Quora answer: What evidence, if any, suggests our universe is one part of a larger multiverse?
The key thing about Multiple Universes theory of Everett in relation to the Copenhagen interpretation is that it is simpler, i.e. it has fewer assumptions, but on the other hand it sends us in a direction that we really don’t want to go which is the proliferation of universes at each observation of a quantum probability wave that collapses. Now I think the existence of Dark Energy pouring in to our universe and making it at the macro scale a far from equilibrium system which is accelerating in its expansion to be the most compelling evidence for the multiverse. This Dark Energy, which Penrose says we should not call Energy because it is not conserved, has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is the “Multiverse” what ever that is. Also Dark Matter suggests that there is a multiverse because in string theory, one of the variations, suggest that our universe has a twin with which we only share gravity. So that would mean that half of the dark energy could be explained as being in our twin universe, and then we can consider the rest to be either in blackholes or non-lighted matter. Now that we know we are living in a world where the earth has rings of anti-matter, and there is no Higgs particle within reach of LHC and where super-symmetries are not yet confirmed, and where neutrinos go faster than the speed of light, really we are certainly going to have to go back to the drawing board, unless something happens soon, like finding an error in experiments, and suddenly finding the Higgs particle where it is expected. We spent a lot of money building the LHC in order to find out that the Higgs is just no there, so far. It will be interesting when we find out what really is there at those energies and that will probably send all our theorizing about multiverses in a different direction.
So I would like to mention a completely different way to come at this problem of Multiverses, a more Kantian Copernican Turn sort of explanation. I have invented something called General Schemas Theory in my research. I came to it by asking what is the next level of abstraction up from Systems Theory. What are the other things like a “System” but different that are ways to organize Spacetime into what Umberto Eco in Kant and the Platypus calls Mathematical and Geometrical Schemas. The other candidates for templates of understanding that are at the same level of abstraction as Systems, but essentially different are things like Monads, Patterns, Forms, etc. It is surprising that such a discipline has never been created in our tradition before, but I cannot find it. You would have thought that it would have been created in Architectural Theory or in Art Theory, or in some other domain. But I guess that Science is just too specialized to think in these global terms about the way we organize phenomena as a species to ourselves. Schemas are Ontological rather than Ontic organizations. Ontic organisations are what one would normally think of as emergent levels in nature. These are things like quarks, particles, atoms, molecules, macro-molecules, organelles, cells, multi-cellular clusters, organs, organisms, ecologies, social organisms, Gaia. All these are ontic emergent levels of organization we find in nature. But they way we understand these emergent phenomena is via templates of understanding that we project as intuited a priori syntheses as Kant called them. But Kant believed that these were unstriated, in other words he thought there was only one kind of time that created schemas, and only one kind of space (homogeneous objective space) which means he believed in unstriated synthetic a priori projections prior to experience. But what General Schemas Theory posits is that these existant singularities of space and time are not only fused into SpaceTime but also are striated into different types of mathematical and geometric schemas. The key point is that you can view any ontic emergent level of organization in the universe via multiple ontological schemas, and much argumentation between scientists who are looking at the same phenomena via different schemas. Schemas are templates of organization projected on phenomena a priori as intuited syntheses. They are ontological because Being is identified with intelligibility. These schemas in comparison to the ontic structures we find in nature are what serves as the reference background in which we come to understand the actual organization of nature. Without the projected reference background we would not know what differences make a difference ala Bateson in the phenomena we are studying.
Now in order to kick off General Schemas Theory as a discipline I created a hypothesis that there are only ten schemas and that they are related by a rule which is that there are two schemas per dimension and two dimensions per schema. This leads to a configuration of schemas as nesting at different scopes of the following organization which I derived empirically by studying science for many years.
F theory = 12 —-> Two orthogonal timelines
M theory = 11
String theory = 10
—————————-
Pluriverse 8, 9
Kosmos 7, 8
World 6, 7
Domain 5, 6
OpenScape (Meta-system) 4,5
System 3, 4
Form 2, 3
Pattern 1, 2
Monad 0, 1
Facet -1,0
These Schemas are nested without gaps. Most of my work in my research has been looking for the gaps in these schema, and also trying to verify the dimensional relations.
Now one thing we notice is that there are only 6 of these schematic levels that actually are completely experienced and those are the central six. The two on each end are like scaffolding which we do not completely experience.
So based on this hypothesis, which I am working hard to refute, so we can get on to the next hypothesis in the development of General Schemas Theory, there is a “Multiverse” because that is one of the a priori syntheses that we intuit, in fact the highest one. Just like Quarks which are never seen in isolation that is the lowest schema. We never see a Quark on its own, or at least not yet. So to we never see the Pluriverse on its own. These are scaffoldings that supports our understanding of the limits of experience.
It is interesting that Bernstein in his lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ultimately says in his regressive reading that the problem with Kant’s theory is that he thinks that there is only one kind of time, just as he believes that there is only one kind of space. So if there are multiple kinds of time projected as a priori syntheses, and space and time are fused, then that means there must be multiple kinds of space as well, not just objective physical space. And since spacetime is fused (as either spacetime or timespace which together I call the Matrix) that means that the schemas are the striations of this existential singularity of spacetime into different kinds of temporal and spatial organizations of experience that are projected a priori on ontic phenomena, which in turn has its own ontic organization. Many times we assume the ontological organization of the template of our own understanding is the organization of the phenomena until we learn differently by questioning closely the phenomena itself. For instance Giovanni Schiaparelli and Percival Lowell saw little lines on Mars at the resolution of his telescope and he projected that there were canals there on Mars and so Edgar Rice Burroughs populated that planet with dwellers that lived along canals. It was not until we got higher magnification telescopes that we could see that the lines that were thought to be canals were in fact either artifacts from the low resolution telescope, shadows on the landscape, or projections from an overactive imagination. But what ever they were we projected our pattern schema on the surface of Mars to understand and connect what we saw there into something we could understand given the level of data we had.
http://www.emmetlabs.com/pair/Giovanni-Virginio-Schiaparelli_321/Percival-Lowell_192
http://www.scienceclarified.com/scitech/Exploring-Mars/Early-Observations-and-Beliefs.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Schiaparelli
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percival_Lowell
http://www2.lowell.edu/Research/library/paper/lowell.html
Better map: http://www.jimloy.com/astro/canals.htm
Lowell’s book http://www.archive.org/details/marsanditscanals033323mbp
Related articles:
http://www.space.com/13197-mars-canals-water-history-lowell.html
http://www.astrobio.net/index.php?option=com_retrospection&task=detail&id=4257
http://www.factsaboutmars.net/mars-in-history-1800s/
Threshold phenomnea: http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Threshold/
Other Pseudo Science: http://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/auxiliary.html
http://palermoproject.com/lowell2004/site.htm
The point of all this is that we project patterns on what later are found to be random data. This is just one example of what has been called Threshold phenomena. But it is one example that allows us to bring home the point that the idea of Kant that there are a priori intuited syntheses flowing from out imagination is credible.
Once we believe what Kant surmised then it is only a small step to saying that there are a series of such schemas and that they themselves are organized into a hierarchy of organizations of Spacetime, so there is more than object time and space as absolutes but instead there are striated nestings of different templates of understanding that we project a priori, and to understand ourselves we ought to understand the structure of that ontological projection of Being (which is illusion) but which makes possible much of what we call the intelligibility of things we encounter.
There are many things about the theory of S-prime hypothesis (abduction) that are interesting but the most interesting to me is the fact that out schemas stop exactly where String theory takes up at the tenth dimension. The five variants of string theory are united into M theory in the eleventh dimension. And finally F theory in the 12th dimension really throws a wrench in the works by giving us unexpectedly two orthogonal time lines. In the Fourteenth dimension this becomes three orthogonal time lines. I searched for a precedent for this and found that Dunne had suggested the idea of orthogonal time lines in the twenties, and his ideas influenced Tolkien. Hinton had earlier popularized the idea of the fourth dimension which influenced Lewis Carroll in his Through the Looking Glass story which takes place in a tesseract. Later Dunne came up with the idea that there might be multiple dimensions of time and that would explain the soul. Tolkien took that idea up as did other writers and for tolkien it was the mark of the different types of beings that populated middle earth that they all experienced time in slightly different ways.
Since Philosophy for a while now has been looking for a reason for the Metaphysical Worldivew which has been in existence since Thales after the Mythopoietic worldview to be over, it seems to me heterochrony is one good way to end it once and for all since the Metaphysical worldivew definitely assumes either one linear or one circular timeline. Why should time be one dimensional when space is three dimensional. We note that the nine dimensional manifold of S-prime hypothesis is just big enough to hold an eight dimensional matrix of the various symmetry breakings of space and time. Ultimately the manifold of the A priori synthesis is just large enough to hold four dimensions of space and four dimensions of time fused relativistically.
So basically what this is saying is that there is no pre-given schemas to integrate string theory into our understanding. That is one reason we have such a hard time working with it and understanding it. But on the other hand S-prime hypothesis says that we are working with 7 plus or minus two dimensions in our short term memory all the time and that explains our propensity for transcendental idealist philosophies and our abilities to understand very complex things. Basically we have schemas to support understanding things up to nine dimensions in extension and it is the proposition of my dissertation that this is what we are using all the time to design complex systems. See http://about.me/emergentdesign.
So my basic thesis here is that the evidence that the multiverse exists is inside of us not outside. It is the very highest schema called the pluriverse and it is a threshold of understanding, and so there we see artifacts of what is beyond it and we call that string theory. It is at the limits of what we can think and is at the limits of what we can see, and thus it generates its own threshold phenomena and speculations. Essentially the pluriverse was in us from the beginning, just like the Li of the pattern in which spiders weave their webs making visible that Li. Chi is of course the unfolding of that patterning. The Chi might be called the energy behind the a priori projection of the synthetic whole of the striated spacetime singularity which we intuit, i.e. which we see reflected back to us in the organization of the phenomena until we look further and find that the phenomena has in effect its own order different from that we expected. For instance we did not expect super-conductivity as a phenomena but it was there and it took 20 years to come up with a plausible explanation for it. We did not expect to find black holes but now few people think they don’t exist because of all the phenomena that are explained by them unveiled in astronomy especially with the Hubble telescope and other sources of pictures of space which for instance see the background radiation from the big bang in detail. Ideas of the Big Bang, Black Holes, acceleration of the Expansion of the Universe, Dark Matter, Dark Energy all contribute to this uneasy feeling that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. The universe itself has its own unconscious that we are just seeming to get data which indicates its reality. There is a meta-system (general economy ala Bataille) beyond the system of our universe (restricted economy) and that is projected by us prior to any phenomena appearing to indicate it, which we can see from Science Fiction and Fantasy where we project other universes all the time without any difficulty. In fact what is amazing is that we can create other universes easier than we can do almost anything else. Just like we can invent new programming languages easier than we can learn existing ones. This ease of projection of alternative worlds seen in Leibniz (Paingloss) where he says this is the best of all possible worlds is astounding and that leads to David Lewis’s idea that all those imagined universes are actually real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possible_world
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lewis_(philosopher)
POSSIBLE WORLDS: WHAT THEY ARE GOOD FOR AND WHAT THEY ARE
Alexander R. Pruss, Ph.D. http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/ap85/papers/PhilThesis.html
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xQ9f6by0g25d-lKaaTgvsTWLmtyp9rrelC4yHg25jyM/edit?hl=en_US