tired, and seem to have pasted the name of the article, again, into the link box, instead of the actual link.) It is fixed now (though it will unfortunately still be broken in the emailed version I sent out). Here is the raw link:
And, as Tyler Nam helpfully pointed out, the link to the same article two paragraphs earlier does work. (It's labeled "...his article for Scientific American, in which he dismisses multiverse theories...")
Learning that the Aldabra Rail bird evolved twice really helped my understanding of the concept of evolution. I was incredibly stuck on the idea of "randomness" and didn't process that evolution is about iterative chances over a specific distribution. We're not simply determining the chance that we roll a six, we are mapping what numbers are on the die. When you iterate thousands of times, your average will be very different for a die with faces [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and a die with faces [1, 2, 3, 100, 5, 6] even if the chance of rolling a six is the same between both die.
As you know Julian, I have no argument with your evolution of universes theory. But what you, and all the physical sciences, describe are 'changing forms'.
In and of itself 'The Universe' is formless. It is a single integrated ever-changing whole.
What something appears to be depends upon the scale and the perspective from which it is viewed. Water is a very different thing to a fish as to a person.
A collection of trees appears to be a forest from a specific distance and viewpoint. As you move further away or closer in the 'thing' changes', until it disappears and a different form emerges into view (zooming in or out).
Also, no object is as it appears. Take the cube. It is a Known form with six sides all the same. There is only one Known-cube. No such object has ever been seen :) Apparent cubes show only 1-3 sides which vary in shape and size depending upon the viewpoint. The apparent object appears to be a 'cube' only as the idea of 'cube' is associated with the apparent form.
There is no mechanism that takes you from 'form' to 'Consciousness'.
Plainly, all forms are Known to and apparent in Consciousness.
Without Consciousness, form cannot exist.
Consciousness alone is the foundation of apparent being. All universes appear in and to it alone.
Consciousness alone is aware of these words. And as they are read, there are no other conscious experiences arising any where or any when else... for there is no where but here and no when but now.
Consciousness is formless, timeless, changeless, tasteless, odourless, intangible, inaudible, invisible, inconceivable, non-dual. These words do not describe it. They simply say what it is not.
Consciousness is the ultimate indefinable subject which requires no proof. It is 'Self-evident'.
Plainly too, all apparent forms are illusory objects formed of sensory images (colours-Seen, sounds-Heard, feelings-Felt, flavours-Tasted, and odours-Smelled), given number, form and meaning by the ideas-Known that are instantly associated with the fleeting ever-changing images.
There are many simple tests that demonstrate the illusory nature of all apparent forms :)
I think that what you argue is just as probable as the main stream theory, and just a s probable as any theory (although an evolved monkey who expresses loudly that it wants light sounds kind of strange (Sorry for the religious joke, I don't mean to offend, but situation/things that we take for granted are just so much more comical when taking from another point of view).
Your theory it's gives reason and logic the universe, while the main stream theory gives logic to the universe.
But shouldn't we first question WHY or IF? The Buddhist argue that maybe we shouldn't know everything (or something to that effect, I MUST. READ. MORE.).
P.S.: Sorry for the poor composed comment, I will give it another try after some reading
P.P.S.: I love the idea of simplicity BUT I am curious. I am dying to know the unknowable. (figurative and literally, from the moment we are born we start dying and what comes after death is unknowable, so... yeah)
P.P... oh, you get the idea! : Because of you, I am considering of opening a blog of my own on this same platform. I am not sure if It's going to be my own fictional stories or philosophy, maybe both... but yeah, thanks a lot.
Slightly off-topic to the post - have you read Ken MacLeod's *Learning the World*? It's a science fiction book I recommend for a few reasons, but it includes some brief mentions of black holes birthing new universes, and a selection effect on their parameters.
I haven't read it (though I have heard good things about MacLeod). Unfortunately, Learning the World was published late in the year my daughter was born, a year in which I subsequently read almost nothing at all... I'm intrigued by the mention of the selection effect on the parameters of new universes though... If you can find the reference/take a photo/screenshot it, I'd love to see it.
A theme of the book is evolution at a few different levels. In generation ships, the people who self-select to go on them are the footloose. This leads to evolution over time. This is echoed at the level of evolution of universes - quotes relevant to that theme below.
Page 191
Sublime as the sight was, it took a knowledge of what it did to take the full measure of its magnificence. Like its polar counterpart in the rearward cone, the titanic engine was a cosmogonic machine. At its core was a process that — second by second when it powered the ship's flight, hour by hour when, as now, it powered only the sunline — compacted the equivalent of a multi-megaton nuclear explosion into a space the size of a hydrogen atom. Its primary effect was to accelerate the reaction mass to relativistic velocities. As a side effect, invisible but inevitable, it generated universes. From each compacted explosion, like a stray spark from a hammer, a new singularity exploded out of space-time and inflated in an instant to give birth to a new cosmos. Some inconceivably minute fraction of the energy of that inflation could be tapped to make the engine selfsustaining. Invented in the Moon Caves, the cosmogonic engine had given man the stars. At one level efficient beyond cavil, on another it was the most profligate of man's devices: it blew multiple universes like bubbles, for the mere sake of moving mass, and at an average speed of 0.01 c at that.
Page 302
“The engine generates new universes all the time. These universes are similar but not identical to the one we live in, yes?”
"To the best of our knowledge, yes," he said. "Information is conserved."
"Well then," I said, "what that means is that in some of these universes, there will be starships with cosmogonic engines of their own."
His expression was inscrutable. “That would seem to follow, yes.”
"So," I went on, "just as the birth of universes from black holes selects over cosmic time for universes with laws of physics such that black holes can be formed, hence universes with stars and galaxies, so the birth of universes from starship engines selects for more universes in which starships can exist. And what more likely universes to have many starships in, than ones in which intelligence emerges all over the place at almost the same time?"
[…]
“What inference do you draw from it?”
I stalled. “That we’re not the first,” I said. “Not the original universe, by a long, long way. We’re a long way down the line from the first universe in which somebody looked at a high-energy physics experiment and saw that it could fly to the stars.”
[…]
"Goodbye, Constantine," I said. "I just wanted to ask. You said information is conserved. How much information?"
“More than you might think,” said the Oldest Man.
[...]
The other is more troubling. If cosmic evolution works on the scale that I outlined to Constantine, and that he seemed to find plausible, and if as he said information is conserved — then perhaps those like us who come first are changed the least, and are thus doomed always to find themselves in a universe in which they are in every sense primitive, and to encounter species wiser and kinder than they.
Oh, this is terrific. He's using Cosmological Natural Selection with Intelligence (CNS-I) as a literal plot engine! You can thank one of the other commenters on this thread, James Smart, in part for that. He and the philosopher Clément Vidal, the mathematician Louis Crane, the cosmologist Edward Harrison, and a couple of others came up with and developed the idea of intelligent life as a driver of the reproductive success of universes (by making artificial black holes). There's a good history of it here (scroll down to the section headed "CNS with Intelligence (CNS-I)"):
My brain keeps jamming up when I try to think it through. The universe explodes into being only to consume as much of itself as it can in a black hole, thereby creating a new universe which may, if its lucky (!?) consume even more of itself even quicker. As a by-product of consumption we get galaxies, stars which set up the conditions for planets, biology, life. For the cosmologically brief moment matter exists before being consumed in a black hole we have the possibility of conscous life, you, me, giraffes, dogs, bats. Is that right? Is our material destiny really a black hole and into the unknown moment where even the laws of physics cease to exist?
What a fun email group you've got there!
Thank you! Yeah, it's getting even better over time. I think it's slowly becoming a place where people who are interested in this Darwinian evolutionary approach to the universe can discuss it. And it turns out there are a lot of them! There may have been pent-up demand: it's been a theory without a public-facing home for a long time. (As John mentions in his comment, though, there is an active community of publishing scholars over on the list-serve, EDU-Talk, at the Evo-Devo Universe website, but of course that's not public-facing. Do contact them if you are such a scholar and are interested.)
https://evodevouniverse.com/wiki/Main_Page
https://evodevouniverse.com/wiki/Join_EDU
Beautiful post Julian! The way I try to explain the increasingly non-random nature of universes under selection is through the example of accretive developmental genes, which are fine tuned for the robust production of replicative complexity. How many of our 26 (and counting) fundamental constants are similarly fine tuned? Development is not evolution. It is a very special subset of predictable convergent processes. Multiverse theories that don't include the possibility of universal development arent ready for prime time. We research CNS and related hypotheses.at evodevouniverse.com. All publishing scholars are warmly invited to join our free list serve, EDU-Talk.
John! So nice to see you here. (For those who don't know, John is a leading figure in the further development of the theory of cosmological natural selection over the past couple of decades, particularly with regard to explaining why intelligent life might be selected for. We met at the N2 Conference in Berkeley last year, and I can confirm that he's an all-round good egg.) Yes, the development of our specific universe shows strong signs of such fine-tuning of the basic parameters of matter. It's clearly an evolved developmental process, where aspects of the development have been strongly selected for. (Galaxy formation, for instance.) I know you are busy, but I'd love you to write something about this for us sometime, as this is your area of expertise... Let's talk offline.
My pleasure sir! Thanks for all the fantastic work you are doing, both in your synthetic research and in the very accessible way you explain these key concepts to everyone. So helpful for understanding the purpose and meaning of life in our biofelicitous universe.
Is the link to Philip's article re multiverses broken?
Yes! Sorry, I screwed up the link under "Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse". (I was a bit tired, and seem to have pasted the name of the article, again, into the link box, instead of the actual link.) It is fixed now (though it will unfortunately still be broken in the emailed version I sent out). Here is the raw link:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-why-we-might-live-in-a-multiverse/
And, as Tyler Nam helpfully pointed out, the link to the same article two paragraphs earlier does work. (It's labeled "...his article for Scientific American, in which he dismisses multiverse theories...")
Apologies for the screwup!
The link from two paragraphs prior is to the same article
Thanks Tyler. Yes, I messed up the main link. It's fixed now. (Too late for the email version, sadly.)
Learning that the Aldabra Rail bird evolved twice really helped my understanding of the concept of evolution. I was incredibly stuck on the idea of "randomness" and didn't process that evolution is about iterative chances over a specific distribution. We're not simply determining the chance that we roll a six, we are mapping what numbers are on the die. When you iterate thousands of times, your average will be very different for a die with faces [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] and a die with faces [1, 2, 3, 100, 5, 6] even if the chance of rolling a six is the same between both die.
As you know Julian, I have no argument with your evolution of universes theory. But what you, and all the physical sciences, describe are 'changing forms'.
In and of itself 'The Universe' is formless. It is a single integrated ever-changing whole.
What something appears to be depends upon the scale and the perspective from which it is viewed. Water is a very different thing to a fish as to a person.
A collection of trees appears to be a forest from a specific distance and viewpoint. As you move further away or closer in the 'thing' changes', until it disappears and a different form emerges into view (zooming in or out).
Also, no object is as it appears. Take the cube. It is a Known form with six sides all the same. There is only one Known-cube. No such object has ever been seen :) Apparent cubes show only 1-3 sides which vary in shape and size depending upon the viewpoint. The apparent object appears to be a 'cube' only as the idea of 'cube' is associated with the apparent form.
There is no mechanism that takes you from 'form' to 'Consciousness'.
Plainly, all forms are Known to and apparent in Consciousness.
Without Consciousness, form cannot exist.
Consciousness alone is the foundation of apparent being. All universes appear in and to it alone.
Consciousness alone is aware of these words. And as they are read, there are no other conscious experiences arising any where or any when else... for there is no where but here and no when but now.
Consciousness is formless, timeless, changeless, tasteless, odourless, intangible, inaudible, invisible, inconceivable, non-dual. These words do not describe it. They simply say what it is not.
Consciousness is the ultimate indefinable subject which requires no proof. It is 'Self-evident'.
Plainly too, all apparent forms are illusory objects formed of sensory images (colours-Seen, sounds-Heard, feelings-Felt, flavours-Tasted, and odours-Smelled), given number, form and meaning by the ideas-Known that are instantly associated with the fleeting ever-changing images.
There are many simple tests that demonstrate the illusory nature of all apparent forms :)
In this mess of knowledge can we stop for a bit?
I think that what you argue is just as probable as the main stream theory, and just a s probable as any theory (although an evolved monkey who expresses loudly that it wants light sounds kind of strange (Sorry for the religious joke, I don't mean to offend, but situation/things that we take for granted are just so much more comical when taking from another point of view).
Your theory it's gives reason and logic the universe, while the main stream theory gives logic to the universe.
But shouldn't we first question WHY or IF? The Buddhist argue that maybe we shouldn't know everything (or something to that effect, I MUST. READ. MORE.).
P.S.: Sorry for the poor composed comment, I will give it another try after some reading
P.P.S.: I love the idea of simplicity BUT I am curious. I am dying to know the unknowable. (figurative and literally, from the moment we are born we start dying and what comes after death is unknowable, so... yeah)
P.P... oh, you get the idea! : Because of you, I am considering of opening a blog of my own on this same platform. I am not sure if It's going to be my own fictional stories or philosophy, maybe both... but yeah, thanks a lot.
Slightly off-topic to the post - have you read Ken MacLeod's *Learning the World*? It's a science fiction book I recommend for a few reasons, but it includes some brief mentions of black holes birthing new universes, and a selection effect on their parameters.
I haven't read it (though I have heard good things about MacLeod). Unfortunately, Learning the World was published late in the year my daughter was born, a year in which I subsequently read almost nothing at all... I'm intrigued by the mention of the selection effect on the parameters of new universes though... If you can find the reference/take a photo/screenshot it, I'd love to see it.
**SOME PARTIAL SPOILERS for Learning the World**
A theme of the book is evolution at a few different levels. In generation ships, the people who self-select to go on them are the footloose. This leads to evolution over time. This is echoed at the level of evolution of universes - quotes relevant to that theme below.
Page 191
Sublime as the sight was, it took a knowledge of what it did to take the full measure of its magnificence. Like its polar counterpart in the rearward cone, the titanic engine was a cosmogonic machine. At its core was a process that — second by second when it powered the ship's flight, hour by hour when, as now, it powered only the sunline — compacted the equivalent of a multi-megaton nuclear explosion into a space the size of a hydrogen atom. Its primary effect was to accelerate the reaction mass to relativistic velocities. As a side effect, invisible but inevitable, it generated universes. From each compacted explosion, like a stray spark from a hammer, a new singularity exploded out of space-time and inflated in an instant to give birth to a new cosmos. Some inconceivably minute fraction of the energy of that inflation could be tapped to make the engine selfsustaining. Invented in the Moon Caves, the cosmogonic engine had given man the stars. At one level efficient beyond cavil, on another it was the most profligate of man's devices: it blew multiple universes like bubbles, for the mere sake of moving mass, and at an average speed of 0.01 c at that.
Page 302
“The engine generates new universes all the time. These universes are similar but not identical to the one we live in, yes?”
"To the best of our knowledge, yes," he said. "Information is conserved."
"Well then," I said, "what that means is that in some of these universes, there will be starships with cosmogonic engines of their own."
His expression was inscrutable. “That would seem to follow, yes.”
"So," I went on, "just as the birth of universes from black holes selects over cosmic time for universes with laws of physics such that black holes can be formed, hence universes with stars and galaxies, so the birth of universes from starship engines selects for more universes in which starships can exist. And what more likely universes to have many starships in, than ones in which intelligence emerges all over the place at almost the same time?"
[…]
“What inference do you draw from it?”
I stalled. “That we’re not the first,” I said. “Not the original universe, by a long, long way. We’re a long way down the line from the first universe in which somebody looked at a high-energy physics experiment and saw that it could fly to the stars.”
[…]
"Goodbye, Constantine," I said. "I just wanted to ask. You said information is conserved. How much information?"
“More than you might think,” said the Oldest Man.
[...]
The other is more troubling. If cosmic evolution works on the scale that I outlined to Constantine, and that he seemed to find plausible, and if as he said information is conserved — then perhaps those like us who come first are changed the least, and are thus doomed always to find themselves in a universe in which they are in every sense primitive, and to encounter species wiser and kinder than they.
Oh, this is terrific. He's using Cosmological Natural Selection with Intelligence (CNS-I) as a literal plot engine! You can thank one of the other commenters on this thread, James Smart, in part for that. He and the philosopher Clément Vidal, the mathematician Louis Crane, the cosmologist Edward Harrison, and a couple of others came up with and developed the idea of intelligent life as a driver of the reproductive success of universes (by making artificial black holes). There's a good history of it here (scroll down to the section headed "CNS with Intelligence (CNS-I)"):
https://evodevouniverse.com/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection_(fecund_universes)
(And thanks for going to the trouble of assembling these quotes, I really appreciate it.)