A "base process" conceptually "below" any "base" universes

post by Amy Johnson (Amy Minge) · 2025-02-03T19:11:22.706Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

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Many people realize that, conceptually “below” or “before” any “base universe,” there is / “was”

1 — nothing

or

2 — something that “was” caused to come into existence by nothing

or

3 — something that “has always” existed.

(I’m using time-sensitive words, even though we are stepping out of the spacetime of our universe for parts of this discussion.)

Of these three options, most people feel that #3 is most likely to be correct, given the nature of causality.

So if it’s #3, and something “has always” existed, then what is the nature of the “something” that “has always” existed?

Since “eventually,” something caused a universe or universes to come into existence, we are dealing, once again, with causality. If we “drill down,” or “back,” we get to increasingly more fundamental processes.

For this essay, I’m thinking of the most fundamental process (conceptually “under” any “base universe”) as a “base process.”

Given the life-conducive nature of subsequent or just “sub” processes, such as the collection of processes, or “overall process,” of the universe(s), it seems “extremely likely” that the base process is what we would think of as “intelligent.”

This seems apparent because, as many people have noted, the likelihood of creating a universe that coincidentally has constants and other properties that are life-conducive is “extremely” low. Estimates vary, but are often on the order of one in billions.

Many people will recognize that the same argument is used by supporters of the philosophically-oriented simulation hypothesis. Sometimes, people imagine that such universes “were” likely created by “posthumans.” (1)

Here, we are just removing the anthropocentric or universe-centric portion for whatever created the base universe or base universes, which would logically be very dissimilar to anything in our universe, given its (most likely) “constant” existence.

Some humans have argued against the life-probability logic with an infinite multiverse hypothesis. They say

“There may be infinite other universes which are not conducive to life, but there would be no organic beings in those other universes to make such a life-conducive-probability argument, so the life-conducive-probability argument fails to be significant.”

Perhaps the following allegory elucidates the skepticism maintained by life-conducive-argument supporters, with respect to the infinite-multiverse hypothesis:

Let’s imagine a universe exists in which there is a planet, on which there are “intelligent” organic beings. These organic beings have devised a morbid “game” that is to last for one thousand days.

On the first day of the game, they will randomly select one hundred of their fellow organic beings, and then imprison those beings. In the evening, the prisoners will put their names in a hat. The prisoner whose name is randomly drawn from the hat will be allowed to live until the following day. The prison guards will execute the other 99 prisoners. Then on the second day, this society will imprison 99 new organic beings, bringing the total back up to one hundred. Then that evening, the prison administration will organize another drawing, and so on, for one thousand days.

Now let’s say that, on the first day of the game, an organic being named “Adam” has the poor “luck” of being randomly selected to become a prisoner. That evening, he puts his name in the hat, and then, apparently “by chance,” his name is drawn, so that he can live until the following day.

On the evening of day two, Adam’s name is again drawn. This happens on days three, four, and five as well. Adam, whose teachers once called him “slow-witted,” finally starts to suspect that the drawing is rigged on day 6, when his name is drawn yet again. He thinks to himself that there must be some intelligence behind what is happening. It starts to seem very unlikely that his "luck" is only "luck" because, after all, finger-crossing can only go so far. Perhaps the someone in the prison administration likes him. Perhaps his wife has bribed someone. Whatever the reason, something is most likely going on that requires “intelligence.” Otherwise he would, most likely, no longer be alive. The remaining days pass, and Adam’s “luck” holds all the way through the thousandth day. Then the following day, the prison guards allow Adam to go home.

A few days later, Adam tells a friend that he suspects intelligence or “rigging” played a role in his continued existence as "Adam," but the friend says

“There may be infinite other universes in which such games are played. In those universes, there are no ‘Adams’ left alive to tell such silly stories. Thus, your theory about logic behind this ‘luck’ is meaningless. It was only a matter of sheer chance that you happen to be in a universe in which your name was drawn from a hat one thousand days in a row.”

***

How much less probable is a base process, that has "perpetually" been running on "hardware" that has "perpetually" existed, than the existence of an infinite number of other universes? And if we choose to accept an infinite number of other universes, we still lack an explanation for how they came into existence. 

And if such a "perpetual" base process exists, what would its subprocesses, or extraneous “programs,” be like?

Would they include at least one universe, organic beings, and humans?

And what if wave function “collapse,” in any base universe, provides evidence for the existence of processes that connect that base universe’s processes, including measurement processes, to the “information level” processes (which would, in turn, be connected to what I have been calling the “base process”)? Or we could just think of the information level as the same as the base process. Exactly where one prefers to draw conceptual boundaries is irrelevant. 

People might say the extra-universal argument for wave function “collapse” is an “easy out” that their fellows always use to explain that which they cannot comprehend.

However, haven’t humans finally truly reached the conceptual “bottom” of their universe, which is described by quantum physics, and cannot be further subdivided? And the leading alternative interpretation for our observations of wave function behavior, the "Many Worlds" interpretation (2), also requires extra-universal reasoning. Furthermore, "Many Worlds" would still seem to require some information-level processing, so in that sense, it would seem to possess no advantage over a "raw" information-level interpretation.  

 

1-Bostrom, Nick. "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 53, no. 211, 2003, pp. 243-255. Oxford University Press. 

2-Everett, H. (1957). "Relative State" Formulation of Quantum Mechanics. Reviews of Modern Physics, 29(3), 454–462. https://doi.org/10.1103/RevModPhys.29.454.

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