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Occam's Razor, essentially. The basic idea is that most multiverse notions arise naturally out of lower level mechanisms. A theistic explanation requires extra

Occam's Razor, essentially. The basic idea is that most multiverse notions arise naturally out of lower level mechanisms. A theistic explanation requires extra low level mechanics. Say all of our experiments are explained by Theory X. Then positing Thoery X + God is a model with strictly more moving parts and equal explanatory power as Theory X alone. On a wider level, explanations like "God did it" tend to operate on the same level as calling the phenomenon "magic"---it's an analysis that doesn't really provide any actionable information on how to influence said phenomenon. In that way, I personally see "magic" and "God" as operating more in the realm of storytelling. Practically, I find good storytelling is helpful for things like identity-building and theatre, but if I wanna build a bridge then my money's on minimum Kolmogorov complexity, i.e. Occam's Razor.

natecavanaugh 9y ago
I see it as a something that arises out of first principles. Everything in our world has a cause, and something always comes from something else. Now a deity, being outside of our universe and separate from it wouldn't be subject to that rule necessarily. The multiverse is an inductive line of reasoning that infers things to explain away observances. But is it measurable? I'm not saying we should "God away" the questions, but coming up with inferences that we can't actually measure (and don't answer the question of where the multiverse comes from) really doesn't do much scientifically or philosophically.
jcranmer 9y ago
Well, it's not quite that simple. A Deist theology basically posits that the universe was created by some entity that exists apart from the universe and doesn't interfere with the workings of the universe. A multiverse theology basically posits that the universe exists in some entity that exists apart from the universe that contains sufficiently many such universes that the improbability of our own universe is immaterial. In terms of complexity, both theologies necessitate the existence of a space which is inaccessible to our own measurements. You can't favor or disfavor one over the other since there is no distinction in explanatory capabilities, and the complexity exists in an immeasurable state. In a sense, both theologies basically state that the universe is the way it is because it was made that way, and the means of that making is described via effectively bullshittery in both cases.
- yorwba 9y ago
  The difference is that e.g. quantum mechanics already operates on a vector space that contains all possible world-states, so many-worlds doesn't really add anything to the theory, it just interprets them differently. That's similar to the idea of a Platonic universe of mathematical truths, in that it doesn't give you any different predictions, just a different perspective. What a multiverse "explanation " of the observed constants adds to that is a prior that puts probability mass on every possible state, from which we can get the possibility of our personal universe. (I think that's a bit dubious, since it only shifts around the arbitraryness to some meta-heuristic about priors, thus the scare quotes.) Similarly, you could imagine a theology that takes all the same laws of physics and interprets them as "God's plan", which again is just a different perspective. But to get additional predictions, you then need to have some idea of what God's plan specifically is, which tends to require thick books of ancient stories that still don't explain everything clearly. So in the end you could disfavor both theories based on the difficulty of getting them to explain what they are intended to explain.
  - xelxebar 9y ago
    Your point about a prior distribution over universes is a good one. It just got me thinking about the quantum version of the Sleeping Beauty problem. Apparently, Sean Carroll has used this kind of idea and Everettian mechanics to derive the Born rule.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > In terms of complexity, both theologies necessitate the existence of a space which is inaccessible to our own measurements One has more side effects than the other. Your requirement that the creating entity exist “apart from the universe” and not “interfere with the workings of the universe” is not generally accepted by deists. It is also not a required consequence of the deist hypothesis.
Veelox 9y ago
>The basic idea is that most multiverse notions arise naturally out of lower level mechanisms. I think this is the part I don't understand. I have heard no evidence-based explanation for what lower level mechanisms cause our universe that imply a multiverse. >Say all of our experiments are explained by Theory X. Then positing Thoery X + God is a model with strictly more moving parts and equal explanatory power as Theory X alone. In pricipal I agree with you. In this case I think we disagree. In my mental model, Theory X in this case is the multiverse. At which point you say X + God is more complicated and I agree. I think instead of X + God as the explanation it should instead just be God. In which case I don't see an objective way of saying if Occam's razor would favor multiverse or God.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  > I have heard no evidence-based explanation for what lower level mechanisms cause our universe that imply a multiverse. The example I have in mind is the Everettian interpretation of QM. Formally, we have a Hilbert space and decoherence. We can interpret decohered regions in the Hilbert space as separate universes. These mechanics are an artifact of the mathematical formalism. Interestingly, the Copenhagen "interpretation" would get ruled out by Occam's Razor since it adds the notion of wave collapse on top of the formalism without experiment being able to differentiate between the two. > I think instead of X + God as the explanation it should instead just be God. If that works for your needs, then more power to you. We can also jump a meta-level with Occam's Razor though. Say we take a firm stance on only wanting to keep around models that are constrained by scientific experiment. Then we need, say, the Standard Model and General Relativity, but I'm not sure the God Did It model would survive said filter. For scientific progress (i.e. the cooperative human effort of science), such a hard-nosed approach seems to have worked unreasonably well so far. For questions of personal world-view and how that affects your subjective experience, then I doubt such a dogmatic stance is universally ideal. Anyway, I ramble.
  - Veelox 9y ago
    My understanding of the Everettian interpretation is that all worlds that are possible in QM exist and we exist in one of them, the wiki article for this is called many-worlds. I may be being obtuse but this seems like a fundamentally different claim than what I normally see as claimed when talking about the multiverse. The multiverse, in my understanding, claims that there are infinitely many universes, even some that will have different QM from our universe because those universes started differently. To use a CS analogy, many-worlds says that the tree branches the maximum number of time at each nodes. Multiverse claims there are infinitely many trees. Do I have a different understanding then you when it comes to what constitutes a multiverse? > Say we take a firm stance on only wanting to keep around models that are constrained by scientific experiment. My initial asking of this question is that it appears to me that the multiverse is not constrained by scientific experiment. I have read most of the comments and your gets the closest to something predictive but even then, it is still just one interpretation of QM. The other option is that there is something in string theory that implies multiverses but as of yet string theory is just theory and from what I understand string theory doesn't require a multiverse, it requires more dimensions which might cause a multiverse. I ramble as well.
EGreg 9y ago
That about sums it up right there. Belief is a psychologial attitude towards a claim. Atheism is a sort of psychological preference for SIMPLER things to be in the role of causes. It simply rebels against what Daniel Dennett calls a "skyhook". Dawkins pretty much straight up admits this in his books when he says he would be fine with an explanation from simple origins. Also, we want to apply the same rules we have been applying. Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 argument for example, or Occam's Razor. But as we can see from eg quantum mechanics, our rules for understanding are only useful in a certain context, that includes our observational starting point. We really don't know what kind of rules there might be. Even the idea of rules implies there is some simple reason for something. But we now know (with AlphaGo for instance) that there may be more complex explanations than can really be understood by a human mind, even in turn based games. Let alone fluid dynamics or a heterogenous multi body gravitational problem, chaos theory and so on. It is quite arrogant to think that what has worked for us humans so far will let us probe to the end of every inquiry about the universe. Enter... the multiverse theory. The proud partner of the anthropic principle, for those who care about the frequentist interpretation of probability. (Because if you don't, then the question doesn't even arise. Just say "because that's the way things are" instead of "because we're in that particular universe".) It's a bit similar to throwing enough time and space at a problem. For example: "how did the first replicating organism come about if Kolmogorov complexity of the smallest one is so high in terms of chemistry that it would be astronomically improbable to come about by chance?" "Panspermia" "Ok but that just pushes the problem back to other planets. How about the first?" "Well, primordial soup + lightning + billions of years + trillions of planets ... and maybe buckyballs" "That is just theories, where is the testing" "It's the best we got. One day science will tell us the answer. Your theory isn't even scientific." So we have to be careful not to equate science (an approach) with atheism (a bias). But here is my question in conclusion: At the end of the day, given how many times scientific understanding was overturned, what is really the difference between KNLOWLEDGE and BIAS?

natecavanaugh 9y ago

I see it as a something that arises out of first principles. Everything in our world has a cause, and something always comes from something else. Now a deity, being outside of our universe and separate from it wouldn't be subject to that rule necessarily. The multiverse is an inductive line of reasoning that infers things to explain away observances. But is it measurable? I'm not saying we should "God away" the questions, but coming up with inferences that we can't actually measure (and don't answer the question of where the multiverse comes from) really doesn't do much scientifically or philosophically.

jcranmer 9y ago

Well, it's not quite that simple. A Deist theology basically posits that the universe was created by some entity that exists apart from the universe and doesn't interfere with the workings of the universe. A multiverse theology basically posits that the universe exists in some entity that exists apart from the universe that contains sufficiently many such universes that the improbability of our own universe is immaterial. In terms of complexity, both theologies necessitate the existence of a space which is inaccessible to our own measurements. You can't favor or disfavor one over the other since there is no distinction in explanatory capabilities, and the complexity exists in an immeasurable state. In a sense, both theologies basically state that the universe is the way it is because it was made that way, and the means of that making is described via effectively bullshittery in both cases.

yorwba 9y ago
The difference is that e.g. quantum mechanics already operates on a vector space that contains all possible world-states, so many-worlds doesn't really add anything to the theory, it just interprets them differently. That's similar to the idea of a Platonic universe of mathematical truths, in that it doesn't give you any different predictions, just a different perspective. What a multiverse "explanation " of the observed constants adds to that is a prior that puts probability mass on every possible state, from which we can get the possibility of our personal universe. (I think that's a bit dubious, since it only shifts around the arbitraryness to some meta-heuristic about priors, thus the scare quotes.) Similarly, you could imagine a theology that takes all the same laws of physics and interprets them as "God's plan", which again is just a different perspective. But to get additional predictions, you then need to have some idea of what God's plan specifically is, which tends to require thick books of ancient stories that still don't explain everything clearly. So in the end you could disfavor both theories based on the difficulty of getting them to explain what they are intended to explain.
- xelxebar 9y ago
  Your point about a prior distribution over universes is a good one. It just got me thinking about the quantum version of the Sleeping Beauty problem. Apparently, Sean Carroll has used this kind of idea and Everettian mechanics to derive the Born rule.
JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> In terms of complexity, both theologies necessitate the existence of a space which is inaccessible to our own measurements One has more side effects than the other. Your requirement that the creating entity exist “apart from the universe” and not “interfere with the workings of the universe” is not generally accepted by deists. It is also not a required consequence of the deist hypothesis.

Veelox 9y ago

>The basic idea is that most multiverse notions arise naturally out of lower level mechanisms. I think this is the part I don't understand. I have heard no evidence-based explanation for what lower level mechanisms cause our universe that imply a multiverse. >Say all of our experiments are explained by Theory X. Then positing Thoery X + God is a model with strictly more moving parts and equal explanatory power as Theory X alone. In pricipal I agree with you. In this case I think we disagree. In my mental model, Theory X in this case is the multiverse. At which point you say X + God is more complicated and I agree. I think instead of X + God as the explanation it should instead just be God. In which case I don't see an objective way of saying if Occam's razor would favor multiverse or God.

xelxebar 9y ago
> I have heard no evidence-based explanation for what lower level mechanisms cause our universe that imply a multiverse. The example I have in mind is the Everettian interpretation of QM. Formally, we have a Hilbert space and decoherence. We can interpret decohered regions in the Hilbert space as separate universes. These mechanics are an artifact of the mathematical formalism. Interestingly, the Copenhagen "interpretation" would get ruled out by Occam's Razor since it adds the notion of wave collapse on top of the formalism without experiment being able to differentiate between the two. > I think instead of X + God as the explanation it should instead just be God. If that works for your needs, then more power to you. We can also jump a meta-level with Occam's Razor though. Say we take a firm stance on only wanting to keep around models that are constrained by scientific experiment. Then we need, say, the Standard Model and General Relativity, but I'm not sure the God Did It model would survive said filter. For scientific progress (i.e. the cooperative human effort of science), such a hard-nosed approach seems to have worked unreasonably well so far. For questions of personal world-view and how that affects your subjective experience, then I doubt such a dogmatic stance is universally ideal. Anyway, I ramble.
- Veelox 9y ago
  My understanding of the Everettian interpretation is that all worlds that are possible in QM exist and we exist in one of them, the wiki article for this is called many-worlds. I may be being obtuse but this seems like a fundamentally different claim than what I normally see as claimed when talking about the multiverse. The multiverse, in my understanding, claims that there are infinitely many universes, even some that will have different QM from our universe because those universes started differently. To use a CS analogy, many-worlds says that the tree branches the maximum number of time at each nodes. Multiverse claims there are infinitely many trees. Do I have a different understanding then you when it comes to what constitutes a multiverse? > Say we take a firm stance on only wanting to keep around models that are constrained by scientific experiment. My initial asking of this question is that it appears to me that the multiverse is not constrained by scientific experiment. I have read most of the comments and your gets the closest to something predictive but even then, it is still just one interpretation of QM. The other option is that there is something in string theory that implies multiverses but as of yet string theory is just theory and from what I understand string theory doesn't require a multiverse, it requires more dimensions which might cause a multiverse. I ramble as well.

EGreg 9y ago

That about sums it up right there. Belief is a psychologial attitude towards a claim. Atheism is a sort of psychological preference for SIMPLER things to be in the role of causes. It simply rebels against what Daniel Dennett calls a "skyhook". Dawkins pretty much straight up admits this in his books when he says he would be fine with an explanation from simple origins. Also, we want to apply the same rules we have been applying. Dawkins' Ultimate Boeing 747 argument for example, or Occam's Razor. But as we can see from eg quantum mechanics, our rules for understanding are only useful in a certain context, that includes our observational starting point. We really don't know what kind of rules there might be. Even the idea of rules implies there is some simple reason for something. But we now know (with AlphaGo for instance) that there may be more complex explanations than can really be understood by a human mind, even in turn based games. Let alone fluid dynamics or a heterogenous multi body gravitational problem, chaos theory and so on. It is quite arrogant to think that what has worked for us humans so far will let us probe to the end of every inquiry about the universe. Enter... the multiverse theory. The proud partner of the anthropic principle, for those who care about the frequentist interpretation of probability. (Because if you don't, then the question doesn't even arise. Just say "because that's the way things are" instead of "because we're in that particular universe".) It's a bit similar to throwing enough time and space at a problem. For example: "how did the first replicating organism come about if Kolmogorov complexity of the smallest one is so high in terms of chemistry that it would be astronomically improbable to come about by chance?" "Panspermia" "Ok but that just pushes the problem back to other planets. How about the first?" "Well, primordial soup + lightning + billions of years + trillions of planets ... and maybe buckyballs" "That is just theories, where is the testing" "It's the best we got. One day science will tell us the answer. Your theory isn't even scientific." So we have to be careful not to equate science (an approach) with atheism (a bias). But here is my question in conclusion: At the end of the day, given how many times scientific understanding was overturned, what is really the difference between KNLOWLEDGE and BIAS?