Re: Romeo and Juliet and QS

From: George Levy <GLevy.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 07 Oct 2002 22:28:16 -0700

Jesse Mazer wrote:

> George Levy wrote:
>
>> Without our quantum laws, for example, if we lived in a mechanistic
>> universe, electrons, unfettered by their >quantum levels would fall
>> into their nucleii resulting in the almost immediate annihilation of
>> all matter in >the universe and a huge increase in entropy. Even
>> though entropy of the universe is continuoulsy >increasing, the
>> universe is still in an incredible state of low entropy. In any case,
>> the defense argues, if a >low entropy spike is an indicator of
>> criminal activity, then even God, himself, is not be immune from
>> >prosecution, since entropy was at its lowest at creation.
>>
>> The defense concludes that nature itself is a huge QS machine that
>> filters only those worlds capable of >sustaining consciousness.
>
>
> The issue of the low entropy of the universe came up a while ago and
> Tim May brought up the best argument against seeing it as an anthropic
> effect--the anthropic principle would only guarantee the bare minimum
> downward entropy spike needed for intelligent beings to exist, it
> wouldn't begin to explain why the entire visible universe is at
> equally low entropy (and the anthropic argument would also imply that
> all our memories of a lower-entropy past are probably false). The same
> would go for explaining quantum effects like discrete energy
> levels...if the electrons fell into their nucleii in some distant
> galaxy, it wouldn't hurt us (and even if the shockwave would be
> dangerous or something, there'd still be no need to see the *same*
> discrete energy levels throughout the universe).
>
> The prosecution rests!
>
> --Jesse

Don't rest so quickly, Jesse. I have read Tim's argument and while I
found it intriguing, I thought that it was too simplistic. Tim's
argument did not convince me.

To paraphrase Shakespeare "Oh what a wonderful web we weave when we
practice to perceive."

Our perceived universe must be, as Bruno says, a "logical extension" of
ourselves. If we look at the world around us we must be capable of
generating an anthropic "tale" explaining us. The question hinges is how
detailed should this tale be to satisfy our degree of resolution. The
finer the resolution, the larger the tale must be. Given the size of the
univere, I would say that our resolution is pretty fine. (There may be a
relationship between Planck's constant and Hubble constant - I have read
somewhere that someone was playing with these numbers to show such a
relationship. Maybe it was Feynman)

The above argument is kind of analogous to trying to represent a signal
by means of a Fourier series. The more resolution we want in our signal,
the more terms we need. Well, it appear that the amount of resolution
that WE need, requires the whole universe to explain. Think about it. No
time was wasted in our creation.Every step in the chain of event that
lead to our existence was necessary. Humans have existed for a few
hundred of thoushands of years. To make humans possible mulitcellular
life had had to evolve from unicellular life for about 500 million
years. It took about 3.5 billion years for the earth to cool down and to
generate unicellular life. Before that it took about 8 billion years
for the first stars to cook enough heavy elements to make life
possible. As you go back in time, the tale that you are weaving expands,
the causal pyramid grows. The tale ends when you reach quantum
indeterminacy in the cosmic scale, at the big bang, and quantum
indeterminacy at the microscale.

Could we have evolved more quickly? Possibly, but improbably. Creating
humans, using a whole universe on a 12 billion years schedule seems to
me to be pretty economical and time efficient job.


George
Received on Tue Oct 08 2002 - 01:28:45 PDT