I wasn’t intending to suggest that the timelessness of the universe is an answer to the First Cause puzzle (which itself is certainly a Wrong Question, somehow) because you just point to the whole timeless mathematical object and say, “Why does this ‘exist’?”
It’s just that you can’t answer by tracing to one minute before the Big Bang and some mighty act of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You’ll have to look somewhere else for a resolution to your confusion.
@Stirling: If you took one world and extrapolated backward, you’d get many pasts. If you take the many worlds and extrapolate backward, all but one of the resulting pasts will cancel out! Quantum mechanics is time-symmetric.
@Shane Legg: Good to see that the post had its intended effect.
“If you took one world and extrapolated backward, you’d get many pasts. If you take the many worlds and extrapolate backward, all but one of the resulting pasts will cancel out! Quantum mechanics is time-symmetric.”
My immediate thought when reading the above: when extrapolating forward do we get cancelation as well? Born probabilities?
I wasn’t intending to suggest that the timelessness of the universe is an answer to the First Cause puzzle (which itself is certainly a Wrong Question, somehow) because you just point to the whole timeless mathematical object and say, “Why does this ‘exist’?”
“What caused the universe?” and “Why does this universe exist, rather than any other possible universe?” are two completely different questions. I think the first one is answered satisfactorily by the timelessness of the universe as a whole. The second might be answered by something like Tegmark’s level IV multiverse.
I wasn’t intending to suggest that the timelessness of the universe is an answer to the First Cause puzzle (which itself is certainly a Wrong Question, somehow) because you just point to the whole timeless mathematical object and say, “Why does this ‘exist’?”
It’s just that you can’t answer by tracing to one minute before the Big Bang and some mighty act of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. You’ll have to look somewhere else for a resolution to your confusion.
@Stirling: If you took one world and extrapolated backward, you’d get many pasts. If you take the many worlds and extrapolate backward, all but one of the resulting pasts will cancel out! Quantum mechanics is time-symmetric.
@Shane Legg: Good to see that the post had its intended effect.
“If you took one world and extrapolated backward, you’d get many pasts. If you take the many worlds and extrapolate backward, all but one of the resulting pasts will cancel out! Quantum mechanics is time-symmetric.”
My immediate thought when reading the above: when extrapolating forward do we get cancelation as well? Born probabilities?
We do get some, e.g. inside a quantum computer, impossible worldstates cancel. But nowhere near as much.
“What caused the universe?” and “Why does this universe exist, rather than any other possible universe?” are two completely different questions. I think the first one is answered satisfactorily by the timelessness of the universe as a whole. The second might be answered by something like Tegmark’s level IV multiverse.