Re: The Anthropic Principle Boundary Conditions

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 31 May 2000 22:01:16 -0700

>
> Brent says:
>> >> The question is, "Can observers exist in a wabbity world?".
>
> If the world was wabbity
> then some elements of the world would exist with absolutely no reason at all.
> Furthermore the world would be irrational and inconsistent. Inconsistency of
> the world would make the drive for completeness irrelevent. There could be a
> wall around the world with absolutely no justification for this wall (back to
> the Middle Ages before Copernicus). My earlier post deriving the existence of
> the Plenitude using the rationality of the world as a starting point would be
> irrelevent and therefore irrationality would preclude the need for the
> Plenitude. The Copenhagen school would actually advocate the simplest
> approach to QM. Observers brains would be governed by wabbity physical
> processes and would therefore be partially or totally incoherent. All you MWI
> groupies would be nuts (which actually may be the case already for some of
> you) and would better disband.
>
> George

Of course at some level of arbitrariness observers (at least observers like us)
could not exist. What I was wondering is what level of arbitrariness is
consistent with the WAP. Note that many people believe they have seen ghosts
or witnessed miracles or other paranormal phenomena - maybe the world is just
that little bit wabbity. Of course all these paranormal experiences are
purported to have causes - the causes just aren't consistent with science;
they're consistent with some religious or spritual world view.

An alternative to the mathematics=existence multiverse is that everything
exists and we have evolved so as to only perceive a rational subset of this
everything - but evolution isn't perfect; so we sort of perceive wabbits that
are close to the boundary of being consistent. Sort of like QM virtual
particles that can only exist for small space-time intervals; these wabbits
could only occur to an observer in a very limited way.

Brent Meeker
Received on Wed May 31 2000 - 23:27:18 PDT