Sunday, May 24, 2009
WE'RE HERE BECAUSE WE'RE HERE BECAUSE WE'RE HERE
I had not expected Spiked, a very worthy bunch of people who started as Marxist freethinkers & grew up to be traditional liberals to take this & thus would get an excuse to put it here myself but they have. On the other hand it is so pretentious & I am so pleased with it, even though I have said similar before, that I am going to use it anyway. The original is here & is a response to an article about James Lovelock's Gaia theory which correctly says his theory's use shows the silly mysticism of the eco movement but assumes Lovelock himself intended it as mystical rather than having lucked into coming up with a concept that fitted the times:
Lovelock was right to point out the statistical improbability of the Earth developing in a way that would keep it continuously habitable. He is using essentially the same argument that Intelligent Designers use, namely, that if the basic parameters of the universe (gravity, strong and weak atomic forces, magnetism) had been even marginally different, the degree of complexity needed for life to form would not have existed. In both cases the existence of a designer explains existence in a way which the traditional atheistic random universe simply cannot.
However, since Lovelock developed this we have seen the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse theory in which every single unpredictable possibility of every quantum movement of each atom in the universe creates a new universe every instant. Even though the overwhelming majority then reunite with the next quantum movement, it does produce a number of possible universes for which the word infinite is inadequate. However it does mean that it is inevitable that there will be a universe where we evolved and obviously that it is going to have the unusual conditions allowing us to evolve. This is what we see.
Indeed for the more mystically inclined one can combine this multiverse with its meta-infinity of uninhabited universes with Schroedinger (and his cat’s) view that a quantum event only achieves actuality when it is observed by assuming that our universe became real (whatever that means) when we evolved to be aware of it and that the uninhabited ones are merely quantum fluctuations.
Either option is possible; it’s the traditional random mechanistic universe that is unbelievable.
Title is a WW1 soldier's song
Lovelock was right to point out the statistical improbability of the Earth developing in a way that would keep it continuously habitable. He is using essentially the same argument that Intelligent Designers use, namely, that if the basic parameters of the universe (gravity, strong and weak atomic forces, magnetism) had been even marginally different, the degree of complexity needed for life to form would not have existed. In both cases the existence of a designer explains existence in a way which the traditional atheistic random universe simply cannot.
However, since Lovelock developed this we have seen the Everett-Wheeler Multiverse theory in which every single unpredictable possibility of every quantum movement of each atom in the universe creates a new universe every instant. Even though the overwhelming majority then reunite with the next quantum movement, it does produce a number of possible universes for which the word infinite is inadequate. However it does mean that it is inevitable that there will be a universe where we evolved and obviously that it is going to have the unusual conditions allowing us to evolve. This is what we see.
Indeed for the more mystically inclined one can combine this multiverse with its meta-infinity of uninhabited universes with Schroedinger (and his cat’s) view that a quantum event only achieves actuality when it is observed by assuming that our universe became real (whatever that means) when we evolved to be aware of it and that the uninhabited ones are merely quantum fluctuations.
Either option is possible; it’s the traditional random mechanistic universe that is unbelievable.
Title is a WW1 soldier's song
