One of the great mysteries for all of us, regardless of belief, is where anything came from. Whatever you believe the source of everything is, I can ask you where that came from. It is unanswerable. It’s makes my head spin.
Some say God, some say science and the associated Big Bang. I’ve spent time in both camps. Both theories have holes that one can drive a truck through. I’m going to go ahead say that religion’s deficiencies are well-documented and most debates end up with someone saying “you just have to have faith I guess”. The conversation is nuanced for sure, but I don’t find it all that interesting any more. So I’m taking the liberty of just moving on.
Science’s deficiencies are more interesting. The fundamental forces of the Universe are fine-tuned to a degree that just simply can’t be called a coincidence by any mind that is rational and objective. Let’s start with Gravity. A couple percent weaker or stronger and celestial orbits can’t form. That’s a big problem. Move on to nuclear forces – the strong and weak forces. Same problem; without these precise settings, nuclei can’t form and electrons can’t orbit. So without these settings, atoms don’t exist. That’s an even bigger problem. Then we move on to talk about ionic and covalent bonding. Just strong enough to stick atoms together, but not so strong that they can’t be undone. How can one explain this?
One theory that attempts to solve these problems is that there are an infinite number of universes; the “Multi-verse”. Each Universe in the Multiverse has different settings and only a tiny, tiny percentage can support life. We’re the lucky ones. It’s hard to believe that any scientist would really want to die on this hill.
Another theory is that once we learn more, we’ll understand how the settings to these forces are really linked and it doesn’t have to take such a coincidence to have the individual settings be so convenient. Maybe.
One other is that if you shuffle a deck of cards (and this is true), you will literally have a deck of cards that has never existed in the history of the world before. That particular order is so rare that it couldn’t possibly happen, and yet there it is. In other words, if the Universe wasn’t this way, we wouldn’t be around to discuss, and it just is what it is. That’s another big stretch for me.
Another interesting phenomenon that will tie into a later point is Quantum Mechanics. It is the science of the very small, and it is incompatible with the Standard Model of physics that accurately describes everything larger than an atom. Quantum mechanics is bizarre to the point of absurdity, and the area I want to mention is the Observer Effect, which says that sub-atomic particles are everywhere in a “cloud” at once, until they are observed. Then they can be found in a particular position; but not before. I submit that if you are not baffled by Quantum Mechanics in general, you have no understanding of it whatsoever. But I’ll move on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)
So where does that leave us?
There exists another interesting possibility and it is this. Are we part of an elaborate computer simulation? On its face, that seems absurd. But let’s unpack it.
We run all kinds of computer simulations today, because in many cases it is much cheaper to do so than run the real-life experiments. Drug interactions are a good example. Before testing drugs on animals or people, it is much more cost effective to run a computer simulation 10,000 times to see what you might want to expect. Another example is video games, which are becoming very complex in their own right. I would submit that the only reason we don’t have entities (i.e. artificial intelligence) that don’t strongly resemble elements of “life” already, is simply technological. In other words, as soon as we can, we will. When and if those entities become sentient to some degree, will they know they are a simulation? Good question.
My last point is one about the Observer Effect that I mentioned before. As you remember, the motion and position of elemental particles does not exist until we are actually observing them. If you don’t think that is bizarre you don’t understand what I am saying. But that’s the way it is. Prior to that, they exist only in a cloud of probabilities. That should also make no sense to you. But these fundamental particles are the building blocks of everything and their numbers defy imagination relative to how many of them there are in our universe. They make up atoms, light, everything.
So … if you were designing a simulation, and computing power was an issue, would you design the smallest particles in a way that you don’t have to constantly calculate their specific motion and position unless the universe evolved a being sophisticated enough to (after billions of years) invent a mechanism to finally observe those particles? In other words, don’t determine the specific information unless asked?
I have to think I would, and that’s pretty interesting.
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