Hello everybody,
My name is William Vandenberghe, I'm 21 years old, and currently a last
year student electrical engineering at the university of Leuven
(Belgium).
All of my life, I have been wondering about why we exist, and why we
exist in the way we do... I think I finally found the explanation and
after some searching on the internet, I came to the theory of Max
Tegmark
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/multiverse.html which was
pretty close to what I was thinking.
Although, I do disagree or put the emphasis differently at some points.
My theory (I mailed a copy to professor Tegmark yesterday) :
The main disagreement in philosophy with the theory of Tegmark is that
I do believe that SASs are possible in universes that have higher
dimensions, or for instance SASs in a universe that did not just start
with 1 big bang ...
Take a universe completely the same to our universe up to this moment,
obviously it would contain an SAS (us humans); but the difference with
our universe is that from tomorrow on, it will stop obeying the rules
of physics (it has respected rules of physics up to today for those
humans, but no longer does from tomorrow on). I am sure you will agree
that this universe exists (given that I can describe it to you and it
is not inconsistent).
Now, if all universes are equally probable, we can not be living in a
universe with rules of physics.
My solution:
In short, I think the option 1a
"Everything that exists mathematically exists physically."
must be true ... for reasons of symmetry, simulated reality, etc ...
Now, I have a 2nd "postulate":
"Nothing that exists mathematically exists physically with finite
probability."
So the main point in my theory is, that all mathematical things exist,
but some with a different probability than others. And the way I
develloped my theory, the probability of a universe (or a formal system
in the paper of prof. Tegmark) to exist; is proporional to the amount
of information that universe contains ( Probability ~ 1/(amount of
information) )
A simple example would be:
A (normalized & continious) 3D universe with 1 particle in it is
infinitely less probable than a (norm. & cont.) 2D universe with 1
particle in it.
This is very intuitive, it just means that a 2D universe is equally
probable as the sum of the probability of all 3D universes for 2
coordinates fixed, and a 3rd varied.
Or P( U2(a,b) ) = int( P( U3(a,b,x) ) , x=-inf..inf )
So of all universes that allow SAS, we live in the one with the lowest
possible amount of information.
Now let us look at some predictions for now:
- Our universe has rules and keeps to them at all times unless it is
essential for the existence of a SAS (violating rules = information)
- Either our universe started with a small number of particles, or many
particles in our universe started with the same initial conditions; if
every particle currently in existence, had its own initial conditions,
this would contain a huge amount of information. A nice Big Bang
directly coming out of the TOE.
- No universe containing fewer information than our own, contains a
SAS.
Another amusing result is that we can answer the simulated reality
question with a simple "no, we are not living in a simulation", since
it takes a universe of more information to simulate our universe and
that universe is at least infinitely (probably some powers of infinity)
less probable than ours.
Bring on the comments please :)
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Received on Fri Dec 08 2006 - 18:18:21 PST