Unhelpful

While in IRC, our friend Grogan linked a site I’d read a little of in the past, but a video I hadn’t seen or at least hadn’t remembered. God is imaginary is one of a few sites devoted to atheism and rational thought that rejects metaphysics, but also concentrates on talking to Christians rather than at or about them. It spends most of its energy making intelligent, rational arguments about the logical inconsistencies of faith generally, and Christianity specifically.

The technique the site uses is to take some basic precepts and to see where they lead if rationally and logically applied in the form of thought experiments. This reminded me of a thought experiment I’ve thought about for a long time. It’s original to me in the sense that I didn’t read it anywhere, but I have absolute certainty that other people have independently come up with it, and have probably written it down better than I have.

The subject is not religion, but rather, a different area of metaphysics.

I have a friend, whom I will refer to as Steve, who is very “open-minded” to concepts such as ghost hauntings, alien visitations, government coverups of alien crashes, and other issues which can fairly be described as pseudoscience. We’ve discussed government conspiracies since he’s aware that, while in the military, I served almost four years in an interesting assignment at the NSA, and had a high security clearance on the merits of the fact that when you’re troubleshooting network connectivity and message delivery systems, you have to be cleared at the highest level those systems are used for. I don’t claim to have any interesting secrets, because the fact is that most documents which are classified are overclassified, and usually classified not because of the information within them so much as the fact that the means of the information gathering is more sensitive than the result. When interesting secrets do come up in a job like that, most of them—particularly the best ones—tend to become public knowledge, and the value of a government keeping a document secret often has more to do with when something is known rather than whether it is ever known. Be that as it may, Steve is sure that I know something regarding the popular conspiracy theory regarding aliens crashing a spaceship in Roswell, New Mexico, and that the biological and technological evidence that is purported to be held in Area 51.

He’s wrong about the facts and about what I would have been in a position to know, but I do know something about conspiracies generally. Successful conspiracies are not about the big lie of massive proportions, they’re about personal gain. Here is an example of a conspiracy that isn’t plausible: the government was responsible for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the Bush White House masterminded this with the goal of passing legislation to give the government extraordinary powers over peoples’ daily lives. Here is an example of a conspiracy theory that is plausible: industry leaders in a market sector met in a private meeting in Hawaii to artificially inflate the price of a commodity, succeeded, and managed to raise prices by 70% within 9 months. Not only is it plausible, it’s documented fact. It’s not a documented fact because it’s on Wikipedia, it’s on Wikipedia because it’s a documented fact. It’s not as sexy as a transportation failure billions of light years from home, stranding exotic visitors on a remote backwater of the galaxy, but it’s still a pretty interesting story with a very human element.

Those are the sorts of conspiracies that are real. They almost always involve profit, not being held accountable for one’s actions, and ego. They never involve space aliens, bigfoot, or the fulfillment of the Revelation of St. John.

If Nixon and seven other men couldn’t keep a third rate robbery under wraps, one needs to think seriously about the government’s ability to keep a shocking secret like evidence of alien visitation a secret when that sort of conspiracy would require hundreds, or possibly thousands of responsible, rational people diligently keeping their mouths shut and not slipping up all the way to their very death beds, being willing participants in the most sensational conspiracy in human history, and nobody but the tinfoil hat gallery being any the wiser for it. NASA faking the moon landing or the White House masterminding the attacks of September 11, 2001 (or at best quickly reacting to them to hide the truth, if it wasn’t their doing) requires, to my mind, an even greater army of professional secret-keepers and government bureaucrats doing their very best to prevent the public from knowing information vital to the nation’s interests. Put briefly, all of these ideas are absurd.

Steve had a typically interesting thought experiment involving the “infinite universes” theory. I admit, I forget the details, because I was shocked that someone had stumbled so closely to a thought experiment of my own that I couldn’t wait to flesh it out. The concept of the “infinite universes” theory goes something like this:

The math behind string theory and quantum theory leave open the possibility of infinite universes. Infinite universes are created in every non-deterministic action (and to a quantum physicist, it’s probably accurate to say every action is non-deterministic, since it is posited that a quark’s location or speed can be known, but to know one makes it impossible to know the other). Every time a quark dodges left instead of right, every time a piece of dust wiggles north instead of south, every time a photon is reflected instead of absorbed, it is because every possible action has occurred, and we only live in a specific universe which that event which could have happened in any number of ways happened in only one specific way.

In the mundane realm of things, there’s a universe where you didn’t just deliberately blink. There’s a universe where your faucet sprung a leak tomorrow instead of today. There’s a universe where you went to bed five minutes earlier last night.

More interestingly, there are non-mundane consequences of random events. There’s a universe in which you have a much better job. There’s a universe where you died ten years ago. There’s a universe where Marilyn Monroe lived. There’s a universe where Adolf Hitler won the war for Germany and ruled on for decades.

Go a step further. There’s a universe where any statistically reasonable thing has happened. There’s a universe in which you are president of a world government. There’s a universe where medical science is far in advance of our own and that you will live on for 500 more years. There’s a universe where Marilyn Monroe lived to become the best fighter pilot in the world, and proved herself in a decisive war between the forces of Southern California and the army the allied Eastern US, European, and Canadian powers, and killed an enemy soldier with every tiger claw bullet her sonic slingshot ever launched. There’s a universe where Mahatma Gandhi won the war for Germany and continues to rule into his 140th year.

In fact, there’s a universe in which anything physically possible has happened, statistically reasonable or not.

This is a popular metaphysical belief. Some optimist scientists and philosophers adhere to it. There is a specific reference in Hindu holy texts which allow one to come to this belief. It’s been explored in science fiction. It’s a charming belief that, in short, a lot of people who ought to know better like to adhere to. I used to. My excuse is that I was about 15.

Here’s my thought experiment.

Take the idea to its mathematically obvious conclusion. If you have a number line that goes on into infinity, your whole numbers represent an infinite set. 1 2 3 4 5… If you take your even numbers, it’s an infinite set. 2 4 6 8 10… If you take your multiples of 2, still infinite. 2 4 8 16 32… Multiples of 95,381.28, infinite. 95,381.28 190762.56 286143.84 381525.12 476906.4… No matter how you describe a natural progression of numbers that has no end point, not only are all of those sets infinite, but it’s not even possible to suggest that one set is more infinite than another.

So in an infinite multiverse, not only is every universe that is at the very least consistent with the physical laws of our universe possible, but each and every one of them exists in an infinite number of instances, different from each other (if they even must be) in ways that are as inconsequential as a random quark in deep space interacting or not interacting with another random quark. On the other hand, an infinite number of universes exist which are as different our own as the physical laws will allow. Some people would even go so far as to suggest that in a multiverse, the physical laws it must follow are also up for grabs, making the situation defy even these lax confines of my thought experiment.

So yes, in an infinite multiverse, there’s a universe where you’re a happier, ridiculously more successful version of yourself, and you can fantasize about the very real likelihood that these different universes can communicate with one another. If communication between between two things are possible, it is possible to exchange matter, since communication is a form of energy transfer, and thanks to Einstein’s famous equation, we know that given energy, we can create matter, and vice versa. So while we can’t conceive of a technology which allows us to move information and matter between different universes, we don’t have to; out there, there are an infinite number of universes where an infinite number of beings, including an infinite number of humans, including an analogue of you, have figured out the secrets of this technology. On the other hand, if communication, and thus energy transfer aren’t possible between universes isn’t possible, this is the exact same thing as there being only one universe, and the whole thing is just a fantasy without any real-world application, and not even worth considering.

This leads to the fantastic conclusion that there’s an infinite number of universes where Earth exists without any human life, and that we can just move there using universe-transfer technology from our own (or more likely, another) universe, and start over. There’s an infinite number of universes where better, more enlightened versions of ourselves know information—scientific, historical, social—that we need and are willing and determined to spread it out to their less-enlightened multiverse analogues.

Which brings this multiverse theory to the brink. There are an infinite number of universes which have beings that have gone to war with other beings in their own universe, or beings in other multiverses. This has happened an infinite number of times. There are an infinite number of super-weapons which have had the unintended effect of destroying every other universe that exists. This has happened an infinite number of times. There are an infinite number of super-weapons which have had the very intended effect of destroying every other universe that exists, and an infinite number which target only our own universe. An infinite number of times.

Since we’re still here, this clearly hasn’t happened to our universe once, let alone an infinite number of times, that is the exact same thing as there being only one universe. As before, the whole thing is just a fantasy without any real-world application, and not even worth considering. There is no multiverse, and we have to deal with our own issues ourselves. There are an infinite number of things which will not solve them for you, including God, Brahma, and Super You from Alternate Earth. Any time otherwise responsible mathematicians and physicists start down the roads of unprovable—or worse yet, provably wrong—conclusions about the state of the universe, they should probably step away from metaphysics and ground themselves in testable theory.

There’s a difference between metaphysics and theoretical physics, and any theory which gives us this level of wish fulfillment should be suspect.