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mcc

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

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mcc

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

mcc

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

mcc

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

mcc replied to mcc

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

mcc replied to mcc

Best to keep a theory made of feelings within the realm of feelings / an intellectual shrug for the question of first origins / why do we exist / because everything exists / why not

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