Recently I’ve been reading about the vastness of space and it’s probably resulted in my brain resembling an MRI of an acid trip. Here is a question that especially intrigues me:
The probability of me coming into existence by pure chance circumstance is near infentesimal. I see no evidence of a master-designer encouraging my chance circumstance.
Perhaps my probability calculations are wrong and the universe goes on or gets recreated forever. Perhaps in a googolplex number of years the atoms that composed me will happen to be at exactly the right spot and I will exist again.
If number 2 is true, then my conscience being is a necessary condition and not a one-off event. Maybe we die and wake up again since we have no sense of time during the vast interim.
Do you guys think this line of thinking is pure quakery? Or has anyone else thought along the same lines as me? I know we’ll never find the answer but I’m in such a mental quandary that I had to ask others.
Actually, it is statistically probable that there is an exact duplicate of the entire earth some distance away right now. Assuming an infinite universe with a mostly uniform dispersion of matter.
But as for your own personal existence, you don’t have any recollection of prior consciousnesses, do you? So what does it matter if “you” is reborn again after you die if you don’t retain any of those past memories, thoughts or relationships?
Absolutely. It’s a really ludicrous idea: at some point, you die and your body decays into a variety of components. A few billions years in the future, the sun dies and the earth is destroyed. The universe continues to expand forever until heat death occurs. And somewhere along that sequence of events, your body puts itself back together and reanimates itself? How and why? Your consciousness is very much a one-time event.
How: Pure chance
Why: As a necessary condition of pure chance on an infinite time scale
After heat death are we sure that the universe doesn’t experience another big bang? I know that string theory proposes this resulting from another collision of branes.
Suppose you’re a toaster. Eventually, you go the way of all toasters, and malfunction. You’re thrown in the trash, and your component materials rust away.
Much later, someone manufactures a toaster. That toaster is identical to you, it was made from exactly the same plans, and machined to very high tolerances.
Is that toaster the same toaster as the original toaster? Or is it another toaster that’s very similar to the first toaster?
Even if 100 billion years in the future 200 billion trillion light years away there exists a being that’s pretty much exactly identical to you, that being won’t be you. It will be similar to you, but not you.
Anyway, we have no reason to believe that the universe is in fact infinite in extent or duration. So if the universe isn’t infinite, then there will be no duplicate of you out there.
The difference between the toaster example and a living being is the state of consciousness. I would say that I am still the same being if brought back from the dead through modern medicine, even if I lost all memory.
I believe there are multiple theories converging on the idea of a multiverse (cosmic inflation, string theory, and the mystery of the “perfect” dark energy value). This program talks about it:
Physicist Michio Kaku, in his book “Parallel Worlds,” covers several different kinds of parallel worlds. One of them is the idea in the OP, that in an infinite universe, anything that can happen, must happen…and must happen an infinite number of times. So, if the universe is infinite (unproven) and if the distribution of matter and energy is approximately uniform (otherwise, the universe might be infinite…and empty!) then, WAY OUT THERE somewhere is another earth, with another SDMB, with other people having our login names, making the same posts.
Who is ME? Is it my selfawareness (consciousness, ego, soul or whatever named)? Or is ME the configuration of atoms of my body? To be reborn is becoming selfaware again. But will my selfawareness depend on which body my selfawareness inhabits? Maybe there exists only one big common awareness, but which can only recognise itself as isolated selfawarenesses? If so, the rebirth of one’s selfawareness will be unavoidable instead of infinitely improbable.
I recall having a conversation with someone long ago regarding how in an infinite universe, for any object you can think of, there is probably at least one planet out there that grows it. (This concept was also covered in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy books).
Their response was “that’s ridiculous! You mean there’s some planet out there that grows Volkswagons or computers or whatever?!”
Again, that doesn’t explain anything. Infinite time doesn’t mean everything that’s possible happens, and this isn’t even possible. The planet’s going to be gone, the sun will be burned out, and even if your atoms somehow found each other again, what makes you come back to life? Magic defibrillators?
No, we’re not sure. I don’t see any reason to think it would happen, but we’re not sure that it can’t.
I assume anything can happen, but it is unlikely that most things will. Maybe in the most infinite universe everything happens, but in that mode, there’s nothing distinctive about your supposition.
It would be cool if some life after death concepts were true. But there isn’t any scientific evidence or rational explanation for them.
The odds of an event occurring that has occurred is 100%.
What are the chances of you being born at all? A few billion humans in a universe 14 billion light years across, the average separation is immense, let alone the expected separation of your parents. So the chances of you being born are nearly negligible. But you were. In fact, millions of people are born every year. A priori vs a posteriori odds are entirely different things.
Also: There are a lot of people out there, with degrees and everything, who don’t understand Cantor’s hierarchy of infinities. No: In an infinite number of universes of infinite size over infinite time there is no chance at all of there being another duplicate Earth. There can only be room for a countable number of Earths in space-time. It requires an uncountable number of space-time slots for the chance of another Earth to be non-zero.
Ignore anyone who claims “in an infinite universe X must exist” for non-trivial X. They don’t understand Math.
I think you are misunderstanding some points. I also came up with the idea in the OP years ago as well and still can’t find any reason why it couldn’t be true. Infinite time does indeed mean that everything that is possible will happen again and again. The fact that you are here now means that you will be recreated again given some further assumptions. One is that there are infinite parallel universes or that this one goes through an infinite number of expansion contraction cycles rather than just ending up with heat death. If this assumption isn’t true, you are probably correct but no one knows that yet. It is quite possible that there are an infinite number of parallel universes or this one will contract into a singularity and undergo other Big Bang events again and again. The other missing piece is consciousness as mentioned. We don’t know what that is yet but, assuming it can be recreated, it isn’t the same as making a duplicate toaster. It would be ‘you’ in a new existence.
I think it’s the other way around. Life is just a temporary state in between non-existences. And non-existence means no consciousness, no awareness, just plain nothing. All this talk about infinite universes is just wishful thinking. I like Richard Dawkins’ analogy of your present as a small spotlight that moves along a really really long time line. The past before the spotlight is the time before you were born. The future after the spotlight is after you’ve died. There is no you outside of the spotlight. This may make life sound kind of bleak, but IMO it just emphasizes how lucky we are to be alive and why we should try to make the most of our brief time in the spotlight. This is it buddy. Forget about what may or may not be after the spotlight.
If not for entropy, maybe. This theory seems to assume that entropy reverses itself somehow, and unless it turns out the universe isn’t headed for atomic decay and heat death, that doesn’t work.