Posted on 01/15/2007 6:32:55 PM PST by snarks_when_bored
It's official, Elvis livesLast Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/01/2007
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Whoa, that article started out in english...
With articles like that, you just read around the equations...(grin)
(laugh) Nicely put.
Too late!
I suspect that it's fortunate that I've blocked GIF animations...
Or...
There are an infinite number of gods...
So if a God is the definer of morality in the universe He creates then there are infinite moralities, which is to say there is no morality.
If it is possible for us to know that there are other universes that have potentially different moralities then we know that there are multiple moralities and so there is no absolute morality.
So we still have the same problem.
Even if there are no Gods. If in our own universe the vast majority of us come to the conclusion that axe murdering is wrong, then if there is another universe where the vast majority of sentient beings have come to a different conclusion, then who is to say which morality is correct?
Multiverses are worse than multiculturalism when it comes to abandoning morality for whatever seems to work at the time. It's situational ethics at a multi-cosmic level.
You're assuming God defines morality. Going by His actions in the OT, Satan has nothing on God in the amoral department.
Oy!
There may or may not be a God. There may or may not be such a thing as morality. God may or may not define morality (if such a thing exists.)
All I'm trying to say is that in a situation where there is a single universe, even without a God, there is some way of making a case for certain acts being inherently good and other acts being inherently evil.
However if we have infinite multiverses where no matter what we do in this world, countless copies of us are doing the exact opposite, then there is no way of salvaging anything resembling morality.
Then all we are left with is the fact that the majority of us are too afraid to buck the system, and the few people that are courageous enough are running it however they choose. Nihilism at its finest! Of course if I had the guts to run the entire system Michael Jackson, Celine Dion, and Brittney Spears would never have been allowed to get above dive bar singing status.
The following paragraphs are from Don N. Page, Is Our Universe Likely to Decay within 20 Billion Years? (PDF format): Let us take the case in which the decay of the universe proceeds by the nucleation of a small bubble that then expands at practically the speed of light, destroying everything within the causal future of the bubble nucleation event. [snip] One might ask what the observable effects would be of the decay of the universe, if ordered observers like us could otherwise survive for times long in comparison with 20 billion years. First of all, the destruction of the universe would occur by a very thin bubble wall traveling extremely close to the speed of light, so no one would be able to see it coming to dread the imminent destruction. Furthermore, the destruction of all we know (our nearly flat spacetime, as well as all of its contents of particles and fields) would happen so fast that there is not likely to be nearly enough time for any signals of pain to reach your brain. And no grieving survivors will be left behind. So in this way it would be the most humanely possible execution. Furthermore, the whole analysis of quantum cosmology and of measures on the multiverse seems (at least to me) very difficult to do without adopting something like the Everett many-worlds version of quantum theory (perhaps a variant like my own Sensible Quantum Mechanics or Mindless Sensationalism [1, 36]). Then of course if there are worlds (quantum amplitudes) that are destroyed by a particular bubble, there will always remain other worlds that survive. Therefore, in this picture of the decaying universe, it will always persist in some fraction of the Everett worlds (better, in some measure), but it is just that the fraction or measure will decrease asymptotically toward zero. This means that there is always some positive measure for observers to survive until any arbitrarily late fixed time, so one could never absolutely rule out a decaying universe by observations at any finite time. However, as the measure decreases for our universe to survive for longer and longer times, a random sampling of observers and observations by this measure would be increasingly unlikely to pick one at increasingly late times. Although observers would still exist then, they would be increasingly rare and unusual. Of course, any particular observer who did find himself or herself there could not rule out the possibility that he or she is just a very unusual observer, but he or she would have good statistical grounds for doubting the prediction made in this paper that he or she really is quite unusual. In any case, the decrease in the measure of the universe that I am predicting here takes such a long time that it should not cause anyone to worry about it (except perhaps to try to find a solution to the huge scientific mystery of the measure for the string landscape or other multiverse theory). However, it is interesting that the discovery of the cosmic acceleration [37, 38] may not teach us that the universe will certainly last much longer than the possible finite lifetimes of k = +1 matter-dominated FRW models previously considered, but it may instead have the implication that our universe is actually decaying even faster than what was previously considered.
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