Philosophical Vegan Forum

Posted: **Sun Feb 07, 2016 9:15 pm**

Hello, I'm an agnostic atheist in regards to all religions. I have a question for other fellow atheists and need help figuring out if I should clasify myself as one too.

So to make it clear I don't believe in the Christian god, or any of the popular religion's god for that matter. However, even in my disbelief for such deities I do not exclude the possibility of the existence of higher beings and/or civilizations.

I believe that it may not be a coincidence that the universe is tuned so precise mathematically speaking ( Gravitational constants, electrons mass, etc). This is the most compeling argument theists have used to spark some doubt in me, because of the precision the universe has ( Not necesarily to be fined tuned for life, because it really is not, but for existence itself) it is almost like it was programmed and run on its own after being built.

So, am I really an atheist if I think that the universe is programmed and likely has a higher civilization behind it? I know it sounds like SciFi, higher beings controling higher dimensions and all that but so far it's the most reasonable hypothesis I could think of seeing that nothing in the observable universe is ever on its own, so this ultimate being ( God) to me is bullshit but not a group of higher beings.

Posted: **Mon Feb 08, 2016 2:35 am**

Idk about mathematically it being tuned etc.. Tuned for what exactly? If the argument is that it is tuned for life, let alone human life that would be quite ridiculous since the overwhelming majority of the universe does not have any life so it seems more like the universe isn't designed for life and that life, let alone human life, is the extreme exception rather than the norm. It would be a very inefficient design if the one thing you wanted to produce was the extreme exception rather than the norm.

As far as probabilities are concerned, the number of stars in the known universe are estimated at about 100 octillion (1 with 29 zeroes). There are fewer atoms in a human body than stars in the universe, so from the universe perspective if you think of it as a person, then our sun isn't even an atom, then what even are we? If you have such a huge number of stars, chances of life emerging around some of them might seem to be not improbable (surely it is non zero since we exist) but what the exact probabilities are for the exact right set of conditions for life, idk.

Some suggestions are that much of life in the universe may be microbial/non sentient. And even if sentient life/sentients do exist, we may not know about it because of the vastness of the size of the universe which would make communication difficult.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sNhhvQGsMEc

The sort of deity described in religions ie a personal diety that can communicate with yoiu via esp and the afterlife etc is ofc unreasonable. As to higher beings around creation of the universe etc, idk but how at all would this support a theists position? Maybe a deists position might be supported by this supposition but ofc while we can presuppose anything, there is hitchens' razor. It also becomes an infinite regress/turtles all the way down. Occam's razor. Why not just save a step?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag6fH8cU-MU

Posted: **Mon Feb 08, 2016 6:14 am**

I debunked these arguments in this thread: https://philosophicalvegan.com/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=1571

brimstoneSalad wrote: By "simulate" I assume he meant being able to calculate the number of bits to represent the universe's current state, in a way that we might be able to get something meaningful from it. BUT, that's not actually true for a number of reasons.

1. Bits are binary data; either zero or one. The universe is composed of waves, not collapsed states forced into discrete quantifiable locations/velocities (see Heisenberg's uncertainty principle). Even if you gave the precise location of all particles, you'd be unable to give any data about their velocities, and vice versa. Neither of those options would yield a legitimate representation of the universe. Representing this data in a limited sense could be possible with Qbits (which are not the same as bits), but...

2. As a result of the wave nature of the universe, it's actually a multiverse, which means even a perfect representation of a single "collapsed" state that we may find (if that were meaningful, which it isn't), would not really represent the universe as a whole in all of its parts -- which would take a likely infinite amount of information, unless you infinitely increased the variables contained within a Qbit (which would make it increasingly useless as a 'simulation' that has any meaning to the simulator). But from that I can tell you exactly how many bits it would take: One. One "bit", a Qbit, with an infinite number of states in perfect and perpetual superposition. This is not a Qbit that's actually possible to create in any universe -- but it is legitimately a multiverse (not just a simulation of one).

3. Due to the effects of relativity on enforcing locality, and the nature of a cosmic Qbit itself (which affirm each other in consequence), even if you could create one, simultaneous simulation of an entire universe/multiverse state is impossible if any information is being extracted -- we're talking about collapse of this universal Qbit -- which means it only returns an arbitrarily long string of random data to use to construct a snapshot of a possible universe, which is again useless from a simulation perspective. At best it would give you a glimpse into a possible universe -- out of an infinite number -- but not necessarily one with anything interesting in it. You could spend the entire lifetime of the universe taking endless snap shots out of this Qbit without finding anything useful at all, AND it could even take you the lifetime of the universe (or longer) to get a single snapshot out of it due to the bandwidth limitations imposed by quantum physics and relativity (extracting data from a single point, limited by light speed and laws of quantum physics).

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Posted: **Mon Feb 08, 2016 7:02 am**

brimstoneSalad, that's really interesting. I only have a layman's understanding and interest in those things, but I thought there wasn't a scientific consensus regarding the multiverse? I'll have to read that thread.

I'll try to address some of the other points:

It's impossible to claim what is necessary for existence, we just don't know enough about the nature of "existence". It's not difficult to imagine different universes with different physical properties. We run into the limit of our imagination before we can get very far, but just because we can't imagine or understand a vastly different universe doesn't mean the one we're in is fine-tuned for existence. You realise this yourself when you mention those "higher beings in higher dimensions". In that scenario, those beings were in an already existent universe, so to speak, which means ours obviously isn't fine-tuned for existence.

Whether this is the only universe that can possibly exist or there are other universes which constitute existence, I guess the underlying question is the same. Why is there something instead of nothing? No one knows, maybe there is no such thing as nothing. Any attempt to introduce a first cause just leads to a more complex problem. So as garrethdsouza said, Occam's razor.

That said, one of my favorite pieces of fiction is The Last Question by Asimov.

Posted: **Tue Feb 09, 2016 3:36 am**

Jaywalker wrote:brimstoneSalad, that's really interesting. I only have a layman's understanding and interest in those things, but I thought there wasn't a scientific consensus regarding the multiverse?

There is basically consensus that it is mathematically true, but not necessarily that the other universes are "real". Hawking takes this view from what I remember.
Which is funny; as if you admitted 1 apple +1 apple = 2 apples, but you like to still think of it being only one apple because the other might not be "real" (whatever that means).
The only way they can assert that here with universes is because it's outside of our observable universe and we have absolutely no access to it; so it doesn't make any practical difference to the science, and from our perspective it's kind of true that it isn't real, but that depends on how you define "real" (and it becomes equally true from an objective perspective that our universe isn't real either).

As far as the math goes, taking it at face value and making no additional assumptions (Occam's razor), MWI is the correct interpretation.
Many physicists are still stuck in Copenhagen mode (making the unsubstantiated assumption that wave function collapse is a real phenomena), they do this because it makes them more comfortable (which they are often honest about), and because the math is the same either way so in their view it doesn't matter.
Collapse is also an easier mechanism for some to use in calculations for some applications, like particle physics, so some people just prefer it on paper and go with whatever they like to work with. That's kind of like saying in the expression 10 * 7 * 2 * 5, that we should multiply 5 * 2 first because it's easier for us and equally valid -- sure, go for it. But that ease of mathematical operation says nothing about reality.

Anything but MWI makes additional (and currently empirically unfalsifiable) assumptions which have no impact whatsoever on the physics and math of the matter. So it's kind of like a "choose whichever makes you more comfortable since it doesn't matter [yet]" issue.

Philosophically, it's much more important. But physicists are not philosophers, so in that regard they usually have nothing to say on the matter.
Philosophically, it's much easier to show how absurd Copenhagen is, and how elegant MWI is.

Jaywalker wrote:It's not difficult to imagine different universes with different physical properties.

To the contrary, anybody who thinks he or she can imagine 100 grapes at once is probably full of shit. Our imaginations are crude approximations of a notion, and just because something thinks he or she can imagine something doesn't mean he or she actually can, or that the thing in question is possible.

Jaywalker wrote:We run into the limit of our imagination before we can get very far, but just because we can't imagine or understand a vastly different universe doesn't mean the one we're in is fine-tuned for existence.[...] In that scenario, those beings were in an already existent universe, so to speak, which means ours obviously isn't fine-tuned for existence.

These are the more important points.
Or in other words (as I think Garreth said): "Turtles all the way down".

Posted: **Tue Feb 09, 2016 3:22 pm**

I couldn't fully make sense of that first part. I'll read up on it and try again.

Posted: **Fri Feb 12, 2016 3:02 pm**

Ángel Malavé wrote:Hello, I'm an agnostic atheist in regards to all religions. I have a question for other fellow atheists and need help figuring out if I should clasify myself as one too.

So to make it clear I don't believe in the Christian god, or any of the popular religion's god for that matter. However, even in my disbelief for such deities I do not exclude the possibility of the existence of higher beings and/or civilizations.

I believe that it may not be a coincidence that the universe is tuned so precise mathematically speaking ( Gravitational constants, electrons mass, etc). This is the most compeling argument theists have used to spark some doubt in me, because of the precision the universe has ( Not necesarily to be fined tuned for life, because it really is not, but for existence itself) it is almost like it was programmed and run on its own after being built.

So, am I really an atheist if I think that the universe is programmed and likely has a higher civilization behind it? I know it sounds like SciFi, higher beings controling higher dimensions and all that but so far it's the most reasonable hypothesis I could think of seeing that nothing in the observable universe is ever on its own, so this ultimate being ( God) to me is bullshit but not a group of higher beings.

Have you ever considered to discuss with deists? Because if you do not exclude even the posibility, thats what you are. agnostic deist maybe, since deists are against revelead religions.

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