I am fond of this kind of multiverse reasoning. One place I look for inspiration is Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science. This book can be thought of as analogous to the early naturalists’ systematic exploration of the biological world, with their careful diagrams and comparisons, and attempts to identify patterns, similarities and differences that would later be the foundation for the organization system we know today. Wolfram explores the multiverse by running a wide variety of computer simulations. He is often seen as just using CA models, but this is not true—he tries a number of computational models, but finds the same basic properties in all of them.
Generally speaking, there are four kinds of universes: static, repeating, random, and chaotic. Chaotic universes combine stability with a degree of dynamism. It seems that only chaotic universes would be likely abodes of life.
The question is whether there are likely to be universes which are basically stable, with predictable dynamics, except that when certain patterns and configurations are hit, there is a change of state, and the new pattern is the seed for an explosive transition to a whole new set of patterns. And further, this seed pattern must be quite rare and never be hit naturally. Only intelligence, seeking to explore new regimes of physics, can induce such patterns to exist. And further, the intelligence does not anticipate the explosive development of the seed, they don’t know the physics well enough.
From the Wolfram perspective, it seems that few possible laws of physics would have these properties, at least if we weight the universes by simplicity. A universe should have the simplest possible laws of physics that allow life to form. For these laws to incidentally have the property that some particular arrangement of matter/energy would produce explosive changes, while other similar arrangements would do nothing, would seem to require that the special arrangement be pre-encoded into the laws. That would add complexity which another universe without the special arrangement encoding would not need, hence such universes would tend to be more complex than necessary.
It’s worth noting that coming up with configurations that require intelligence (or at least life) to produce isn’t that hard. The only really obvious one I know of in our universe is bulk refrigeration below 2.7K, but given the simplicity of that one I strongly suspect there are others.
On the likelihood of such a state inducing a large-scale phase change, I’m in agreement. It seems implausible unless the universe is precisely tuned to allow it.
I am fond of this kind of multiverse reasoning. One place I look for inspiration is Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science. This book can be thought of as analogous to the early naturalists’ systematic exploration of the biological world, with their careful diagrams and comparisons, and attempts to identify patterns, similarities and differences that would later be the foundation for the organization system we know today. Wolfram explores the multiverse by running a wide variety of computer simulations. He is often seen as just using CA models, but this is not true—he tries a number of computational models, but finds the same basic properties in all of them.
Generally speaking, there are four kinds of universes: static, repeating, random, and chaotic. Chaotic universes combine stability with a degree of dynamism. It seems that only chaotic universes would be likely abodes of life.
The question is whether there are likely to be universes which are basically stable, with predictable dynamics, except that when certain patterns and configurations are hit, there is a change of state, and the new pattern is the seed for an explosive transition to a whole new set of patterns. And further, this seed pattern must be quite rare and never be hit naturally. Only intelligence, seeking to explore new regimes of physics, can induce such patterns to exist. And further, the intelligence does not anticipate the explosive development of the seed, they don’t know the physics well enough.
From the Wolfram perspective, it seems that few possible laws of physics would have these properties, at least if we weight the universes by simplicity. A universe should have the simplest possible laws of physics that allow life to form. For these laws to incidentally have the property that some particular arrangement of matter/energy would produce explosive changes, while other similar arrangements would do nothing, would seem to require that the special arrangement be pre-encoded into the laws. That would add complexity which another universe without the special arrangement encoding would not need, hence such universes would tend to be more complex than necessary.
It’s worth noting that coming up with configurations that require intelligence (or at least life) to produce isn’t that hard. The only really obvious one I know of in our universe is bulk refrigeration below 2.7K, but given the simplicity of that one I strongly suspect there are others.
On the likelihood of such a state inducing a large-scale phase change, I’m in agreement. It seems implausible unless the universe is precisely tuned to allow it.