The Anthropic Principle - How Your Existence Could Lead to a Multiverse 

I think it's the latter one. I wonder if this Wiki could make sense after all. :) Link: verse-and-dimensions.fandom.com/wiki/Verse_and_Dimensions_Wikia A random page of it: verse-and-dimensions.fandom.com/wiki/Imaginarium

Also, you're really amazing and beautiful. Never feel bad if you can't upload because of a particular reason. You're still better and smarter than at least 95% of RU-vid. :) Greetings from Limburg, the Netherlands.

First, welcome back. I was just wondering if something happened with you, yesterday. Now on to your question. If we live in a simulation, then I lean heavily towards chaos. Reason: A simulation requires a lot of people to maintain and each will have their own stipulations to add in. Everything designed by committee, quickly proves chaos theory to be correct. If we are an organic universe, then one thing would naturally lead to another, until we have this conversation. It might not be easy to see it, but much like a piece of music written for a symphony orchestra, once it all comes together, it cannot help but be beautiful.

There has to be a theory of everything as nothing is random (except quantum mechanics) there have to be patterns in things described by mathematical equations they are just too complex to be figured out.

You are not including the consciousness in this?

I'm 20 yrs old... I feel so worthless.... I stopped studying..... I don't want to get up my bed... But when i do.. I punch trees hopping on the river rocks.... Walking alone in the mountain..... Some say I'm crazy..... But I just want to be human... I have this serious existential crisis..... And i don't have feelings anymore... Sorry for bad English

@@ginomatusasiamen8336 watch this video and maybe you'll feel okay ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-yWkq7btSQvs.html

@@anujarora0 hahaha lunch time bong is illegal... Magic paper is not easy to earn.. But i love this video thanks😁😁

haha yeah I am late to the party but better late than never right?!

@@upandatom My first existential crisis was when I learned about Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem and its implications in a course in philosophy of science I took in the final year of my undergraduate degree. That led me to take a year off while I contemplated the merits of continuing with graduate studies (my undergraduate field was cognitive science)... and then reality had its way with me. First, I got into a nice, practical field and got certified as a computer and network technician, then I lost my younger brother suddenly in 2002 (cue second existential crisis), and in the last decade or so I've gone back into the sciences via RU-vid and channels like yours, PhysicsGirl, SpaceTime, and 3Blue1Brown. Philosophy, mathematics, number theory, and theoretical physics are still my deepest interests, and your new channel definitely has me interested.

I concur. I recently watched an interview of a very successful game designer explaining how they came up with an innovative method of solving game creation problems... he called this "the layering method"... when he described the method it was a philosophical analysis. People struggle to solve their life problems, those who manage to do that accidentally reinvent ideas which are present in philosophy for a quite long time now. People dismiss philosophy thinking it is this wishy washy mumbo jumbo irrelevant to reality, which is actually the opposite of what it is :\

True, but whose to say we even fully experience the universe. There could be other senses that don't register to humans. For instance, animals run away before a natural disaster happens. How do they know? A fly can see more colors than our brains can process. Is there even a way to truly observe the universe with 100% accuracy when we are limited to 5 core senses?

because "nothing (0) + something (1) = something (1)". this is the arithmetical equivalent of the anthropic principle.

@@_kopcsi_ Nothing is mathematically unsustainable. (infinity) NX = 1 / 10 One divided by 10 to the power infinity. Nothing: If I have 5 apples and I sell them, i don't have nothing of apples, but I have apples equivalent of money. As long as I have any materials, it could be equivalent of 5 apples or some apples. So I still don't have nothing of apples. If I say I have above number NX of apples then that number is so small, I can say I have nothing equivalent of apples. As number NX involves infinity and division, it is not sustainable. So we have something instead of nothing.

Jaydeep Vipradas I don’t really see what you wanted to prove here. OK, i see that in this world we can’t ultimately destroy something to nothingness. that’s quite trivial due to the conservation laws (matter, energy, momentum etc.). however these fundamental laws are valid only in closed systems (and in case of infinitely large universe this definition breaks down). so it’s OK that when there has already been something, you can’t make nothing from that. but the origonal comment’s quote is related to something more fundamental. why is there anything in the first place at all? well, the answer is that if we consider the state of being (existence) and not being (lack), then the two together in additive (parallel) way provide being/existence. however in multiplicative (serial) way they provide not being/lack. this is also coded in our arithmetic: 0+1=1 and 0x1=0. which is not magical at all, since our arithmetic just reflects the logic of our world, so if our arithmetic is consistent, then it must be consistent with everything else which is also consistent (e.g. our world).

@@_kopcsi_ I'm suggesting that total nothing may not be sustainable by itself and something may arise spontaneously in total nothing. The reason for total nothing may not be sustainable is could be because of its definition, which involves infinity. That's why there is something instead of nothing.

Jaydeep Vipradas what do you mean by “sustainability”?

Silkwesir well, the survivorship bias is just the wrong interpretation of the anthropic principle. they have nothing to do with specific or generic versions. the anthropic principle is just the concept of necessity of the ability of observation. this is some sort of law of consistency. but this is just due to some postselection logic. it is true when we observe the past retrospectively, but not true when we observe the future prospectively. ergo: the survivorship bias is just the wrong interpretation and wrong application of the anthropic principle. this principle applies towards the past, but not the future. this wrong extension (temporal inversion) leads to the survivorship bias, which is actually a logical fallacy.

@@_kopcsi_ Exactly, that is what I meant. Thanks for your elaboration. The generic-specific thing that I was on about was that the Anthropic Principle applies to a certain subject matter, namely the origin of our species, planet, galaxy, universe, etc., while the Survivorship Bias is a fallacy that can occur in all kinds of other contexts as well. Basically, the Anthropic Fallacy is the awareness-of and hence not-falling-prey-to the Survivorship Bias with regards to those questions.

@,@@_kopcsi_ more of an inherent temporal bias, meaning that you would have to be inhuman (ie. dead) to be justly accused of false logic.

​@@imdawolfman2698 what? why? believing that we will always exist just because so far we have been existing is a false conclusion and a logical fallacy. that's about it when we deal with the survivorship bias. in order to see and understand that it's false we don't have to go extinct. that's the stupid way to prove something. in our world we can prove and understand things without directly experience things. we can recognise our logical fallacies and cognitive biases so we can free our mind from these harmful thought schemes. it's pretty easy to show that the consistency is necessary (incontingency) when we deal with the past, and that the consistency is possible (contingency) when we deal with the future.

One way to grapple with the ideal of the anthropic principle is to consider the improbability of your own birth. If you were observing early hominids 3 million years ago and trying to predict your specific birth imagine the staggering odds that in each generation of hominids leading to and through the 100,000+ years of modern homo sapiens that each exact individual would have to meet and mate with the right other exact individual so that you would be born at the end of that chain. In fact not just each individual, but the exact right egg and sperm for every generation. The odds against you happening when thinking of it this way are fantastically high. Yet from a weak anthropic point of view - someone had to be at the end of that chain of human beings and that someone happens to be you - so of course when looking backwards that chain of events its not improbable at all, it is just what had to happen so that you could be in the position of wondering how you got there. If any one generation of the exact right individuals did not meet or mate, then some other human would be pondering the improbability of their birth, just not you.

More like one in a million...

well there is a multiverse in marvel so.. (well it's actually an omniverse)

@@wrox9684 I doing a joke

@@wrox9684 Well ok then

Multiverse: a philosophical conclusion posited by people who claim to have banished any need for philosophy.

I agree. Assertions like 'if electrons were a little bit bigger, matter couldn't be formed", apart from being intrinsically untestable, are, or appear to be, true only with reference to the laws of physicas as they are known to apply in our universe*. A different universe might have entirely different laws of physics which would allow the formation of identical-looking matter even with bigger electrons! (*Or at least in our part of the universe - we cannot even be certain whether the same laws apply in more remote parts of the cosmos to which we have no sensory access!)

No sense

have you ever seen another universe?

Singularity-point positioning in log-antilog relative-timing-> coherence-cohesion condensation (Physics), observation of WYSIWYG ONE-INFINITY is the Observable Multiverse.

"Theoretical" sciences. If I had a million dollars I could cure mushbrain, in another universe.

oh mai god

Was thinking the same. I guess it’s true that philosophy is essentially an extension to theoretical physics.

@@springbok4015 I'm definitely not trying to start an argument here, but given history and the breadth of topics philosophy covers, it's more apt to say that science, is a subset of philosophy.

@@RegisBodnar I think you're right.

@@RegisBodnar Yes. Science is merely the act of measuring things. How we apply the answers we get from science and what meaning we ascribe to the information science gives us is a metaphysical question. So many scientists (and their followers) foolishly think their conclusions are purely objective and that they have banished the need for metaphysics, all while making the grandest metaphysical leaps. Check out Edward Feser's "Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science".

What is Nebula?

Thank you!

So what does it feel like to be seven then? It's a joke.

Thank you Bryce!

Marcus Aurelius was Wisdom incarnate. Love his Meditations. Imagine you were now dead, or had not lived before this moment. Now view the rest of your life as a bonus, and live it as nature directs. - Marcus Aurelius The first step: Don’t be anxious. Nature controls it all. - Marcus Aurelius Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions, not outside. - Marcus Aurelius These are the sort of lines he wrote, ahead of his time indeed.

thank you this has been enlightening :)

Existence of our own consciousness is undeniable reality. Other things are flexible!

Magenta isn't any more of a mental construct than yellow or orange. Its true that magenta doesn't have a spot on the EM spectrum like yellow or orange do, but in terms of our biology we actually perceive yellow in exactly the same way we perceive magenta -- relative activation intensities of two different cones. That "real" yellow gets split apart by our eyes into red and green and our brains convert it back to yellow for us. So magenta is an odd case where the consensus is actually more "real" than the reality. Everybody's cones work in pretty much the same way (give or take small genetic differences and excluding things like color blindness,) and everybody's brains similarly work in pretty much the same way (again, neglecting genetic outliers, injury, etc.) If you really want some color-based philosophical quandries though, look to linguistics. Vox has a good starter video here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-gMqZR3pqMjg.html. What it basically amounts to is that the language you speak in many ways defines how you perceive color. For a nice example in English, just try to think of pink as "light red" in the same way you look at the sky and the ocean and see blue in both cases. We can easily distinguish "sky blue" from "dark blue," but Its really really hard to get that idea of "pink" out of your head and think in terms of red, even when you're fully aware that they're fundamentally just different shades of the same color. Linguistics actually has quite fascinating connections to philosophy. The language(s) we learn informs a _lot_ about how we see the world. One example I certainly never would have thought of prior to seeing it laid out is our so-called "inner monologue." Its pretty easy to realize that you "think" in English, and its not that difficult to spoke another language would "think" in that language. But what about people who were born deaf? Who have only ever been able to learn sign language? Well they still have an inner monologue.. their brains are still fundamentally the same as everyone else'. But its not spoken, it's visual. They "think" in terms of signing to themselves. Its the only language they can possibly know, so their brain just adapts to make it work for them. Other weird examples include languages that don't have left and right -- they always speak in terms of absolute direction. That is, something isn't "to your left," its "to the west of you." And it will remain to the west of you even if you turn around, because its relative to the ground not to your person. And have you ever thought about how we talk about distance? Apparently this is mostly an American (and Canadian) phenomena: If someone asks us how far away the next down is, we might tell them its "2 hours away." Hours? It seems super normal when you're used to it, but for people coming from places where they don't do so, having someone tell you a distance in terms of a time measurement is just.. weird. Especially when they then ask how far away the gas station is and you tell them "about 5 miles." But if you're meeting them at the gas station, you might be 10 minutes away. Linguistic quirks that seem super normal until someone stops and asks "why do you do that?" And then there's no logical reason -- our language (or localized version of our language) happened to develop like that, and now we all just think that way. And there's nothing _wrong_ with that, but its enlightening when we realize there are other ways of thinking about the same things that accomplish the same task in totally different ways.

Is this like an absolute inertial frame of reference? That would be fascinating.....

@altrag this is a fascinating perspective. I watched the Vox video you mentioned. Thank you. The notion of how human bodies are constructed shapes how and what we think has long been of casual interest to me. Especially the idea that there may be concepts that we are not physically capable of imagining. By its very nature only the framework, at most, could be identified, otherwise it would be imaginable. One bit about the "inner monologue" that I find intriguing is when it slips out of spoken language and into a mode that is not language, rather non-auditory and non-visual perceptions, like the feel of moving. I wonder if there is an analogue to Berlin & Kay's color perception research that addresses non-language thought expressions versus what the person's language provides.

➕ know thy self. If you discover that all you know is a thought. Then you might wonder who you are. It turns out, who you think you are is also a thought. So who are you without a thought? This is the process of diss identification. To un-know yourself. In this process you discover that you know nothing. Meaning that all your past and future and alternative possibility are just dreams. Self validating dreams. That thinking is an activity. So who are you when you stop thinking? Is there still someone saying "me"? Isn't that an observable activity? Who are you when you are still? You are still. That is who you are. And you fell free and happy for no reason. That is who you are. You are amazed. Out of the maze of thoughts. Un bound. Un limited. Un defined. In finit. Unfathomable. Indescribable. Being. Aware. Present.

@@aurelienyonrac nice. Worst case cenario is that I am a bunch of delusional particules haha. Philosophy is great!

Sorry for the misinterpretation.

haha WHOOPS!

Thank you so much! And yes it definitely was a good thing, I feel my life has much more direction than before and I know who I am (kind of lol)

@@upandatom Awesome, that's great to hear!

I like it. A lot. Except for the "creator" part. It is clear that we are only capable of observing the nature of reality down to a certain level- even Leonard Susskind essentially says that after a point; all we can "see" is a fuzzy blur- nothing is defined, they give it names like "uncertainty principle"... but it appears that we have definitely hit a wall, so to speak, both on the macro and the micro scales. You may be bang-on; and we are currently at the limits of our capability to observe... now we need to discover new technology to enable us to define that next level.

@@arealassassin Not to get all political but let me proceed to do that and say that I think Marx (and critical theory literature) rightly attributes the bounds of such technological/material "progress" as a necessary consequence of the mode of economic production. Really, it's kind of a political anthropic principle in that material survival must be foundational and other social organizations are downstream from that necessity. In other words, we are bounded in our ideologies and consequently our reasoning and imagination by the constraints/rules of material organization (economics). Gramsci kind of expands this through his conception of cultural hegemony which serves to entrench a certain unquestioned logical episteme and I think Mark Fisher in his book Capitalist Realism highlights what I'm ultimately trying to suggest might be the case, which is that over time the entrenchment of layers of institutional and legal frameworks perpetuate their own recreation which eventually traps our collective imagination and really knowledge itself. Or something.

I certainly wouldn't rule that out

My response would normally be, well, alternative maths wouldn't be useful. But this conversation goes deeper, huh? You're asking, why aren't they useful?

@@upandatom www.maths.ed.ac.uk/~v1ranick/papers/wigner.pdf

A lot of this boils down to a philosophical theory called "principle of sufficient reason". It basically says "there must be a reason for everything". It is really one of the foundations of the scientific method so it makes sense that abandoning it (or even modifying it) feels wrong. plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/

Aww thank you Jake! It's cool you came across the idea by yourself, I had never even considered it before! You must be a natural philosopher ;)

​@@upandatom One way to grapple with the ideal of the anthropic principle is to consider the improbability of your own birth. If you were observing early hominids 3 million years ago and trying to predict your birth imagine the staggering odds that in each generation of hominids leading to and through the 100,000+ years of modern homo sapiens that each exact individual would have to meet and mate with the right other exact individual so that you would be at the end of that chain. In fact not just each individual, but the exact right egg and sperm for every generation. The odds against you happening when thinking of it this way are fantastically high. Yet from a weak anthropic point of view - someone had to be at the end of that chain of human beings and that someone happens to be you - so of course when looking backwards that chain of events its not improbable at all, it is just what had to happen so that you could be in the position of wondering how you got there. If any one generation of the exact right individuals did not meet or mate, then some other human would be having the exact same thoughts, just not you.

Thank you! And yeah I spent like 3 weeks reading and rereading the script to finally get it so don't worry if it takes a couple viewings

so wise

Thanks Rusty!

Neil Stephenson is a fantastic engineer, but a horrible writer. Which explains almost everything about his books. The flip side of that coin is William Gibson, who is an amazing writer but a horrible engineer, which also explains almost everything about his books too. They both write cyberpunk, but the difference between the two is fascinating. For the record, I'm not bagging on Stephenson. He has a couple of novels that I really enjoy. But the fact that he is a horrible writer is what makes his books difficult to read. They are fascinating because he really is a great engineer and comes up with some outstanding concepts, but his execution is terrible.

Hi Mike! I've heard of essentialism, it doesn't sound boring at all! Please let me know when you make the video because I would love to learn about it (email me because I'll probably miss the comment)

Thank you!

he is

@@upandatom I knew it all along

Probably not, otherwise any intelligent creature (or creator) would not!

Poor God did not even have any choice in his own creation let aside universe! Men created God to get sense of security from uncertainties and vagaries of the world.

​@@alephii well, first of all an omnipotent entity is illogical, and so carries many logical contradictions. secondly, if we assume that someone created consciously the universe (which is illogical, but let us forget it for a second), then the anthropic principle does not mean that there could not be any other variants of universes which are consistent. the anthropic principle guarantees that the universe that we can observe must be consistent with the existence of the observer (i.e. us). this means: "there must be X", and not "there must be only one X", where X is the consistent universe variant. so the anthropic principle in itself does NOT exclude the possibility of other consistent universes, but it does NOT prove it either.

@@_kopcsi_ I know a few omnipotence paradoxes like "Can God create a prison so secure that he cannot escape from it?" If God can create such a prison then he is not omnipotent because he cannot escape from it and if he is able to escape from it then again he is not omnipotent because he couldn't make such a prison

​@@anujarora0 yeah, that is one of the many alternative and equivalent versions of the mother of all paradoxes. it is logically and structurally equivalent to the "Liar's paradox" and the "Russel's paradox" as well. but the inclusion of an omnipotent and timeless entity in our models is not just contradictory, but also illogical in the aspect of "Occam's razor" principle. it is just superfluous and unnecessary to insert God into our models. why? because there can be two options to explain the origin of God. 1, God, who created our universe, was created by a higher-level creator (meta-God), and so there is an infinite chain of creations, therefore we can construct an extended model where God is just as contingent as our universe, so the two can be merged to a meta-universe, which contains both (and where this original God loses its special attribute of being timeless and omnipotent). 2, God was never created, it always existed (or equivalently God created itself), but in this case we can get the SAME result, but with a SIMPLER model, if we assume that our world (universe) always existed or created itself (no God is needed). so in every case we can see, that the role of an omnipotent creator entity is not just contradictory, but also superfluous.

That's right, you can improve your life so much by paying for the random shit in the ad.

which leads us to the next question, what is this YOU or ME ;) where do I start or end. Is ME my body, my brain cells, the interplay of the chemical reactions therein..? When does a hair that falls out cease to be a part of me? If I get a transplant, is it part of me? If all the matter is exchanged constantly between me and my surroundings, my cells dying and being replaced, my body building itself from the things I eat and inhale, then how can I say I am different from you or from my cat or from a star billions of lightyears away? In other words, what constitutes a self. If everything interacts with everything else in the same way that 'I' interact with 'non-I', is a stone an 'I'? Or an atom, or any other entity of matter? I don't know, I'm getting carried away. I should go to sleep.

02er??

It would be more like: You ask yourself the question "Why am I alive in the age of the internet instead of the middle ages?" You could try to come up with some fundamental laws of society that force you to be in the internet age. Or you could recognize that you need to live at some period in time and that the specific time you live in is basically random.

Yipee!!!!

yeah I'm late to the party but at least I arrived!

3) there *might* be meaning and I'm going to spend my life searching for it

E) I MAKE MY OWN MEANING (existentialism).

Thanks! I've read some of Nick Bostrom's stuff but not that specific paper, I'll check it out!

Aww thank you Jerry! you are most welcome :)

Thank you!

Oh man, Kant. I'm having flashbacks to freshman Philosophy. My prof LOVED Kant. I'm more a fan of Hume myself. There's nothing like the problem of induction to make you question whether you actually know anything.

Ok thanks so much for the recommendations Joao! Glad to hear you are enjoying the videos :)

Read Philip Larkin poem : Aubade.

Or we are just at a random point in vast instability in which what appears to be a moment in which apparent stability is possible. The Ancient Greek idea that there is stability in nature and things naturally return to some sort of equilibrium (the 'balance of nature') is demonstrably false, just as the universe evolved from a situation in which life and even complexity was not possible, and will evolve further into a state in which it is possible no more.

Thank you Stephen! They are somewhat painful but I'm glad I went through it, I feel like I can see a *tiny* bit clearer than before. And giving up just seems too sad, like if there is an answer why not at least try and look for it?

@@upandatom Thanks for your rapid response! To me, at least, one main question is to ask ourselves where do we as humans put "faith" while we progress toward who knows what new relationship with our world. At least for now it seems like an "objective" truth about the way things really are is well beyond us, so how can we not just survive but thrive despite painful phases in our evolution.

Thank you so much Saumitra!

This is a good question, let me find out for you