Gregory's ServerTry defining things this way: science tells us what is happening and philosophy tells us how to feel about it / (this framing sounds like it is belittling philosophy, but it isn't) / (feelings are important) / (you can't do science without philosophy because you need philosophy of science) / (philosophy of science tells us which scientific theories to prefer over others, in other words, scientists ultimately pick the theories they feel good about)
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 Despite this some physicists have started leveraging the philosophical idea of the multiverse as if it were a scientific one / mostly string theorists / the 11-dimensional M-Theory bulk or the ensemble of universes possible under the KKLT construction / they call this the "anthropic landscape" and propose logical reasoning about it should be considered a new field of science / they seem to be unusually good at securing book deals This is how it works / consider the "landscape" of all possible universes / applying the "anthropic principle", discard (as irrelevant) all universes with no life / perform statistics on the average universe within the set that remains / this is the universe you are probably in There are so many problems with this / the construction admits outlier universes exist, but self-aware structures in the outlier universes would find the anthropic argument exactly as plausible as lifeforms in typical universes do / the philosophizer assumes they know which ensemble of universes exist in the multiverse, and can predict which environments self-aware structures can endure, all baselessly / and again there is zero evidence for any of this / castles of air built atop castles of air The "multiverse" of star systems that solves the rare earth problem is scientific / we can create a model of stellar evolution and evaluate it against competing models, say Giordano Bruno's / we can experimentally confirm or falsify the model using telescopes / whereas multiverse anthropics adopts an idea based entirely on how convenient it would be for academics if it were true / and then imagines it can be used to solve real-world questions That the string theorists got so lost in their own thoughts so quickly should serve as a warning / if a multiverse is to be considered at all the concept needs to be used in as limited a way as possible with as few assumptions as possible / hence to me the attraction of the Tegmark multiverse, if any / the simplest possible hypothesis with the largest possible ensemble / literally every conceivable universe with systemic behavior included by definition |
The multiverse answer to origins is a philosophical trick for letting ourselves feel comfortable with an uncomfortably random universe / the philosophizer concludes an infinite number of universes feels more plausible than a single overly arbitrary one / but has no evidence any of these additional universes exist / and has no model for how the multiverse is structured, or if they do, they have no way to evaluate it against competing models / nor is the idea of the multiverse falsifiable