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| I think that question should read: "Does Quantum Physics Create the multiverse?" |
I thought I'd more or less finished looking into Richard Carrier's thinking but I must admit I'm very tempted by this post of his...
Why Nothing Remains a Problem: The Andrew Loke Fiasco • Richard Carrier Blogs
...where he writes this:
What I showed is that once you actually allow for there to be nothing—nothing whatsoever—then a quasi-infinite multiverse is the inevitable, in fact unstoppable outcome. Because removing all barriers to what there can be or what can happen entails allowing all potential outcomes an equal chance at being realized (given only a single constraint: that logically contradictory states have a zero probability of coming to pass). There is nothing there to prevent that, nothing around to keep “nothing” a stable absence of everything. “Nothing” is, by its own defining properties, unstable.
This belief that somehow Probability/randomness furnishes us with an invisible creative dynamic I've come across before. I need to look into this particular instance of it in more detail, but in the meantime, here is a footnote I wrote on the question in part IV of my Carry-on Carriering series:
That's not how probability works. Probability isn't a dynamic capable of generating something from nothing: it is about the level of observer information. Moreover, the physics of probability is about describing random patterns and not about the "instability of nothing". Probability and randomness are in no way an argument for the impossibility of "nothing"; trying to use them to generate aseity is well beyond their scope of usage.
I've seen similar misinterpretations of the Uncertainty Relationship: As Richard is doing here, the principles of probability and randomness are glorified by raising them to the level of a kind of transcendent god-like dynamic or propensity capable of at least creating randomness from nothing. They don't see randomness as being only the mathematical description of a class pattern we meet in the universe rather than being a transcendent creative dynamic.
Another point: The principle of equal a priori probabilities concerns human information levels. That in itself isn't a sufficient condition that automatically translate into reified patterns of randomness.
Richard isn't going to get this one past me! My view is that the descriptive mathematical devices we use to delineate the cosmos are meaningless without a material instantiation, but some thinkers have raised these mathematical principles to the level of a transcendent invisible but mindless "god" creator. ("mindless" and yet ironically randomness is the most complex mathematical object of all!) This kind of notion formation may be what's happening in Richard Carrier's head. I think I need to look into it a bit further if I get time.
However, there are plenty of authorities and principalities out there that are drawing my attention just at the moment and so that may be as far as I get on that one - we'll see.
And while I'm here on the subject of authorities and principalities, I'll mention this article on the North American ID (NAID) website "Evolution News"
The Fine-Tuning Argument by Elimination | Evolution News
In my view the NAID community put too much emphasis on the fine-tuning argument in exactly the opposite kind of way Richard Carrier was doing. Moreover, as can be seen from the above NAID article they perpetuate the "Physical Necessity" vs "Chance" dichotomy - something I suspect that is also part of the intuitions of Richard Carrier. "Physical Necessity" and "Chance" are in fact the opposite ends of a sliding spectrum of platonic possibility; in the absolute sense of the word neither are strictly "necessary"; both are in fact possible contingencies. But more about all that another time.
