“Second, if time is infinite, it means that every possible combination of e.g. atoms will reoccur an infinite number of times. Yes, this means literally that everything happens again and again forever, including this precise moment.”
I’ve heard this premise a few times and I’ve never felt persuaded. It’s such a romantic notion that I want to believe it, but as you say, “an idea does not create a possibility space!” I can see that there’s an enormous space of possibilities that are not prohibited by the laws of physics, but I don’t see as clearly what mechanism would cause those possibilities to become realized. Why can’t there just be infinite amounts of dust or vacuum or nearly identical rock planets?
Leave it to my quote-unquote "friend" to seize on one of the elements that gave me the most trouble as I wrote this! Wow: just, wow.
I have to admit that I have no idea about this particular claim, despite reading as much as I could bear about it. Pi, for example, repeats infinitely but never repeats, so it seems possible at least for "an infinite sequence of numbers never to repeat." Does this show that "finite sets of entities can go on forever without repeating"? I cannot tell. Mathematics and physics are different; see here for more on that angle: https://www.askamathematician.com/2013/12/q-how-do-we-know-that-π-never-repeats-if-we-find-enough-digits-isnt-it-possible-that-it-will-eventually-start-repeating/ (I also am not sure we know, with final confidence, that the "entities" of the physical world are finite; I think they are, but I'm not sure).
As you can imagine, I thought a lot of the "Infinity Hotel" chapter of our favorite book "The Beginning of Infinity," which illustrates that physical infinities would have a variety of paradoxical and insane properties which do not have parallels in the non-physical (???) infinity of pi.
My sense is that if we take infinity "seriously" —as we love to do— and extend it in both directions, so to speak, we cannot avoid the claim made by Nietzsche and others that everything reoccurs infinitely. We must literally imagine never-ending permutations of matter and energy, into the past and into the future: never-ending! Infinity contains infinities! Where my ignorance fully expresses itself is that I merely "feel" that there is something different between irrational numbers and physical reality. We could, for example measure a circle down to its atoms (or subatomic particles) and presumably we'd not wind up with a measurement that goes on forever. (Would we?!). I suspect this has something to do with "math as an ideality," but as you can tell I straight-up have no idea.
*If* the universe does "go on forever" and it never repeats, I'd regard that as even weirder, I think: like there was a built-in mechanism to prevent redundancy or something! Maybe someone who studies math can help us out!
When I left the church I wasn’t totally sure where I was gonna land, as popular atheism seemed broadly right in its criticisms but also like...a bit dull? Unsatisfying? A little blasé about just how fucking wild and mysterious it all is?
I often feel that one writer who really got it was Chesterton—a giant kid who never lost his sense of wonder and who constantly took a glove to his reader’s face while shouting his version of This Is Water at them.
“The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.”
Hot damn, that’s beautiful; and I guess maybe that’s exactly what animated me: a fear that ordinary people might have been gradually gaslit into thinking that they’d be crazy to wonder or speculate about their very existence!
There's something powerful about the concept that everyone knows as little as you do. It exposes the facade of the "experts" who pretend otherwise. For me, though, it's very easy to dip my feet in the pool of nihilism. Like Talix, I wonder "who cares?". If there's a creator or immovable mover, I doubt there's any coherent purpose to her creation. To me, the likely lack of a purpose, leaves me where we started, even with the knowledge of our origin.
I sometimes feel that way, and sometimes other ways; I think maybe what seems important to me is that “how we feel about this” is as reasonable a way to manage our thoughts as any other! And that we are all truly sovereign in this most insane and consequential zone. It doesn’t lead to anything in particular, but it somehow still uh... shifts things a bit for me, maybe. Not sure!!!
My response to "It's a simulation" is "So what?" If that's true, does it suggest behaving in a way I currently do not? When I was younger, I was all about the mystery. Now I seem to be more concerned with the cash value of things. I still haven't found a way to derive an Ought from an Is.
Hahahahah ain’t this the truth! I love getting more prosaic with age overall; I’m especially into how drained of import inner-mystery questions are for me now. “Who am I?” is a question I cannot imagine asking myself or caring about the answer to!
"Life on earth is due to a single massive geological feature, the Mid Ocean Ridge, running up to 75,000km along the ocean floor. It's the longest volcanic mountain range in the solar system. Without it, earth would be a frozen, dead planet." lol https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/mid-ocean-ridge
Guilty as charged: I haven't spent basically any time thinking about these questions lately. But, a couple of stray thoughts on people broadly not spending much time wondering:
1. Would the god of monotheistic religions qualify as the prime mover? Do theologians spend their time thinking about this stuff, or do they take the prime mover idea as a given and then mostly concern themselves with downstream ideas? (Full disclosure: I feel totally ignorant and basically have no clue what theologians concern themselves with. I'm going to ask ChatGPT!)
2. I consider myself agnostic sometimes veering into atheistic, but where I indulge in wonderment is fantasy and sci-fi: books, graphic novels, movies, TV, whatever you've got I'll eat it right up. That's gotta count for something, right? I bet a lot of people fall into this bucket: not confronting the question head on, but entertaining it via indirect interests. Maybe that's encouraging!
And, as others have said, this is a fantastic essay and an impressive synthesis. Thank you for putting it together.
Thanks Kamil! That means the world to me, man. Theologians don’t have any special maneuvers here beyond “not needing to avoid the supernatural,” but unless we treat “the supernatural” / “god” as truly requiring no further description or explanation, it doesn’t help much. Aquinas certainly took god to be the prime mover, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but even if one believed in god, I doubt seriously whether one’s curiosity would be wholly arrested. Yes, theologians say god is uncreated... but what?! What does that mean? Maybe we really cannot know, but this is all more can-kicking! As you may know, I’m generally fond of religions, but I don’t believe they have any real explanatory edge here at all! I like their attitudes and vibes and often their content, but they’re in the same boat as the rest of us with this question, I think. The view that “god is just a name for the mystery” is fairly common in mystical / theological circles, though!
One thought on "the existence of the universe is a violation of Occam’s Razor" — if time and universe instances are infinite, absolutely everything everywhere forever might equate to the same thing as nothing, right? https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1528630077277151232
Hahahahahaha, well, I think I'd (naturally) bicker with that analogy. Highlighting every word is not, in fact, the same as highlighting none! It fails to "select a special subpart," but it does select, and you can e.g. copy and paste!
If it's all infinite, it's not the same as it not existing, I don't think. For example: if nothing existed, I wouldn't know you. This is what sticks for me and why I can't chill out about this! We are literally here! That's insane, in and of itself, and we cannot account for it! If we didn't exist, if nothing did, no accounting would be necessary.
OTOH: maybe that's a deep insight into the opposite issue, namely, whether "non-existence" exists. I think you could try to make a case that non-existence is the thing that would need to be demonstrated or explained, since we have no examples of it (and cannot lmfao). But even so, I still demand causation! Maybe it's "not possible" for nothing to exist, but we still have every reason to expect what does exist to have causes, IMO! (Some disagree with this, but until I see causeless phenomena / causeless creation, I cannot relax. And I do not think 'virtual particles' qualify!).
Yeah. Like, you know me, and if there are quantum universes, there are many in which you don’t. There are many where our parents had different children, and many where their parents had different children, and no children at all. The sum of all those people and their relationships is quite meaningful, or at least would be to me if I could learn about them (and maybe one day we’ll be able to). While that would be deafening to consider it’s definitely not nothing. Fine, the universe is a violation!
Hahahahahah YES. Can I be very basic for a moment and ask if you watched "Everything Everywhere All At Once"? I almost didn't post this because I'd been working on it for weeks and then saw that movie last weekend and felt like I no longer needed to say any of this (but then reconsidered).
I do think existence, and the nature of existence, are meaningful. I feel bad for the Mills that didn't get to know you, but then also: fuck him, what's he ever done for me?! (Maybe a ton, how the hell would I know!).
I for one trust our developer overlords!!! Presumably I paid for this immersive experience and I’ll be damned if I get short-changed. Besides, isn’t that how Lucifer would up getting his account suspended? I’m more of an “obey both the letter and the spirit of the TOS” type myself.
presumably we're a glitch! this thing is mean to do something inscrutable with stars, and we are some weird ass fungus unexpectedly growing in the cracks let's break out and cause trouble
Honestly what would feel more like humanity’s ultimate expression that gumming up some mechanistic works intended by far better intelligences to perform some useful, noble purpose!!! It would be the dream of dreams to break this thing!
I don't know why I get so animated about this but I do. Put us in a box? Ha!
And then people are like "if we're in a simulation guess there's no way to ever know or do anything about it" yeah man it's probably perfect and unhackable just like the complex systems we build
Hahahahhahahahah that is an extremely funny point; like if Soda or Cassie were like “nah, no reason to even try to misbehave, the gods cannot err and they never miss a trick” and meanwhile... well, our lives lol.
I enjoyed Sean Carroll’s book Something Deeply Hidden. Around the same time that I read that I discovered another pop-sci/physics writer named Max Tegmark. I think I enjoy his books a bit more than Carroll’s, but I think that was mostly because the themes he spoke about were hitting me in all of the right places at that moment. I get lost when either of them go deep into the math side of things, but Tegmark does a decent job at keeping things accessible.
For a while I was really on a kick where I was trying to come to terms with whether I buy into the idea of the multiverse or not. My conclusion is that I don’t like the idea, but based off of my reading it seems like math indicates that there is something to the concept. It’s possible that we simply don’t fully understand what those equations are trying to communicate, but it’s equally possible that it exists whether I like the idea or not. If it does exist, then, I really must insist that I am the Prime John Ward.
I come down on the mystical side of things regarding our origin story as well. For me the only way it can possibly make sense is if there is a Prime Mover. There has to be a supernatural/extra-time originator... at least, in my mind. That being said, I’m comfortable with the idea that I also experience a lack of imagination because I can’t conceive of other viable alternatives. I have many limitations and that may be one of them.
I really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for taking the time to write what I’m sure was a complicated essay because of all of the thought that had to have been involved.
Agree with all this, and like Tegmark too! And thanks for the kind words! It wasn’t that hard to write, but it was a little nerve-wracking; somehow it feels embarrassing to admit that I think this is significant!
Great stuff. To defend the honour of Ockham's finest: didn't he say you shouldn't /unnecessarily/ multiply entities? Otherwise his answer to everything would have been "yeah, didn't happen. No, you see, didn't happen. Just didn't happen, mate"; and of such stuff great philosophers are not made.
Also, I'm fairly sure the answer is that it's some combination of the words quantum, bubbles, emergent, and recursive. Sadly, with the death of Freeman Dyson, it seems unlikely we will ever recover the correct order in which to place them.
Oh, that’s a great point about William of O! I’m really trying to slander his misinterpreters, not him. And as a Dyson fan, I’m pretty ready to believe this lol.
I’m very late to this excellent post but perhaps you still get pinged if somebody comments. My intuitive answer to something like the prime mover question -- and I wonder if you ever feel this way -- is something like this: “Well, very likely the ‘answer’ is neither of these two options that the reasoning habits of our primate brains believe to be the only possibilities. Very likely, the structure of reality is quite literally beyond our grasp, as human reason is just one component of reality in the same way that vampire bat consciousness is just one component of reality. It’s frankly astounding how much we’re able to achieve with our evolution-built primate brains and the principles of reason they’ve devised, but clearly, as here demonstrated, they have very real limits, and if we zoomed out and out and out we’d likely see that our minds are as limited a tool as our eyeballs and our most advanced telescopes. Likely, we’re terribly naive, and the ‘answers’ to these questions you’ve posed come in a form so majestically strange than can’t fit into our narrow and fussy prose and even really be called ‘answers.’” I’m not sure if this makes sense to you, but this is the heart of my agnosticism. I love everything you have to say re: “HOLY CHRIST EVERYBODY! HOW ARE WE ALL NOT HUNG UP ON THIS VAST MYSTERY!” Fully on board with that. But I feel in my BONES, almost mystically, that OBVIOUSLY we don’t know have answers from our perch on a little rock among billions of stars, among billions of galaxies, among...
I got pinged, but I missed it!!! Thanks for commenting! I hold the controversial belief that to say “it’s behind our reasoning” is the same as saying “it’s supernatural.” To date, not one single thing has been beyond reason, mathematics, and science in any fundamental way; there are things we don’t understand, but what we do understand is already so far from e.g. the context in which mind and civilization evolved —the early universe, supernovas, quantum mechanics, etc.— that I struggle to understand why someone would think there is a “limit.” If such a limit exists, it means that whatever is on the other side is beyond every tool of natural philosophy we have: i.e., it’s supernatural.
If we really imagine what this would “look like,” I think it’s strange: a spaceship comes to the edge of some border. What does it mean for whatever is there to be “beyond our understanding” permanently? Every measurement or description of it “doesn’t make sense”? Probes we send, scans we perform yield no data? We just sit there looking at some phenomenon but cannot gain information about it? Everything we try turns to nonsense? (This sounds like our relationship with the mind lmfao, but that’s by the by).
It would be a massive day —and I guess a massive L— for science if we drew a line around some parts of the physical world and said: there can be no progress made understanding this. It would mean science exists “within” an irrational universe. Maybe that’s right!!! But I’d be surprised, I think.
Interesting, thank you. To answer your question about what the limits of our understanding would “look like,” I think it would look very much like a chimpanzee’s inability to grasp any number of things beyond its intellectual firepower and corresponding imaginative capabilities. We observe all other creatures to be severely limited, why not us? You’d be surprised if it was discovered that science existing “within” an irrational universe — and I’d quibble with that word irrational, if by it you mean unordered — but I’d be surprised if evolution, driven by quotidian survival concerns on this little, peculiar planet, had gifted us with a godlike power to understand all. In fact if I believed the latter would true, it would strike me as evidence for some variety of theism, like maybe we *are* a kind of chosen species, with a touch of the divine in us. I probably wouldn’t go that far, but man, it would be weird!
Oh I have to find he relevant section of a great book on this precise question —is it more parochial to imagine that math and science cannot describe an ordered universe due to some indescribable limitation on their reach, which to date is limitless? or to imagine that somehow we little freaks can understand everything?— but I’m in the middle of a move! If you get a wild hair, David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” discusses it well!
But you’d at least have to admit to surprise at how much we can understand to date, if we’re so limited, right? Why should an earth creature be able to understand how light bends around black holes (or black holes at all)? But we do, and just through the usual methods. Whatever is “beyond” those methods can’t merely be “strange”; black holes are strange! Cosmic background radiation is strange, quarks are strange, yet here we are talking about them. So it would be something weirder than quantum physics. It’s also worth noting that this would be a first, I think, and we’d have to ask: why now? Strange coincidence that whenever we don’t know something yet, we say: “Eh, the limits of the mind!” before some Einstein turns it back into regular knowledge.
If I sound confident in my arguments, it’s only because I’m rushing!!! I honestly have no idea *at all* about this, of course!
Yes, I am indeed very surprised about how much we can understand to date. Science teaches that we’re hairless primates whose brains were built by random mutations + stone age survival advantages, and science ALSO teaches that far distant galaxies will behave in such and such predictable manners obeying Greek symbols we’ve played around with and, see, they just did. I think this tension is as wondrous and mysterious as pretty much anything else in this discussion.
But you say that the appearance of something we can’t TRULY understand would be “a first” and you ask “why now?” I’d counter that the thing we can’t truly understand is the subject of this post and it’s the question that’s always been with us. It’s the thing staring us in the face. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” And its variations: “What caused all this? What *is* all this? What the fuck? What gives?” Our reasoning about the question of origins leaves us with dissatisfying alternatives, and I’d argue it’s mostly likely because there is something limited about our ability to see and grasp reality, given our (to borrow a word) parochial origins. These questions aren’t really an area where we simply *don’t understand* and haven’t worked out the formulas, rather we can’t imagine there being an adequate explanation.
And who’s to say the universe isn’t awash with realities we can’t imagine? Maybe the visible universe is an almost infinitesimal component of something larger with a complex and strange multidimensional architecture, as is often speculated… I’m veering off into “wild ass speculation” mode, which is ascientific, but that’s kind of my point. It’s easy to identify areas the scientific flashlight won’t reach. I would dispute that we’d have to find something “stranger than quantum mechanics” to notice that human reasoning may have its limits. I think we’re constantly noticing this with our core questions about the nature of reality. (And MAYBE some questions about consciousness, too.)
Anyhow, I hope I’m not boring you. My next book is going to be touching on (though not dwelling on or resolving!) some of these questions in an avowedly amateur way. I really only learn what I think by observing and participating in arguments, so you will never bore *me,* for what it’s worth.
It would be pretty crazy if the universe really isn’t THAT complicated, and, once a species has reached a certain reasoning threshold, a few years (or decades) of postgraduate math gains you all the keys to the kingdom. But then again, it’s all crazy.
You are doing the opposite of boring me lol!!! This is beautifully put, and now I’m excited to get your book! I know one thing: I’m not a scientist, so I’m a pure spectator in wherever all this goes. I don’t know that anything in particular would shock me!
Your post afforded me such a lovely romp through the overgrown forest of memories of my philosophy undergrad, and my time in seminary. Also, the background musing I'm still prone to, while watching any iteration of Star Trek. Yes, none of us actually knows more about the mystery of existence than anyone else. At 62, I am far more comfortable with that then I was at 20, or 30, or even 40. I think part of aging, and inching closer to physical death, is a humble "okayness" with living in the midst of mystery.
It feels that way to me. I’m in my 40s now and already I find myself more deferential to “mystery” as such than I was just ten years ago. I rather like aging, apart from the physical dimension, for this reason and others.
Oh... there’s something you didn’t mention when you were speaking about humanity’s future potential. The rise of AI and potential AGI. Combine this with Von Neumann probes and it opens up a literal universe worth of discoveries for us. If you want to read a fictional (and really quite funny) science fiction book about this premise I can’t recommend Denis E. Taylor’s Bob-i-Verse series highly enough. It’s one of my favorites and the most recent books are just as entertaining as the first one. One of the latter books features a scene where a group of characters are playing Dungeons and Dragons and that scene contains some of the most hilarious moments I’ve ever read.
The first book in the series is called We Are Legion (We Are Bob). Dennis E. Taylor is the author.
Well I love this comment and agree with it all, but I especially adore thinking of myself as murderous; I am, I really am, in all senses! I’m about to get on a plane but: thanks for writing this, I think it’s illuminating and fun and also could have been an awesome post!!!
I love this post of course!!
“Second, if time is infinite, it means that every possible combination of e.g. atoms will reoccur an infinite number of times. Yes, this means literally that everything happens again and again forever, including this precise moment.”
I’ve heard this premise a few times and I’ve never felt persuaded. It’s such a romantic notion that I want to believe it, but as you say, “an idea does not create a possibility space!” I can see that there’s an enormous space of possibilities that are not prohibited by the laws of physics, but I don’t see as clearly what mechanism would cause those possibilities to become realized. Why can’t there just be infinite amounts of dust or vacuum or nearly identical rock planets?
I want to believe, but how?!
Leave it to my quote-unquote "friend" to seize on one of the elements that gave me the most trouble as I wrote this! Wow: just, wow.
I have to admit that I have no idea about this particular claim, despite reading as much as I could bear about it. Pi, for example, repeats infinitely but never repeats, so it seems possible at least for "an infinite sequence of numbers never to repeat." Does this show that "finite sets of entities can go on forever without repeating"? I cannot tell. Mathematics and physics are different; see here for more on that angle: https://www.askamathematician.com/2013/12/q-how-do-we-know-that-π-never-repeats-if-we-find-enough-digits-isnt-it-possible-that-it-will-eventually-start-repeating/ (I also am not sure we know, with final confidence, that the "entities" of the physical world are finite; I think they are, but I'm not sure).
As you can imagine, I thought a lot of the "Infinity Hotel" chapter of our favorite book "The Beginning of Infinity," which illustrates that physical infinities would have a variety of paradoxical and insane properties which do not have parallels in the non-physical (???) infinity of pi.
My sense is that if we take infinity "seriously" —as we love to do— and extend it in both directions, so to speak, we cannot avoid the claim made by Nietzsche and others that everything reoccurs infinitely. We must literally imagine never-ending permutations of matter and energy, into the past and into the future: never-ending! Infinity contains infinities! Where my ignorance fully expresses itself is that I merely "feel" that there is something different between irrational numbers and physical reality. We could, for example measure a circle down to its atoms (or subatomic particles) and presumably we'd not wind up with a measurement that goes on forever. (Would we?!). I suspect this has something to do with "math as an ideality," but as you can tell I straight-up have no idea.
*If* the universe does "go on forever" and it never repeats, I'd regard that as even weirder, I think: like there was a built-in mechanism to prevent redundancy or something! Maybe someone who studies math can help us out!
Right, something doesn’t have to be demonstrably true to be profoundly meaningful, that’s the spirit of this whole post anyway.
When I left the church I wasn’t totally sure where I was gonna land, as popular atheism seemed broadly right in its criticisms but also like...a bit dull? Unsatisfying? A little blasé about just how fucking wild and mysterious it all is?
I often feel that one writer who really got it was Chesterton—a giant kid who never lost his sense of wonder and who constantly took a glove to his reader’s face while shouting his version of This Is Water at them.
“The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that.”
Hot damn, that’s beautiful; and I guess maybe that’s exactly what animated me: a fear that ordinary people might have been gradually gaslit into thinking that they’d be crazy to wonder or speculate about their very existence!
Chesterton has so many hangers!!!
There's something powerful about the concept that everyone knows as little as you do. It exposes the facade of the "experts" who pretend otherwise. For me, though, it's very easy to dip my feet in the pool of nihilism. Like Talix, I wonder "who cares?". If there's a creator or immovable mover, I doubt there's any coherent purpose to her creation. To me, the likely lack of a purpose, leaves me where we started, even with the knowledge of our origin.
I sometimes feel that way, and sometimes other ways; I think maybe what seems important to me is that “how we feel about this” is as reasonable a way to manage our thoughts as any other! And that we are all truly sovereign in this most insane and consequential zone. It doesn’t lead to anything in particular, but it somehow still uh... shifts things a bit for me, maybe. Not sure!!!
Man, I've missed reading you!
My response to "It's a simulation" is "So what?" If that's true, does it suggest behaving in a way I currently do not? When I was younger, I was all about the mystery. Now I seem to be more concerned with the cash value of things. I still haven't found a way to derive an Ought from an Is.
Hahahahah ain’t this the truth! I love getting more prosaic with age overall; I’m especially into how drained of import inner-mystery questions are for me now. “Who am I?” is a question I cannot imagine asking myself or caring about the answer to!
"Life on earth is due to a single massive geological feature, the Mid Ocean Ridge, running up to 75,000km along the ocean floor. It's the longest volcanic mountain range in the solar system. Without it, earth would be a frozen, dead planet." lol https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/mid-ocean-ridge
Sometimes it's just that simple 😤😤😤
Guilty as charged: I haven't spent basically any time thinking about these questions lately. But, a couple of stray thoughts on people broadly not spending much time wondering:
1. Would the god of monotheistic religions qualify as the prime mover? Do theologians spend their time thinking about this stuff, or do they take the prime mover idea as a given and then mostly concern themselves with downstream ideas? (Full disclosure: I feel totally ignorant and basically have no clue what theologians concern themselves with. I'm going to ask ChatGPT!)
2. I consider myself agnostic sometimes veering into atheistic, but where I indulge in wonderment is fantasy and sci-fi: books, graphic novels, movies, TV, whatever you've got I'll eat it right up. That's gotta count for something, right? I bet a lot of people fall into this bucket: not confronting the question head on, but entertaining it via indirect interests. Maybe that's encouraging!
And, as others have said, this is a fantastic essay and an impressive synthesis. Thank you for putting it together.
Thanks Kamil! That means the world to me, man. Theologians don’t have any special maneuvers here beyond “not needing to avoid the supernatural,” but unless we treat “the supernatural” / “god” as truly requiring no further description or explanation, it doesn’t help much. Aquinas certainly took god to be the prime mover, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, but even if one believed in god, I doubt seriously whether one’s curiosity would be wholly arrested. Yes, theologians say god is uncreated... but what?! What does that mean? Maybe we really cannot know, but this is all more can-kicking! As you may know, I’m generally fond of religions, but I don’t believe they have any real explanatory edge here at all! I like their attitudes and vibes and often their content, but they’re in the same boat as the rest of us with this question, I think. The view that “god is just a name for the mystery” is fairly common in mystical / theological circles, though!
Thanks for re-animating us Mills!
One thought on "the existence of the universe is a violation of Occam’s Razor" — if time and universe instances are infinite, absolutely everything everywhere forever might equate to the same thing as nothing, right? https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1528630077277151232
Hahahahahaha, well, I think I'd (naturally) bicker with that analogy. Highlighting every word is not, in fact, the same as highlighting none! It fails to "select a special subpart," but it does select, and you can e.g. copy and paste!
If it's all infinite, it's not the same as it not existing, I don't think. For example: if nothing existed, I wouldn't know you. This is what sticks for me and why I can't chill out about this! We are literally here! That's insane, in and of itself, and we cannot account for it! If we didn't exist, if nothing did, no accounting would be necessary.
OTOH: maybe that's a deep insight into the opposite issue, namely, whether "non-existence" exists. I think you could try to make a case that non-existence is the thing that would need to be demonstrated or explained, since we have no examples of it (and cannot lmfao). But even so, I still demand causation! Maybe it's "not possible" for nothing to exist, but we still have every reason to expect what does exist to have causes, IMO! (Some disagree with this, but until I see causeless phenomena / causeless creation, I cannot relax. And I do not think 'virtual particles' qualify!).
Yeah. Like, you know me, and if there are quantum universes, there are many in which you don’t. There are many where our parents had different children, and many where their parents had different children, and no children at all. The sum of all those people and their relationships is quite meaningful, or at least would be to me if I could learn about them (and maybe one day we’ll be able to). While that would be deafening to consider it’s definitely not nothing. Fine, the universe is a violation!
Hahahahahah YES. Can I be very basic for a moment and ask if you watched "Everything Everywhere All At Once"? I almost didn't post this because I'd been working on it for weeks and then saw that movie last weekend and felt like I no longer needed to say any of this (but then reconsidered).
I do think existence, and the nature of existence, are meaningful. I feel bad for the Mills that didn't get to know you, but then also: fuck him, what's he ever done for me?! (Maybe a ton, how the hell would I know!).
A modest proposal: if we're living in a simulation, let's break out! Why not?
I for one trust our developer overlords!!! Presumably I paid for this immersive experience and I’ll be damned if I get short-changed. Besides, isn’t that how Lucifer would up getting his account suspended? I’m more of an “obey both the letter and the spirit of the TOS” type myself.
presumably we're a glitch! this thing is mean to do something inscrutable with stars, and we are some weird ass fungus unexpectedly growing in the cracks let's break out and cause trouble
Honestly what would feel more like humanity’s ultimate expression that gumming up some mechanistic works intended by far better intelligences to perform some useful, noble purpose!!! It would be the dream of dreams to break this thing!
I don't know why I get so animated about this but I do. Put us in a box? Ha!
And then people are like "if we're in a simulation guess there's no way to ever know or do anything about it" yeah man it's probably perfect and unhackable just like the complex systems we build
Hahahahhahahahah that is an extremely funny point; like if Soda or Cassie were like “nah, no reason to even try to misbehave, the gods cannot err and they never miss a trick” and meanwhile... well, our lives lol.
I enjoyed Sean Carroll’s book Something Deeply Hidden. Around the same time that I read that I discovered another pop-sci/physics writer named Max Tegmark. I think I enjoy his books a bit more than Carroll’s, but I think that was mostly because the themes he spoke about were hitting me in all of the right places at that moment. I get lost when either of them go deep into the math side of things, but Tegmark does a decent job at keeping things accessible.
For a while I was really on a kick where I was trying to come to terms with whether I buy into the idea of the multiverse or not. My conclusion is that I don’t like the idea, but based off of my reading it seems like math indicates that there is something to the concept. It’s possible that we simply don’t fully understand what those equations are trying to communicate, but it’s equally possible that it exists whether I like the idea or not. If it does exist, then, I really must insist that I am the Prime John Ward.
I come down on the mystical side of things regarding our origin story as well. For me the only way it can possibly make sense is if there is a Prime Mover. There has to be a supernatural/extra-time originator... at least, in my mind. That being said, I’m comfortable with the idea that I also experience a lack of imagination because I can’t conceive of other viable alternatives. I have many limitations and that may be one of them.
I really enjoyed reading this. Thanks for taking the time to write what I’m sure was a complicated essay because of all of the thought that had to have been involved.
Agree with all this, and like Tegmark too! And thanks for the kind words! It wasn’t that hard to write, but it was a little nerve-wracking; somehow it feels embarrassing to admit that I think this is significant!
Great stuff. To defend the honour of Ockham's finest: didn't he say you shouldn't /unnecessarily/ multiply entities? Otherwise his answer to everything would have been "yeah, didn't happen. No, you see, didn't happen. Just didn't happen, mate"; and of such stuff great philosophers are not made.
Also, I'm fairly sure the answer is that it's some combination of the words quantum, bubbles, emergent, and recursive. Sadly, with the death of Freeman Dyson, it seems unlikely we will ever recover the correct order in which to place them.
Oh, that’s a great point about William of O! I’m really trying to slander his misinterpreters, not him. And as a Dyson fan, I’m pretty ready to believe this lol.
Wow this piece is incredible.
I’m very late to this excellent post but perhaps you still get pinged if somebody comments. My intuitive answer to something like the prime mover question -- and I wonder if you ever feel this way -- is something like this: “Well, very likely the ‘answer’ is neither of these two options that the reasoning habits of our primate brains believe to be the only possibilities. Very likely, the structure of reality is quite literally beyond our grasp, as human reason is just one component of reality in the same way that vampire bat consciousness is just one component of reality. It’s frankly astounding how much we’re able to achieve with our evolution-built primate brains and the principles of reason they’ve devised, but clearly, as here demonstrated, they have very real limits, and if we zoomed out and out and out we’d likely see that our minds are as limited a tool as our eyeballs and our most advanced telescopes. Likely, we’re terribly naive, and the ‘answers’ to these questions you’ve posed come in a form so majestically strange than can’t fit into our narrow and fussy prose and even really be called ‘answers.’” I’m not sure if this makes sense to you, but this is the heart of my agnosticism. I love everything you have to say re: “HOLY CHRIST EVERYBODY! HOW ARE WE ALL NOT HUNG UP ON THIS VAST MYSTERY!” Fully on board with that. But I feel in my BONES, almost mystically, that OBVIOUSLY we don’t know have answers from our perch on a little rock among billions of stars, among billions of galaxies, among...
I got pinged, but I missed it!!! Thanks for commenting! I hold the controversial belief that to say “it’s behind our reasoning” is the same as saying “it’s supernatural.” To date, not one single thing has been beyond reason, mathematics, and science in any fundamental way; there are things we don’t understand, but what we do understand is already so far from e.g. the context in which mind and civilization evolved —the early universe, supernovas, quantum mechanics, etc.— that I struggle to understand why someone would think there is a “limit.” If such a limit exists, it means that whatever is on the other side is beyond every tool of natural philosophy we have: i.e., it’s supernatural.
If we really imagine what this would “look like,” I think it’s strange: a spaceship comes to the edge of some border. What does it mean for whatever is there to be “beyond our understanding” permanently? Every measurement or description of it “doesn’t make sense”? Probes we send, scans we perform yield no data? We just sit there looking at some phenomenon but cannot gain information about it? Everything we try turns to nonsense? (This sounds like our relationship with the mind lmfao, but that’s by the by).
It would be a massive day —and I guess a massive L— for science if we drew a line around some parts of the physical world and said: there can be no progress made understanding this. It would mean science exists “within” an irrational universe. Maybe that’s right!!! But I’d be surprised, I think.
Interesting, thank you. To answer your question about what the limits of our understanding would “look like,” I think it would look very much like a chimpanzee’s inability to grasp any number of things beyond its intellectual firepower and corresponding imaginative capabilities. We observe all other creatures to be severely limited, why not us? You’d be surprised if it was discovered that science existing “within” an irrational universe — and I’d quibble with that word irrational, if by it you mean unordered — but I’d be surprised if evolution, driven by quotidian survival concerns on this little, peculiar planet, had gifted us with a godlike power to understand all. In fact if I believed the latter would true, it would strike me as evidence for some variety of theism, like maybe we *are* a kind of chosen species, with a touch of the divine in us. I probably wouldn’t go that far, but man, it would be weird!
Oh I have to find he relevant section of a great book on this precise question —is it more parochial to imagine that math and science cannot describe an ordered universe due to some indescribable limitation on their reach, which to date is limitless? or to imagine that somehow we little freaks can understand everything?— but I’m in the middle of a move! If you get a wild hair, David Deutsch’s “Beginning of Infinity” discusses it well!
But you’d at least have to admit to surprise at how much we can understand to date, if we’re so limited, right? Why should an earth creature be able to understand how light bends around black holes (or black holes at all)? But we do, and just through the usual methods. Whatever is “beyond” those methods can’t merely be “strange”; black holes are strange! Cosmic background radiation is strange, quarks are strange, yet here we are talking about them. So it would be something weirder than quantum physics. It’s also worth noting that this would be a first, I think, and we’d have to ask: why now? Strange coincidence that whenever we don’t know something yet, we say: “Eh, the limits of the mind!” before some Einstein turns it back into regular knowledge.
If I sound confident in my arguments, it’s only because I’m rushing!!! I honestly have no idea *at all* about this, of course!
Yes, I am indeed very surprised about how much we can understand to date. Science teaches that we’re hairless primates whose brains were built by random mutations + stone age survival advantages, and science ALSO teaches that far distant galaxies will behave in such and such predictable manners obeying Greek symbols we’ve played around with and, see, they just did. I think this tension is as wondrous and mysterious as pretty much anything else in this discussion.
But you say that the appearance of something we can’t TRULY understand would be “a first” and you ask “why now?” I’d counter that the thing we can’t truly understand is the subject of this post and it’s the question that’s always been with us. It’s the thing staring us in the face. “Why is there something rather than nothing?” And its variations: “What caused all this? What *is* all this? What the fuck? What gives?” Our reasoning about the question of origins leaves us with dissatisfying alternatives, and I’d argue it’s mostly likely because there is something limited about our ability to see and grasp reality, given our (to borrow a word) parochial origins. These questions aren’t really an area where we simply *don’t understand* and haven’t worked out the formulas, rather we can’t imagine there being an adequate explanation.
And who’s to say the universe isn’t awash with realities we can’t imagine? Maybe the visible universe is an almost infinitesimal component of something larger with a complex and strange multidimensional architecture, as is often speculated… I’m veering off into “wild ass speculation” mode, which is ascientific, but that’s kind of my point. It’s easy to identify areas the scientific flashlight won’t reach. I would dispute that we’d have to find something “stranger than quantum mechanics” to notice that human reasoning may have its limits. I think we’re constantly noticing this with our core questions about the nature of reality. (And MAYBE some questions about consciousness, too.)
Anyhow, I hope I’m not boring you. My next book is going to be touching on (though not dwelling on or resolving!) some of these questions in an avowedly amateur way. I really only learn what I think by observing and participating in arguments, so you will never bore *me,* for what it’s worth.
It would be pretty crazy if the universe really isn’t THAT complicated, and, once a species has reached a certain reasoning threshold, a few years (or decades) of postgraduate math gains you all the keys to the kingdom. But then again, it’s all crazy.
You are doing the opposite of boring me lol!!! This is beautifully put, and now I’m excited to get your book! I know one thing: I’m not a scientist, so I’m a pure spectator in wherever all this goes. I don’t know that anything in particular would shock me!
Your post afforded me such a lovely romp through the overgrown forest of memories of my philosophy undergrad, and my time in seminary. Also, the background musing I'm still prone to, while watching any iteration of Star Trek. Yes, none of us actually knows more about the mystery of existence than anyone else. At 62, I am far more comfortable with that then I was at 20, or 30, or even 40. I think part of aging, and inching closer to physical death, is a humble "okayness" with living in the midst of mystery.
It feels that way to me. I’m in my 40s now and already I find myself more deferential to “mystery” as such than I was just ten years ago. I rather like aging, apart from the physical dimension, for this reason and others.
Oh... there’s something you didn’t mention when you were speaking about humanity’s future potential. The rise of AI and potential AGI. Combine this with Von Neumann probes and it opens up a literal universe worth of discoveries for us. If you want to read a fictional (and really quite funny) science fiction book about this premise I can’t recommend Denis E. Taylor’s Bob-i-Verse series highly enough. It’s one of my favorites and the most recent books are just as entertaining as the first one. One of the latter books features a scene where a group of characters are playing Dungeons and Dragons and that scene contains some of the most hilarious moments I’ve ever read.
The first book in the series is called We Are Legion (We Are Bob). Dennis E. Taylor is the author.
Ohhh I like the sound of that! Will check it out!
Here’s the Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LWAESYQ
Well I love this comment and agree with it all, but I especially adore thinking of myself as murderous; I am, I really am, in all senses! I’m about to get on a plane but: thanks for writing this, I think it’s illuminating and fun and also could have been an awesome post!!!