@GeeSussFreeK "For instance, Hawking has proposed that there are perhaps an infinite number of parallel universes causing an infinite number of truth statements about the cosmos."

That is not possible. If it were possible, one of the "truth statements" you could make would be. "There is an evil god in one of the parallel dimensions with the power and the will to utterly destroy all parallel dimensions now, in the past and in the future."

Obviously we are here, therefore you cannot make an infinite number of "truth statements". There must be some limit. Either Hawking is wrong or (more likely) you have misinterpreted him or learned from someone else who misinterpreted him.

First off, I still refute your statement that there are a finite number of statements about the universe that can be true. For instance, Hawking has proposed that there are perhaps an infinite number of parallel universes causing an infinite number of truth statements about the cosmos. Already, we have programs that can write additional complexity in themselves, causing an infinite rule-set of truths to be created. Also, any statement about truth being finite would itself be about the set, not in the set, causing a new set to be created to include that truth. Any statement about absolute absolute finiteness statistically can't be shown. (This was the same fate the logical positivists suffered. For something to be true, to them, it had to be verifiable. But you can't apply the verification principle to itself nullifying its usefulness as method for determining absolute truths.)

Plus, the way you setup your statistic is to show that for a finite universe, the probability of an infinitely increasing number of Gods being true goes to 0. But no religious person even holds to the idea that all religions are true simultaneously. This statistic is meaningless as it is measuring the value to wit no one is asserting is the possibility of the conditions of deities.

Furthermore, if we disregard your strict adherence to the idea that the cosmos must be finite, we can, in fact, have an infinite number of religions true simultaneously. It would be the limit of x infinity^infinity/x as x goes to infinity. My calculus I is rusty, so I think that is either 1 or infinity, I don't know which.

For me, though, estimations are never close enough to make no difference when Truth is concerned. I hope you don't take my tone as argumentative. I have taken it as two folks with a difference of opinion. However, I do think that statistics are a poor model for evaluation the likeliness of deities. It doesn't matter if all are true, only one needs to be for us to be satisfied. It would be akin to relating the belief of the big bang to a religion and discounting it because it can't be simultaneously true with conflicting theories of existence.

>> ^Drachen_Jager:

It's simple. There are an infinite number of possible 'guesses' one could make about the universe with no observation of reality. Yet the number of statements about the universe which can be true are finite. Yes you cannot divide infinity, that is why I said at first that 'statistically' God cannot exist (try to follow along here and keep more than one post in mind at a time, I don't want to repeat myself). Because, as you say, it is an estimation. The number may not actually be 0, but it is close enough that it makes no difference.

In reply to this comment by P-Thorbjorn:
Hi, my name is Paul and I am a university student in my final year of Television Production. As part of a market report, I will have to research the publics expectations of scientific documentaries. My documentary will follow the same genre of programmes such like Parallel Universes and Illusion of Reality. I need information over how you viewers liked or disliked these documentaries. If you have any kind of opinion over them good or bad, please contact me. I will hope to hear from you.


Just read the comments on the video if you want to know what people think. Our users are a pretty savvy bunch, and most, like myself, get kind of turned on by a quality documentary that either introduces us to new ideas or expands our understanding of those we are already cognizant of.

If you are producing documentaries and would like direct feedback, Videosift might be a good site to post on. Just don't post your own videos! Contact @Fedquip who runs the Documentary channel, or @dag who owns this site. Good luck!

Hi, my name is Paul and I am a university student in my final year of Television Production. As part of a market report, I will have to research the publics expectations of scientific documentaries. My documentary will follow the same genre of programmes such like Parallel Universes and Illusion of Reality. I need information over how you viewers liked or disliked these documentaries. If you have any kind of opinion over them good or bad, please contact me. I will hope to hear from you.

>> ^fujiJuice:

I find this video to be misleading, while the graphics look great, and the idea's are great, they are just not feasible in an MMO, at least not in this fashion. It sounds to me as if it is going to simply follow the Guild Wars 1 approach and be a single player game with some coop thrown in and call it an MMO. Instancing ruins MMO's and this is one of the reasons WOW has been incredibly successful in my opinion. People want to see people around them, going about their business, random social or pvp encounters and the ability to pretty much go where you want, when you want, are what make a world seem real. Loading screens, lack of other players doing other things on their own and a sense of isolation ruined a lot of potentially great MMO's.
This is going to sound like I am a WOW fanboy, and while I am a great fan of the game, it isn't perfect, and I would be happy to see something great come along and compete on the same level, or surpass it. The thing that captured me when playing the game the first time was just walking around the world and exploring, not looking around an area, hitting a loading screen, and loading a completely different area, but physically walking from one land to the next. Yeah it has instances, but they are in places you expect and welcome them, I was excited about APB, but that isn't an MMO either, it is a multiplayer shooter with slighty larger servers than normal. A larger, living breathing city, would of been awesome, then instance the insides of the buildings, then I would pay a monthly fee, if it wasn't boring that is.


They have said GW2 will be persistent. Whether all of what they have promised is feasible I'm not sure.

Tbh I never had a problem with the instancing. WoW had its own shards in its own way, I mean it was really multiple parallel universes, or realms. At least in GW you all shared the same realm, even if it was split into seperate parts. Its really impossible for all the players to share the same world, different games have got around that different ways, each solution has its pro and cons. It'll be interesting to see how they do it in GW2, but I think it will at least feel more persistent than GW1.

I disagree, as AnimalsForCrackers said that design is not an MMO. The principle of an MMO is that everybody in the game is in the same shared world. If you start adding instances or parallel universes you are moving more toward a standard multiplayer game where only a dozen players share the same world state.
>> ^entr0py:
It's not that hard, in fact it's nothing new. In the first game, everything was instanced, even the cities had maybe 30 instances going at once. To make you feel like you had an effect on the world they just have two versions of the city; liberated and enslaved. Once you've saved the city, you only have access to the "liberated" version. I'm pretty sure the first game did the exact same thing with a "ruined" version of a city, and the same idea is used in many MMOs in their "newbie islands".

I also just watched this a few nights ago, it's currently in the Comcast On Demand free movies section (at least where I live). I personally found it difficult to follow, insofar as how the causality paradoxes where presented. I've always thought that if such paradoxes where possible they would either be infinitely recursive or cause the splitting off of a new parallel universe. The way it's treated in the movie doesn't make much sense to me.

Thanks for following up, and happy new year.

Maybe we're looking at different ends of science. Your model makes sense during the initial R&D phases, and generating hypotheses. My model makes sense in the later phases, when deciding what constitutes scientific law and fact. I agree with your point on creationism; to be fair, why wouldn't Christians include all other religions' creation myths, and other philosophies' as well? It's better to leave the unsupported theories for religious studies.

I can't fault people for being religious. We have to use our internal rationale to decide what to think about reality and our existence. Whether people decide there's a god with an elephant head, or if they decide we're in one of an infinite number of parallel universes, or if they think we're just machines and consciousness is an illusion, I can't fault them for their choice. I can show them my rationale for my beliefs, and I can educate them based on what science shows. But my point earlier was that science doesn't show what some people claim, and that scientific "constructionism" (i.e., "only what we can prove exists, exists") is intellectually foolish, has been proven to be folly in the past, and is not accepted by the scientific community.

Science and knowledge may never be able to refute basic theism, and if people want to use that fact to justify their beliefs, they can do that. If theists want schools to teach people the world is flat, or that evolution isn't true, or that condoms spread AIDS, they can't do that, and those efforts should be resisted in full force. Religion and science need that firm dividing line, and if someone thinks they can get on in life without one or the other, there's no problem with that as long as they don't infringe on others' rights to make their own choices.
In reply to this comment by demon_ix:
Alrighy then. I'm sober and moderately coherent, so let's carry on.

We have a very different view of science. Science can't possibly work by ruling out things, because there the universe is infinite, or, as infinite as we are able to measure at this time. The experiment that produces a result never comes alone. It's always there to support a hypothesis, and to prove it, if successful.

There will always be things we can't perceive ourselves, and we will always work towards finding new ways to view the universe. If we would ever discover everything there is to know, the world would be rather dull, in my opinion.

This, however, does not grant anybody a license to invent facts, to make claims with no substantiating evidence and to basically invent a new universe and ask the rest of us to live in it.

Proving something by disproving every other possibility only works when there is a finite number of possible possibilities (I love that phrase, by the way). There is no finite group of Gods. Every person is free to come up with a new God every day. If someone were to ask 1000 Christians to describe their God, and then compile their replies into a profile, I'd be surprised if he wouldn't end up with at least 4-5 separate deities.

My problem with all religions, isn't about the nature of the faith, or of the God itself, but rather with the claim that they know something which they can't possibly know. Teaching Intelligent Design in a school and putting it on the same level as the science of Evolution, simply because a book tells you the world is 6000 years old, is ludicrous to me.

--------------------

I think we sort of diverged from the original point, and I don't have an actual argument to make anymore. Have a happy new year

throbbin et al,

you are clearly okay with disrespecting individuals, and even groups of individuals - but not certain groups of indiviudals?

are you some sort of alien parallel universe time child or something? because your logic just does not mesh with the physical constants of the universe as they exist here on earth in the milky way galaxy circa 2009

It's like watching a parallel universe. Everything is so upbeat; like an episode of Fox and Friends.

A Hwhite hole tastes better with cool hwhip..

In all seriousness though, I believe Dr. Michio Kaku will one day discover a real breakthrough in quantum physics.. I mean, he's been contemplating parallel universes since the age of 8! And he's also fun to listen to. All those analogies he used were hilarious.

SHIT! HOW COULD I FORGET DAVID DEUTSCH!!?! Oh man! That book is SO AMAZING!! Argh, now I'm kicking myself for SURE!

The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications by David Deutsch is the best science book I've read in probably 10 years.

Your video, BBC presents : Parallel Universe, has made it into your personal Highest Rated Videos listing. Congratulations on a job well done. For you contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

It's a parallel universe where the teaching of evolution is as forbidden as the teaching of free market capitalism, American history and conservatism everywhere else!

>> ^Memorare:
maybe siftbot is operating in some parallel universe where time is sped up.
In these physics videos one thing they never offer an explaination for is why the quantum level events don't scale up and occur on our macro level since everything is made up of sub-atomic particles organized as atoms. As with the Schroedinger's Cat paradox it would be kind of disappointing to finally discover a unified theory of everything, only to learn that it really doesn't matter since it doesn't scale up to mundane reality and therefore only "exists" as a theoretical concept. (personally i think the notion that the cat is both dead AND alive simultaneaously and observation determines which, is a lot of mathematical bs, ie it's not Really true except on paper but then i'm not a cosmologist or metaphysicist so what do i know)
Also, a simpler question that has an answer but i just don't know what it is...
with all the anti-matter positrons bombarding the planet via cosmic rays, don't they ever bang into some electrons and create a tiny but big enough to be measured matter/anti-matter explosion? Sure matter is mostly empty (or not so empty apparently) space and possible collisions are few, but cloud chambers indicate tons of these thigns zipping around so Howcome there's not bazillions of these tiny explosions going off all around us constantly?


Yes, the quantum world really destroyed the normal stance of science. It is when math stole the show and ruined the normal claims that science was used to making about the world. In the now, we are talking about things that exist outside of our ability to experience them. The only things that can experience them are our machines we create to measure them; and they do so in a diminished and programed method (they interpolate data). So we are left to interpret an interpretation of an event. When you start getting that convoluted then you have to make the realization that you are no longer talking about what "is", but what your machine is interpolating (The forms of the universe aren't necessarily discrete or concrete, but it will be changed by the machine so that a result can be given). We have gotten to the point where we are no longer talking about the way things "are" about the universe anymore, just about how our machines experience the different elements of phenomena in the universe (your eyes are just as much a part of this machine analogy as well, but that is a tale for another day).

I think one of the largest criticisms of the relativist camp that really sticks is there is not sufficient reason to accept the quantum model over any other model that explains things. The grounds for saying the things that exist in quantum mathematics don't lie in understanding of those elements but the claim that since the math works, then it must be true. This is putting the cart before the horse and it begs the question "why". Why not any other way that also works? We could refine Newton to incorporate some of the quantum findings and use that as the explanation of everything. There is not sufficient reason to suppose that forces are the real things in the universe, or space time warps, quantum probability matrices.

Most "old" ways of thinking just get abandon for not being popular among the new generation of scientist trying to make a name for themselves. Quine talked about this extensively. Things move in and out of popularity in this realm like any other and scientists are just like MTV peoples and everyone else of jumping on the new trend. Truly, there is not sufficient reason to believe that Aristotelian motion isn't the real method of locomotion in the universe.

Simply put, new science don't care about whys anymore. New science is about making models of massive amounts of data. It won't ever be able to give a reason if something violates that model, it just has to re-engineer the model to incorporate the new data set. It lacks any truth to it because it is always in need of more data to continue to refine its model. It will never know when the model is complete or 100% accurate. It is actually the end road of the epistemology of empirical materialism. A constantly evolving model of data is the best "truth" you can hope from science. It will never have a why, that simply isn't a role of science. It is because "it is" and that is all they will ever be able to say; now more than ever.


edit (several times for grammar, man I sux at expressing myself)