[ExI] What should survive and why?

[Samantha Atkins]

On May 6, 2007, at 5:10 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

>
>
> On 06/05/07, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
>
> > Any of the Tegmark multiverse levels would give rise to this
> > situation. Would it upset you, for example, if it turns out to be  
> the
> > case that the universe is infinite, which would mean that every
> > possible thing actually happens, infinitely often? Do you think that
> > it is more likely that the universe is unique and finite?
> >
> This is one of the reasons I have very little use for some of this
> thought and/or some of its interpretations.   Again it seems to me  
> that
> you are crossing up orders of infinity.     I think you are  
> engaging in
> a meaningless set of speculations.     That there is a multiverse does
> not automatically presume that every possible variation of every being
> and event occurs somewhere/sometime within the multiverse.  You can  
> have
> a mulitverse of infinite diversity without all possible variations of
> any particular being or event occurring somewhere within it.
>
> If the universe is infinite and uniform, then I think that  
> everything that can happen, does happen. By infinite I mean that  
> there exists a countable infinity of any given finite volume of  
> space. By uniform I mean that the physical laws remain uniform  
> everywhere and that physical parameters such as density and  
> temperature limit towards some universal mean in any sufficiently  
> large volume, an assumption that most astronomers make about  
> subsets of our own Hubble volume. Now, with the conditions  
> described there is a non-zero probability, call it p, that any  
> given physically possible event E will be found to occur in a given  
> volume of space, and this probability is uniform over the infinite  
> volumes of space available. So the probability that E does not  
> occur within n volumes of space is (1-p)^n. You can see that as n->  
> infinity, (1-p)^n approaches zero, which means that for  
> sufficiently large finite n, Pr(E) can be made arbitrarily close to  
> 1. E could be something like "an arbitrarily close functional  
> analogue of my brain at the present moment".

Not so fast.  If the number, n(E), of possible things that can occur  
is much larger (much less a different order of infinity) than the  
number of places/states/chances it could occur in then your argument  
fails.

- samantha

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