There are some issues with normalization here, but this roughly the idea. If the multiverse contains only two universes A and B, which are intrinsically equally likely, but universe A had a billion times more Elliots than universe B, then Elliot would be billion times more likely to find himself in A.

After you die, the information that you had once lived is still there, so the constraints still apply. Information cannot be erased because that would violate unitary time evolution.

OK lets work our way back. At what specific point can you define intelligent observers to have emerged.

Well, in multiverse theories you could narrow down the definition of an observer to an exact copy of you. This is, in principle, well defined.

the bible tells us that god was lonely so the universe came into being. looks like god is in for some more alone time again. the a new universe will come into being.

so loneliness seems to be the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

I realize the NHL example is a red herring but this “principle” is fraught with linguistic, logical issues and imprecision, that make it very hard for me to include it in my own conceptual category of real science.

Elliot

Well, I don’t see that that this is necessarily a problem. Only in single universe theories do you get tautologies. In a multiverse you can consider the fact that there exists places where unfortunate copies of you live that have to do without NHL Hockey.

You can, in principle, do statistics on the set of all your copies. This also means that you can’t use the argument that since we live in a single universe the rest of the multiverse isn’t relevant. That would only be true if you could pin yourself down at a single place in the multiverse. But you can’t because you have an infinite number of exact copies that live in possibly slightly different (unknow to you) circumstances.

One can imagine that a fundamental parameters are fine tuned to yield intelligent observers. But on a set of observers, you wouldn’t expect a strong correlations between fundamental parameters and various sports. If you change the fundamental parameters to get rid of NHL Hockey, then you very likely get rid of the observer as well.

this should extend to all circumstances

Thanks Lubos for your patience and putting up with my “altered” ego

Elliot

You can imagine that biological creatures that are less susceptible to superstition develop their technologies faster than we do. At a certain point the biological creatures will be replaced by mchine intelligence.

So, one would expect that the total number of individual biological creatures that will ever live will be LESS in case of the less superstitious creatures. It is thus more typical for a biological creature to find him/herself in a ”backward” civilisation that evolves more slowly.

(rebuttal to DIVOKHAN)

For many, many years, Magical Thinking has controlled our ideas on how life on Earth began. Before the concept of Magic Evolution became politically correct, most people believed that a Magic God who spoke Magic Words was responsible for everything around us. Magic God spoke, and “POOF!”, massive or complex things instantaneously appeared or processes happened.

When Magic Evolution became our intolerant master, proponents of Magic Creation were scorned and ridiculed and rendered institutionally disadvantaged for believing in a Magic God who could make anything just by speaking Magic Words. Although Magic Evolution, too, could conjure complex, self-replicating life forms out of just a few chemicals, of its own accord and with no known controlling mechanism, it called itself Science and insisted Magic Creation was Religion only, disconnected with Science.

Magic Creation fought back, though, pointing out the problems with Magic Evolution and showing that Earth’s geology and Fossil Record could also be interpreted by Magic Creation. Magic Creation pointed out the record of massive Sudden Death in the Fossil Record as evidence for a Worldwide Flood. Magic Evolution interpreted it as an explosion of Sudden Life.

Magic Creation insisted that all Life was created in basic categories, able to reproduce itself, but only within these categories. Although all life forms were created to adapt to changing conditions, they were unable to cross over into different categories. Magic Evolution insisted that all Life descended from a single, primitive cell that assembled itself from raw materials in such a way that it could reproduce itself. Its descendents mutated, mutated again, and continued to mutate until the whole world was filled with complex and diverse life forms, all related to the First Mother/Father Cell. Magic Evolution said that lizards turned into birds and whales crawled up out of the sea to become land animals.

Although both accounts of Origins sound preposterous, the battle lines were drawn, and it was a fight to the death. Magic Evolution gained control of the education system, indoctrinated the children, often embraced fraudulent evidence as Truth, and denounced any alternative thinking as Religion. Magic Creation fought back, publicizing the loopholes and improbabilities in Magic Evolution, pointing out the frauds and hoaxes. Genetic reshuffling resulting in different colors or sizes of an animal or plant is a common occurrence, they argued, but self-synthesis of completely new DNA codes resulting in new functions has never been observed.

Magic Evolution couldn’t demonstrate how life created itself, Magic Creation couldn’t demonstrate there was a Magic God. The War of Origins was a stalemate.

The Law of Cause and Effect

The universe we know operates on the Law of Cause and Effect. If we see an Effect, we know that something caused it. If we initiate a Cause, we know an Effect will follow, perhaps imperceptibly, perhaps a little later, but always, there will be an Effect.

Science is the attempt to understand Causes and Effects. Once they’re understood, others can perform the same Cause and observe the same Effect. This is Experimental Science. Experiments can be performed to prove whether a Scientific Idea is True or False.

Theoretical Science is the attempt to explain Causes or Effects that are undergoing testing, or can’t be tested at all. Magic Evolution cannot be tested because we cannot travel back in time to observe it, and we cannot demonstrate it in a laboratory experiment. If Magic Evolution could demonstrate an experiment in which a DNA molecule created itself out of a solution of simple chemicals, then reproduced itself, then Magic Evolution would become simply, Evolution, the Truth. Anyone could reproduce the experiment and achieve the same results. There could be no other alternatives.

In the same way, Magic Creation can’t be tested, because we cannot travel back in time to observe it. If we could obtain absolute proof that it was true, perhaps by face-to-face public contact with one or more of God’s representatives, then Magic Evolution must be discarded.

By misinterpreting the Ancient Writings, Magic God Believers ignore the Law of Cause and Effect and cast contempt on Religion. They think that Magic God spoke, and it happened, because Magic Words are sufficient to be the Cause. Understood correctly, a powerful being, not Magic God, ordered the surface of the Earth to be altered to make it suitable for life, then ordered his subordinates to complete the synthesis of life, using highly advanced technology. God (we don’t know his real name), the powerful leader of an extraterrestrial civilization, gave the orders, others carried them out. To our dwarfish Earthminds, this feat of planetary landscaping and creation of life might seem farfetched, but to an ancient, highly advanced extraterrestrial civilization, it would be child’s play. They’ve done it before…

It took technology to create life, not spontaneous generation of life from non-life, not miracles. There are no such thing as “miracles”, only Effects we cannot explain with our limited understanding of the universe and the forces it contains. It took highly advanced technology to write and assemble the codes of life into a wide range of living, functioning creatures capable of adapting to changing environmental conditions. If you believe life created itself, then you, too, believe in miracles.

So then, we really have two major possibilities on Origins: Life created itself, or, Life was brought here or assembled here by Extraterrestrials who went somewhere else, afterwards. It’s not so much the evidence we see, but what we want to believe that makes us either Evolutionist or Creationist. Both require Faith, Faith in what seems Impossible. Neither have hard scientific proof. Neither can be proven experimentally. We just believe. What we see in geology and the fossil record is colored by what we believe. To some, a few teeth and a jawbone becomes a grunting, stooped-over half-ape, half-human, covered with thick hair…

Some Evolutionists delight in insulting Creationists and deriding them and their qualifications with mean-spirited invective, when they themselves lack the ability to respond with logical proofs based on hard science. Some Creationists, whose God is some fuzzy, luminous nebulosity, located somewhere outside of creation, respond with religious jargon about sin and repentance and grace.

We can get our MBS degrees from BSU and be able to prove our opponents are all morons while we exult in our triumphs. We can spew religious jargon and state that if the Bible says anything we believe it to say, it’s true. What we all need is to experience the forgiveness and the kindness of the one human whose memories came from somewhere else. If he came today, as he did a few thousand years ago, we too, would kill him. Isn’t that what we do to aliens?

True Christianity will make us all softer, kinder people. It’s not connected very much to churches and religion.