existence of the universe, God, and physics

[soon2bepro]

Correct metric, there's probably a something. But to try to adjudicate any sort of characteristic to "it" is completely ridiculous. You can't get to this something without understading a reality that goes beyond our universe, either because that's where this something is/comes from, or to use this "alternate/wider reality" as a reference of what's different in our reality or our portion of reality.

I hate how it sounds to be calling it "a something that grants physical laws to our universe" because it sounds like I'm trying to describe something with very particular qualities, which as I said are ridiculous to assume or even suggest.

An alternate possibility is that fundamental physical laws have no possible explanation, but are rather the only way in which things can exist (in our reality/any given reality? It doesn't make much difference)... And this is how science adresses the subject. It doesn't matter what, if anything, makes things work the way they do, understanding how they work should be sufficient for practical and theoretical purposes.

[CityFan]

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Virtually everyone believes that there is a something which grants our particular set of physical laws reality.

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Virtually, yes. I don't, and I don't believe I'm alone.

To use your car analogy: Why does there have to be some force or being that determines that your car is a Honda Civic? It just is. Maybe the garage next door has a Porsche in it, but you have a Civic. So what?

Returning to universes: Why insist that our universe "exists" an a way that all the other possible universes don't?

In fact, why separate the universe itself from the set of laws that it obeys? The universe exists as the solution to a set of equations. Perhaps it is no more than that.

I know that way of thinking causes problems when it comes to explaining consciousness; but so do the alternatives.

[bocablkr]

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I sure don't have a problem with your "something". I do have a problem with that something going out of its way to create almost a googol subatomic particles, over 15 billion years, in a universe octillions miles across, with quintillions of stars and planets, so that one planet, during one ten millionth of its existence, would have one out of 100 million species, for one onethousandth of its reign on earth, be eligible for special consideration if individuals would only believe a particular moronic story among hunderds that have been thrown out.

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That is one impressive sentence - did you write it with one breath [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[Metric]

It sounds like your solution is that every possible equation is manifest as a physical reality somewhere. I sympathize with the spirit behind this idea, but practically speaking even the definition of "equation" becomes vague -- at some point if you don't impose some kind of structure on this idea, it becomes utterly meaningless. And if you do impose structure, you have to wonder (or at least I would wonder) "why this particular structure and not a different one?" So in the end, I'm pretty sure that you believe in a reality-granting something at some level, unless in the spirit of a "Sklansky assumption" you just don't want to consider that there could be any kind of non-trivial structure at all in the "extended universe."

[Metric]

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How likely do you think it is that we live in a multiverse? Do you think it would be even possible to know this for sure, or would this be inherently unknowable because it lies completely outside our system that we can observe? Would the physics in other universes (in the multiverse) operate similarly to our own -- in the sense that if we tweak the parameters the physics would be recognizable? (Obviously this is all personal speculation).

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I can't really estimate "how likely" all this is, but I do tend to think that there are "alternate realities" associated with other branches of the universe's quantum mechanical wave function, in a "many worlds interpretation" sort of way. There are some interesting information theoretic reasons to think this might be the case, but I don't want to run off too far on the very first question... As for completely seperate universes not connected even by a wave function -- I hesitate to even speculate. I suppose string theory might push you in this direction if you take their "string landscape" and anthropic arguments seriously -- so in a way I suppose you could say that clear evidence for string theory might be evidence for completely seperate universes with different particle interactions, etc (though the physics in these other universe would still be another form of "string theory"). However, I personally have some doubts about string theory, so...

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Some other questions. Suppose this ultimate "creator" you define in your post IS conscious in some way -- the way a theist or deist would typically think of God. It is my contention that it should at least be *possible* to understand this "creator" in terms of physics -- possibly similar physics to our own universe, but not necessarily. If we were to somehow experimentally verify the nature of the creator in such a way, I would guess that he/she/it would cease to be "God" in the eyes of most people. It would simply be looked at as another link in the chain of knowledge. Basically I think that people often, for one reason or another, associate knowledge of how something physically works with evidence against God (sort of like your car example). I don't understand why conscious creation of something necessitates that we cannot understand it. (Back to my original question) Do you think a creator (conscious or not) would be explainable by physical law -- even if it is vastly different than our own universe's physical law? Or do you think anything that "creates" a universe must supercede physics (the way we think of it) in pretty much every way?

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Good question -- If there were self-awareness associated with the "reality granting structure of the universe" I think you're right in that there could be a way to understand it from an analytical sort of approach -- at least, no obvious reason why this couldn't be the case is occurring to me right now. However, if you simply want to sort of picture God living in another universe (one level up) -- then I think that some of the other statements people have made come into force -- you would immediately be curious about what created that universe, and so on. So to really get out of the chain, something about the explanation (be it self-aware or not) is going to have to be really fundamentally different -- I don't know if that includes our ability to understand "it" or not, but I don't see an immediate reason to give up on it.

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Borodog made a post some time ago regarding consciousness that your post reminded me of. Do you think that physics (again, the way we think of it today) can explain consciousness? For instance, say we come to a perfect unified theory that explains everything from the quantum level to the celestial level (by celestial I mean "big" bodies of course -- planets, stars, black holes, etc. -- not heavenly [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]). Armed with this perfect model, do you think it can explain the "self"? Or do you think the physics of consciousness lies somewhere else entirely... where we will have to define completely different criteria to even hope to understand it?

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I think we have enough fundamental physics to understand brain functioning right now. However, that's very far from being able to use it to build the right models of consciousness. Again, there is a sort of qualitative jump here -- knowing the physics just gives you the boundaries on the games you're allowed to play. That's very far from disentangling and knowing the significance behind every physical event happening inside the brain.

[cambraceres]

It seems that the study of the special sciences is directly reducible to the study of your own consciousness. For instamce, in QM, objective reality hinges upon ab element of consciousness, observation. We cannot say very much about this most complicated of existents, the brain.

I believe it is clear at this point that a qualitatively distinct set of assumptions will be needed to explain the why for the is, just as you said .

Thing is, maybe this whole devious sytem of existence and consciousness is something about which we should not ask the question why. Perhaps our humanity is that which keeps us from an exhaustive elucidation of the ways and means of our dynamic universe.

In QM, the observer and the experiment are as one, reality is the same, meaningful only in terms of the observer. Maybe not observer created, but observer validated.

Cam

[luckyme]

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At some point, some kind of qualitative jump to "something else" is essential

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That's the part that seems the leap to me. Given that all the progress we make reveals incrementalism at work, it seems premature to assume that a few of interesting problems we're working on require leaping. Assuming we don't consider relativity, QM or string theory any kind of leap, even though they shift the framework pretty drastically.

luckyme

[Metric]

I'm not arguing that there's anything misguided about incremetal improvements to physics model building. It's a great way to get better models. My argument is that better models don't help you with the question of why the final "100% correct" model assumes physical reality, while an alternate model just sits there on paper.

[Skidoo]

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I think we have enough fundamental physics to understand brain functioning right now.

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You make several interesting points, yet the quoted assertion seems incorrect.

Otherwise, where is the artificial brain in demonstration of such an understanding? It's hardly scientific to talk of mere qualitative accuracy without positive quantifiability.

[Metric]

The problem of understanding consciousness is not one of understanding the fundamental physics involved (the statement of mine you quoted is probably the least controversial one I made) -- the problem is that it quickly becomes practically impossible to use the Standard Model to compute the precise state of ~ 10^25 interacting particles. The equations of the standard model are certainly more than good enough on the energy scale of interactions taking place in the brain, but if you want to solve them it's going to take you the age of the universe to do all the computation that would be required in a "perfect simulation."

So the way to proceed is to find out which interactions taking place in the brain are important to consciousness, and which ones can be mostly ignored -- this is a hard problem, and it's clearly qualitatively different from knowing the next order correction to particle physics at the 100TeV energy scale (there are no fundamental interactions taking place in the brain at an energy higher than a few eV).