Re: OT: Many Worlds Probability Problem


anon1@xxxxxxx wrote:
> > This problem was first proposed by Collins and Hawking (1973) when
> > they noticed that some physical constants have an infinite number of
> > possibilities while they must have an exact value or there would have
> > been no deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-based life in the observed
> > universe.
>
> I rather doubt they could predict the presense of absense of DNA-based
> life just from the fundamental constants of nature. More likely they
> were predicting whether the fundamental constants of nature would
> likely produce Earth-sized planets with appropriate quantities of
> various elements such as carbon suitable for making DNA and life and
> with sufficient tiem for evolution to do its work.

Yes, I was not suggesting anything different. Various values of
physical constants could make DNA-based life impossible, but I do not
believe that any set of values for physical constants would make
DNA-based life inevitable.

>
> I saw a more recent article suggesting that there's a wide range of
> values of the fundamental constants that would allow our kind of life
> to occur, with a bias of the random generation of such universes in a
> particular direction. Here's my rendition of the diagram relating two
> parameters:
>
> xxxGGxxxxx
> xxGG*GGxxx
> xGGGGGGGxx
> xGGGGGGGxx
>
> where G is the shaded region showing a "good" universe able to support
> life, x is the unshaded region showing a "bad" universe not able to
> support life, the bias is upward, and * shows our current universe,
> within an order of magnitude of the edge in the biassed direction. I.e.
> random universes plus Anthropic principle (we wouldn't be here to
> observe if we weren't somewhere in the G region) yields an expection of
> just about where we in fact are. The vast majority of universes are up
> above the top of the G region, but nobody's there to complain.
>
> > I doubt the mathematical conclusion that an infinite number of
> > universes would exhaust all possible universes when some physical
> > constants could have an infinite number of possible values.
>
> I agree. But all that's needed is for the random sampling to eventually
> hit somewhere inside the G region, which is a statistical certainty
> given the infinite exploratory process of universe-generation. It's not
> needed to completely exhaust all possible points in the graph in order
> to hit at least one G point.
> .

Well, I see several theories that propose an infinite number of
universes with slightly different values for the physical constants.
And I was looking to see if there is some statistical method that can
evaluate the claim of some people that all potential universes are
inevitable in an infinite number of universes with slightly different
values. (And since I am no longer living near a major university, I
decided to bounce the ideas off people in a couple of newsgroups.) And
from my discussions in related threads, I confirmed my original
conclusion that an infinite number of universes do not necessitate the
inevitability of all possible values for potential initial conditions
of universes. So this would indicate that there is no determinism for
the initial conditions of the observed universe. But a universe with a
similar outcome to the observed universe does not require the exact
initial conditions of the observed universe.

And I agree with you that if there was a multiverse with an infinite
number of slightly different universes regarding the initial
conditions, then there would be at least one universe similar to the
observed universe in regards to initial conditions.

This leaves me with a couple of questions. For example, in the case of
Classical Probability, if a proportion greater than 0 faces an infinite
number of trails, then I assume that there would be an infinite number
of successes. Is that correct?

So in the case of an infinite multiverse that determines the certainty
of at least one universe similar to the observed universe in regards to
initial conditions, would that same multiverse also determine an
infinite number of universes similar to the observed universe in
regards to initial conditions?

And such infinite multiverses push the issue of origins back to the
origin of the multiverse. And some multiverse hypotheses claim to have
no origin because they claim that no matter how far back we go in
multiverse history, there always had been an infinite number of past
universes. So these hypotheses escape the need to explain the origin of
multiverse history. Do you agree?

And I have briefly read that various models of Many Worlds hypotheses
with an infinite number of parallel universes do not escape the need to
explain the fine tuning in the origin of the infinite number of
parallel universes.

.

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