Now we know that the universe which we know of is specially tuned; a small change of the natural laws and natural constants would cause a...
Now we know that the universe which we know of is specially tuned; a small change of the natural laws and natural constants would cause an entirely different universe. We can even see this in computer simulations. If we change the laws and constants, it leads to a totally different universe.
We can see in these models, that not only would the universe be totally different, but probably life could not exist in these systems either. These systems would operate in a completely different way; it would be impossible to create structures that would ultimately lead to life as we know it. This is a big challenge for science: How is it possible that the existing universe is good for us? These are the questions of the anthropic universe theory, and one possible answer is the multiverse, and another answer is that it was created.
Of course, we do not know all the laws of nature on which base we could make a model of our universe yet. The philosophical question is whether we can ever know the whole depth of the physical laws. But still, we can build models based on our present state of knowledge, and as our knowledge grows, our models become closer to reality.
However, when released from the approximation of reality, and when we start creating models where physical laws and constants are free to change, we can create different “universes,” and we could examine how these would operate.
Does creating these universes depend only on computational capacity? In principle, how precise and detailed can a model of these universes be? Are we able to model our universe in this way? Would intelligence emerge in the modeled version of our universe?
Or ultimately, is our universe tuned this way? Is our universe virtual?
No comments