Hi Witt - this is a well-posed set of points.
wittgenstein said:
1.Laws of nature do not exist in a Platonic realm, if anything they are descriptions of how things are rather than laws from some transcendental realm that move our reality to and fro.
Agreed that they would be emergent regularities that are part of the system, not transcendant. But there are then two different takes on this.
The first is that the regularities are just supervenient and thus causally impotent. The laws are just how the micro-stuff locks together.
The second, which is the basis of systems thinking, is that the global level that emerges acts with downwards constraint. It is the top-down source of action.
So the laws would not move things to and fro (that would be local constructive action). But they would frame local actions in a way that strictly limits their freedoms.
This is why the best laws are equations like F = ma which describe a symmetry.
wittgenstein said:
2. As such if we postulate a creation ( in other words we do not believe in an infinite past) then there was a time when absolutely nothing existed, including the laws of nature.
Again, I would agree that even the laws of nature are not timeless but must have developed/evolved in time. Or "time" as even dimensionality must have developed.
But does there have to be a "creation" - a punctate act? A crisp initial event? Or can things slid into being from a fog of vague potential?
And while there would have been a pre-reality in which what we take as real did not exist, would this be the same as nothing existing, or just no- real things (no actual crisp things).
So ruling out infinite existence in favour of a developmental perspective leaves you once more with at least a pair of options to consider. Crisp creation vs vague creation.
wittgenstein said:
3. If there are no laws of nature than everything is allowed
Agreed, initially anything would have been possible. This would indeed be the definition of a vagueness (but a paradoxical feature of a nothingness, or even an everythingness).
Then laws would be part of the self-assembly, the self-organisation, as the anythingness that was originally possible develops into the subset that is the lawful, self-constraining, actual.
Note how the very acceptance of the notion of lawful implies the complementary existence of a wider space of possibility. Laws stop some things from happening, and so permit the other freedoms to dominate. Or other symmetries, following Noether.
wittgenstein said:
4. This explains how something can come from nothing.
Still got two rival camps here. Was there a crisp nothing that was interrupted by a punctate creation event and instantly there was a realm of law?
Or was there a vagueness whose symmetry was spontaneously broken leading to the rapid development of an SO realm in a new more ordered state? The way the chaos of vapour condenses into the more constrained and "lawful" state of water, then ice.
wittgenstein said:
5. Since this creation is not restricted by any law of nature almost everything actually happens.
This is where the two lines of thought really diverge.
My approach is teleological. The ends justify the means. In an SO fashion. The creation could not have gone off in any direction (even if all directions were initially open) as only (perhaps) a single outcome could equlibrate every arising source of tension or conflict. Only one interlocking set of laws would have actually locked together.
So early on, every direction is being explored (via fluctuations or their vague analogy). But almost all directions got actively suppressed as a result of the emergence of a context of constraints. The lawful patterns.
So this is anti-multiverse, anti-many worlds, anti-landscapes, like thinking. It would be strong anthropic principle, not weak.
It would be chaotic attractor style thinking. Start the system off in any choice of initial conditions and it would have to find itself sliding down into the basin of the attractor. There would be no splitting of the one into the many. Instead the many (the vague many) would converge towards the one mutual constraints satisfying outcome.
wittgenstein said:
6. This coincides with the many worlds hypothesis.
Again two contrasting paths of thought are possible. One in which there is no teleological selection mechanism that constrains the results, the other in which only a single synergistic outcome is possible (as the outcome brings itself into existence precisely by suppressing all the alternatives).
wittgenstein said:
7. Most "universes" will be chaotic ( even their laws of nature will be chaotic, IE;not logical).
Ditto. And note that chaos is no longer chaotic anymore! They can conceal teleological attractors. All roads may lead to Rome.
wittgenstein said:
8. Only those " universes" that are capable of creating life will have life and the laws of nature of those universes must not be chaotic, they must be logical.
Here again, two stories depending on the choice of creation approaches.
In my view, even though it is strong anthropic, life is irrelevant to the model. What I am arguing is that the causality is teleological. What exists has bootstrapped itself into being by suppressing all other possible outcomes. It is an act of reduction. So the universe created itself through its development of lawful regularity, its emergent synergy.
But the buck stops there. Humans are not part of this activity. We are not acting backwards in any way that we can detect (forget QM qualia extremism) to shape up what we find exists.
So we can say yes to an anthropic universe story (as a good candidate level of focus for our SO cosmology) and no to human involvement in the kind of downward constraints causality I am talking about.
The human part of the creation story would remain the weak anthropy position (in this particular view of things).
wittgenstein said:
9. That is why we are amazed at the stunning "coincidences" that our universe seems to be made just for us.
It would be no coincidence that the universe exists - if strong anthropy applies at that level.
And human existence is a chance extra that is merely consistent with the bigger story.
We would arise as one of the unsuppressed freedoms.
Perhaps that though is a new way of looking at things for many. Instead of being the created, we were merely the un-prevented!
In the long run of course - because the universe is ruled by the second law and its heat death fate - humans and all other forms of dissipative structure will indeed become "prevented". Suppressed as local possibility because the universe has finally achieved its full teleological purpose - to become crisply a nothing. An infinite cold and still void.
Where once there was everything (vaguely), finally there will be a big fat nothing - or as near nothing as it proved possible to get. Just three flat spatial directions and a QM background rustle of de sitter event horizon "black body" radiation.
Existence as the gradient from everything to nothing via something.
Or you could go back to the traditional view - nothing existed, then for no reason something was created, then it is all going to decay. A fate that seems so objectionable in this ontology that people dream of the rebirth, the hope, of big crunch bounces, oscillatory creation, black-hole spawning multiverses - anything to avoid the dread of the heat death.
