The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrödinger’s equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality—or whether it does not. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way.
Richard Feynman, Lectures on Physics II, 41-12
Abstract
The answer to the fine-tuning problem of the universe has been traditionally sought in terms of either design or multiverse. In philosophy circles, this is sometimes expanded by adding the option of explanatory nihilism—the claim that there is no explanation for statements of that high level of generality: fine-tunings are brute facts. In this paper, we consider the fourth option which, at least in principle, is available to us: co-evolution of the universe and observers. Although conceptual roots of this approach could be found already in ancient stoicism, it is still the least investigated explanatory option for resolving the problem of empirical fine tunings. We offer two preliminary models along which the co-evolution hypothesis could be developed further. They are still on the level of speculative metaphysics, but there are opportunities along the way to generate predictions which are in principle testable, especially in the domain of large-scale numerical simulations.
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Notes
In further text, we shall treat each of them as single hypotheses, as denoted by capital letters, while fully admitting that these are just placeholders for their respective categories or families of hypotheses.
Bonnor (1964), p. 119.
This is certainly a true statement as pertaining to the observable universe at present epoch. (Of course, we may go further and claim that Ωλ is, in fact, equal to 0.71 ± 0.01; e.g., Hinshaw et al. 2013.) The point, however, is something else: counterfactual or parallel universes in which dark energy density is outside these bounds almost certainly fail to evolve observers.
One should note that such an approach looks much less eccentric if we keep in mind that within process metaphysics it is processes which are irreducible, primitive concepts, not material entities or events. Conventionally understood entities are just outcomes or, in a more general case, phases of different processes. For a modern introduction into process metaphysics see, for instance, Rescher (2000).
It could be argued as well (vide Everett) that this measurement of live or dead cat impacts the observer herself, i.e., represents continuation of her evolution in the world.
Wheeler (1977), p. 27.
Sagan (1967); this paper has been rejected about 15 times in different journals prior to publication.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book 4, translated by George Long (available online at http://classics.mit.edu//Antoninus/meditations.html, last accessed August 15, 2016).
Quotation marks are necessary here, since chronological ordering—and hence past, present and future—does not exist, strictly speaking, in the presence of closed timelike curves. Each two points on such a curve are both in the “past” and in the “future” of one another, making these terms incoherent. However, the great interest of theoreticians in Gödel-like cosmological models led to a compromise understanding of “weak” chronology or nearly causal spacetime, insofar closed timelike curves are rare in spacetime (e.g., Monroe 2008).
Interestingly enough, Sir Fred Hoyle was in his later work, quite interested in the possibility of backward causation, as testified by the discussion in his Intelligent Universe (Hoyle 1983, esp. pp. 211–239). We are grateful to an anonymous referee for bringing our attention to this fascinating piece of history.
Extreme complexity introduced by closed timelike curves even in previously quite simple everyday situations has been brilliantly demonstrated by the superb thriler of Shane Carruth Primer (Carruth 2004). This movie also highlights another possible way of falsifying the present hypothesis: if artificially created closed timelike curves cannot reach further into the past than the moment of their creation, it is impossible to use them for increasing habitability of the universe.
Nozick (1981), p. 164.
The authors wish to thank Dušan Pavlović for help in obtaining some of the literature, and Slobodan Perović, Vojin Rakić and Anders Sandberg on pleasant and useful discussions. Four anonymous referees for Foundations of Science offered helpful suggestions which immensely improved a previous version of this manuscript. MMĆ acknowledges financial support from the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia through the projects #ON176021 and #ON179048.
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Ćirković, M.M., Dimitrijević, J. Putting the Cart Before the Horse: Co-evolution of the Universe and Observers as an Explanatory Hypothesis. Found Sci 23, 427–442 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-017-9532-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-017-9532-0