Hello, and welcome back to winterastral. Of course, nobody is reading this, but what the hell. It's just a vehicle for ranting. Also, the spellcheck cannot spell vehicle, and neither can I.
Anyway, onto infinity. I don't like infinity of late. It's getting on my nerves, with its parallel possibilities and all.
Now, I'm assuming you're vaguely familiar with the infinite universes idea. For those who aren't it's basically that whenever a decision or observation is made that the universe splits into an infinite number of realities with all of them different. From this I'm assuming that in the infinity of universes there is everything that is possible, due to different initial starting conditions and such, which are decisions of a sort. Everything has to be included, because it is infinity, and thus has every given value.
But now here comes the thought experiment problem. In at least one universe - in fact an infinity of them, although a small infinity - there is a bomb which will blow up every reality, and it will go off in seven seconds. It doesn't really matter how the bomb works - the important thing is it can be imagined, which means it is possible. Now, seven seconds have gone by; why aren't we all dead? Something seems wrong with my ideas.
But! In an infinity of universes, there will also be something that stops every bomb. We're saved? Not quite. Because there will also be something that stops what's stopping the bomb; and then there will be something that stops that; and so on. And this is where the problem is. In the infinity of universes, the prevention of this bomb exploding will never come to a resolution. Things will be canceling out each other forever, leaving no state for the bomb to be in.
I am unsure where this leaves us. It seems that in our infinity of universes, things cannot happen, for they will not resolve. But we are here now, and actions seem to do things. So one of the starting conditions is wrong. Either there is not an infinite number of universes, or there is not an infinite number of possibilities.
But then again, infinity is weird. If there is infinity, then there is everything, all of the time, always. And in that everything there will be a little aside somewhere of our reality as we know it. So who knows how it might come to an end, or a new beginning. Anything could happen; and hopefully it will.
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2 comments:
hrm these kind of thought experiments usually seem to invalidate the infinite universes/possibilities idea. Terry Pratchett's story "Death and What Comes Next" Has another one.
For me it seems that if there are an infinite number of universes where reality's rules, checks and balances don't apply, that we'd have noticed some really freaky shit happen to us by now. I think that the most obvious counter to this would be that somehow the fact that there are infinite universes implies that the probability of of said "freaky shit" either happening or being noticed is relatively low when averaged out.
...But since the exstence of these universes is defined by observation or the concievable possibilities for each moment (as far as I understand it), wouldn't freakishness spawn ever accelerating freakishness? (bear with me) Our imaginations seem spontaneous but it's usually assumed that they can only remix what's already been put in them, so the ever expanding possibilities inspired by one even minutely freaky happening would snowball into an unimaginable multiverse of nonsense that would either expand to fill all of the permutations for reality or expand without bound, either way probably tip the scales in favor of rampant reality burning across the board.
In conlusion, the fact that our minds are not fucked on a daily basis would suggest that this multiverse thing doesn't quite fit
I have a theory now that if there is a multiverse, it works because an infinite number of universes there stop these kind of thought experiments in ways beyond our understanding.
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