From: Perry E. Metzger (perry@piermont.com)
Date: Sun Apr 27 2003 - 20:37:32 MDT
"Ben Goertzel" <ben@goertzel.org> writes:
> > Your reasoning there is flawed. The impact on our universe is entirely
> > caused by items within our universe interacting -- such as scientists
> > and the WMAP satellite interacting with information about the thermal
> > fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation. The fact that this
> > can confirm or falsify a flat geometry for our universe does not mean
> > we're getting information out of other universes.
>
> I agree that empirical observations can confirm or falsify a flat geometry
> for our universe, but I'm not sure why the flatness (or otherwise) of our
> universe necessarily implies the existence of a bunch of other universes.
Have you read Tegmark's paper? Given a flat universe, we have an
infinite universe, and other Hubble volumes may be thought of as
parallel worlds -- indeed, if you think of the Hubble volumes as being
much like volumes in Borges's "Library of Babel" you're sure to find
every possible arrangement of matter, an infinite number of times. You
can choose to think of these distant Hubble volumes as parallel
universes (or not, as your taste goes).
In any case, however, we're inferring, based on information that is
purely local, that 10^10^118 meters away is a Hubble volume just like
ours in which someone else just like you is having this same precise
email argument, even though we have no way to directly observe
that. This is precisely the "infer that something exists even without
being able to observe it at all" phenomenon we were talking about
earlier.
Perry
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