Proper Application of the Multiverse

Many Worlds Interpretation / Wikipedia.org

Quantum Mechanics Manyworlds / Stanford.edu

What if that situation you were in during sixth grade, where you found your passion in music because your aunt gave you a nice guitar, was changed? Your aunt never gives you a guitar, and in that same year you find your passion for drawing cartoons.

The multiverse theory suggests both happen. You are going along as a sixth grader and in one universe you get a guitar, in the other you do not. In all the Universes you are you, you just take the a different path at the fork in the road. 

In a multiverse the Nazi's loose in one, win the war in the other ; the electric car gets adopted as the way we do cars, in the other gasoline cars become the way we do cars. 

With each moment being a moment of on/off for whether something happened, this means the multiverse is huge, with each moment spinning off at least two versions....one where the ball was caught and the other where it was dropped. 

So hopefully you're comfortably imagining an endlessly branching out Universe of different outcomes. 

I offer that that the multiverse theory is a better metaphor for understanding evolution. 

In the multiverse metaphor there are forks, as in biological life with mutations. The mutant butterfly with a new color pattern or length for its legs spins off eventually to a new species. Lions, cheetahs, jaguars and house cats all have a common ancestor, just like in multiverse theory an event can have multiple outcomes. 

Of course in the case of evolution, we live with and see the multiplicity of mutations living all under the roof of one Universe. In the case of evolution all the different species of feline, canine and primate live on the same planet.

What about the mutations we don't see?

We talk about the amazing diversity of life by pointing to the living things around us. What about the things not in existence?

The diverse living things are not the only Multiverse....they are a small percentage of the Multiverse.

The lives that died young (before able to create offspring), and groups or species that went extinct, are the rest of the Multiverse. They are the negative space of the Multiverse.

All those born with mutations that did not work out in their environment are very much an example of diversity. They are just the end of diversity the environment killed off.

This isn't just the phenomenon of "birth defects". Mutations that gave an animal too much power in their biological niche can go extinct by being too strong. Think of a pack of wolves that have an odd
mutation of longer legs. They outrun all their prey. They are wildly successful and well fed for a season. Then, very soon, all of their prey are hunted to zero. That pack of longer legged and faster wolves dies due to not being fit for their environment. So it is not just birth defect mutants that die, but the overly strong or fast mutant that ruins its food supply by eating it all.

The only mutations that work are those that lead to offspring, and those offspring having offspring.

With all this established, we can easily see the biological Multiverse is constantly generating every form of life there could be, and the pressure of reality prunes much of the diversity from the living.

It is like an airplane factory that randomly generates every physical form of plane...even planes with the most bizarre things like playground swings and stair cases welded to their sides....and the reality of flight blots out of existence the ones unfit. What constitutes unfit?  Those not capable of coming back to the airstrip after taking off.

So all those planes the left the ground and never came back occupy the negative space of that Multiverse.

The largest portion of the Multiverse are the bad ideas, the failures, those that didn't make it. The largest portion of the Multiverse died. Died in a way that did not leave offspring, descendants in our present world.

The negative space of the Multiverse is what the Universe deemed undesirable unable to support within the frameworks and dynamics of reality. You see the strikethrough because, unlike us and our prejudices that load our desires and undesirables, the Universe is more open than we are. If we were in charge, there might be much more negative space in the Multiverse. 

Evolution is not about life, it is about death. It is not about seeking out and aiding good design, but about killing bad design. 

Evolution does not seek to make functional eyes, it does not seek to make the glories of the world around us. Evolution is just the negative space of the biological Multiverse. It only kills bad design. We end up with what survives, and call it good.

We as humans want to say a good or intelligent designer created all this good.

This is unfortunate, because the only omnipresent....God....or simply overarching immutable power....is one of subtraction....of death.

The only God that propels this enterprise called Life forward is one that employs death, combined with wildly prolific attempts at creating offspring. Mass birthing, and mass death of those outside of some boundaries, with those boundaries fickle and shifting constantly.

In the Bible Jesus healed the sick, brought back the dead, and never married and had children. The very opposite of the omnipresent dynamic that keeps Life going.

Possibly the only true God is Odin -the God of promiscuous sex and death.

Note, the multiverse analogy I describe is more how science fiction has depicted multiverses.

Me: The Mutation

This blog posting may appear as 100 per cent indulgent. I am going to talk about what I like. But the idea is not to propagate readers -you are not being asked to be like me. The focus is on two axioms:

1. No one is entirely alone in their preferences and methodologies. If I prefer, contemplate, or do something, there are others doing the same.
2. Humans have been evolving in very separate ways, grouped by continents (influenced by unique climates and landscape), and even more so in the last 5,000 years with culture (not nature) being the filter for surviving mutations.

These axioms are the a priori assumptions to keep in mind as you look at

Me: The Mutation: My Ambient Environments:

ice, mountains, and technology

rock and ice topped mountains

concrete bridges

power and communication towers

high population density (city)

high population density (remote village)

high altitude, treeless plains

big city urban core

command line interface

data link to globe

buckethead types of music

caffeine

surveillance

long tail economics

The point of listing these cognitive artifacts/biota is to press for their antithesis -all the types which do not fit on the list. Now think of all the humans that function at optimum on the antithesis list.

Those humans are of a different evolutionary track. We are genetically different.

Supporting and supplemental documentation:
The neural bases of complex tool use in humans Mesoudi, A., Whiten, A., & Laland, K. N. (2006). Towards a Unified Science of Cultural Evolution. Behav Brain Sci, 29(4), 329-347; discussion 347-383
Human-Computer Interaction: Cognitive Science, Memes and Evolution.
21st Century Public Safety

Buckethead video.

Long tail economics theory.

Change is good

I am writing this for anyone who can read it. I am writing it for humans who can decode these symbols into meaning, and also for the multitude of bots that crawl the web parsing web pages looking for statistical occurrences of words in association with one another. The bots think a lot like you, e.g. if they see "hello world, I have this plain little web page viagra viagra viagra viagra that is about me" they know something suspicious is afoot.

I am not here to talk about web pages, but about us. By "us" I mean anyone that can read this web page.

Note what happened in the last two paragraphs. A filter was created ( a.k.a. a qualification ), and anything that passed through the filter was labeled. The processing, or rhetorical device, created a special class of cognitive beings. You are in this class, and there are many living things that are not.

This rhetorical device is one real instance of evolution. We "web page readers" are an exclusive class who can social network on the web, give each other paying jobs as a result ( and the pay buys food, water, and social prestige things that also function as evolutionary filters), or in very many instances mate and have offspring. That type of baby definitely came into being filtered through the first two paragraphs in my blog entry.

Human evolution is ...... I am not going to finish that statement. The statement makes a mistake of tense. "Is" should be "was". Hopefully you have seen a puddle of water that recently melted from ice (there are some humans who haven't seen this). You know it just melted, because some little bits of ice are still part of the spot of water. But you do not know the melting process exactly as it happened, including the original shape of the ice.

Like the ice changing its shape as it turns to water, we don't know the original shape of "human", nor the exact posture and way of being that was "human" along the way. The term is equifinality -there are many possible routes to our current configuration.

Human evolution has some of faster-legs-will-survive components to it. This is where we are like all in the biological realm. The entities with the better functioning parts, resulting in better functioning whole self, exploiting a niche in the surrounding environment to secure energy sources for ourselves -those entities survive to the next second in the timeline.

In the last 5,000 years the faster-legs component has taken on far less of a role. As an example, Tamerlane was not able to walk, but was leader of thousands and conquered/exterminated huge cities. He was physiologically inferior to the millions he subjugated. When you ask how Tamerlane could be is when you start exploring evolution that happens as a result of culture.

Evolution through culture is an even harder past tense to discern than physiological evolution. Right now there are people mingling and mating as a result of being in microtribes that exist in virtual worlds online, recently there was a love-triangle of NASA astronauts that got international press. My great-great-grandfather was an Irish immigrant raised with his brother in an orphanage in New York City. He and his brother fled the orphanage, with my ancestor working on the railroads and marrying a Cherokee and the brother becoming a stock trader who had a mansion in New York and San Francisco.

Babies are coming out of these processes. Then those babies are going to mutate the culture even more (e.g. James Brown and Henry Ford).

The trend in the last 5,000 years has been towards less adaptation in relation to nature, and more adaptation to the symbolic and cognitive. The gods have even changed their residence -once they inhabited every local tree and stone and now more likely are "sky gods". The sky gods are Allah and Yahweh, out away from all the daily mundane often leading their warriors on an abstract faith-based agenda on Earth. Lots of todays babies have come out of these warrior's progress, with whole portions of the planet having little or no people outside this class of family religion.

This process of filtering humanity's next generation based on symbolic and cognitive artifacts poses a dilemma for humanists. Remember the ice to water melting process, and how if you encounter it at 5:00PM you do not know exactly what it looked like at 3:00PM? Humanists worship the sanctity of humans at 3:00PM, are calling the current status at 5:00PM an outcome of social injustice, and would ideally like 6:00PM to see us progressing to something like what 3:00PM was.

The humanists are just another particular filter imposed on the present, a meta-aware systems intervention or systems disruption. The filter has little ability to deliver on producing a less exclusive society, it is merely another construct of exclusion -a church of contempt for the process that is ever more prevalent.

That process is change, and it is has no leader or cruel demagogue. It will be more fair, democratic and brilliant than what you or I could have designed with our best intentions.

Hopefully, see you in that future.

Supporting and supplemental documents:
Industrial Evolution
By BENJAMIN M. FRIEDMAN
Does natural selection favor the rise of capitalist economies?


Out of Control
Chapter 18 THE STRUCTURE OF ORGANIZED CHANGE
by Kevin Kelly


Searching for Similar Diagnosis Through DNA (new communities emerging from genetic mutations)
By AMY HARMON