I do feel as though there is more to it, as far as spiritual creation goes. For the Big Bang seems in no way to deal with that. Still, it is yet to be revealed to us, it seems, how the Big Bang theory can be fully compatible with LDS cosmology. I’m going to hold on to the latter and the teachings of the prophet Joseph for now, and continue to gather as much as I can.

There are still so many questions I have though, like how is it that the universe can have a beginning and yet not have an end? What is the ultimate destiny of the universe, and if it can come to an end, how is it that we can be immortal? How is it that our bodies are ressurected? I understand that it is the atonement of Christ and power of God that makes it happen, just curious as to the processes, though again one of the mysteries of Godliness, with spiritual implications that seem out of the realm of what’s being discussed here.

Forgive me for my ignorance >.>

Notice carefully that the word “resurrected” isn’t actually a limitation there in the scripture. The scripture says spirit and element ARE inseparably connected. That’s what I was trying to get at when I was talking about getting out of the framework of time. Time is a PHYSICAL concept. There is no PRE in “pre-existence”; there is no AFTER in “afterlife”. I’m not suggesting these concepts are metaphorical. They’re real, but the limitations of temporal language are misleading us, IMO. The connection between physical and spiritual IS inseparable and far more complex than we can yet imagine.

Is our physical component an artificial adjunct invented by the gods to inhance our powers and happiness, or is it something as natural as the butterfly stage in the life cycle of the caterpillar/pupa/butterfly.

As I understand it, a spirit by itself cannot reproduce, but resurrection doesn’t seem to be a natural process, either, i.e. a process that would happen if nature were left to itself, like the butterfly emerging from the cocoon.

The problem is an inability to get away from the notion of time as a linear framework in which things happen. There are highly technical arguments, that I don’t pretend to understand but do know exist, that say that a complete description of physical reality can not depend on time as a fundamental property. The nature of time is central to resolving conflicts between general relativity and quantum mechanics, because the two pillers of modern physics treat time in a mutually contradictory fashion.

So I keep asking the question: what is the relationship between our spirit and the spirit of our copies and variants? I suspect that deeper physics may show a way to describe reality in an equally valid alternative way that drops time out of the description. And I wonder if such a description may reveal phenomena that clarifies the “spiritual” and its relationship to the “physical” naturally.

Perhaps this could be true, though I’m quite skeptical of this hypothesis.

On the other hand, given enough time, we can be assured that a society could evolve to amazing levels… perhaps even reaching Tipler’s Omega Point, where the computational capacity of the Universe can be tapped and used to run a computer simulation that resurrects all people in that Universe. In an infinite Universe, not only is this possible, but it has already happened, and happens perhaps an infinite amount of times. A being like the Heavenly Father that Latter-day Saints worship not only could have evolved, but definitely has somewhere. Then “why not here?” as Mr. Simmons pointed out.

I think that is even more true when we embed the big bang in multiverse theory. It gives more wiggle room for both camps, and those who wiggle far enough will find themselves approaching a common ground with the opposite camp.

It’s like the blind men and the elephants. The grand unified theory is the elephant itself.

Creationists see evolution from scratch as highly improbable, and in any case they feel no need for that hypothesis.

Evolutionists see resurrected beings as highly improbable, and in any case feel no need for that hypothesis.

Twenty billion years is too short for intelligent beings to evolve from scratch, say the creationists. It’s too short for intelligent beings to evolve into gods, say the evolutionists.

The most honest of both camps will not deny the logical possibility of the other’s theory, but do deny that the probability is significant enough to consider.

But in the context of multiverse theory, anything that has any probability, no matter how small, will exist in some region of the multiverse, and then why not here?

Has life ever evovled from scratch somewhere in the multiverse. If it is not a logical impossibility, the answer is yes, and not only once, but infinitely many times.

Have societies of intelligent beings evolved to the stage where they can resurrect their dead? If there is not logical contradiction involved, then the answer is yes, and in infinitely many cases, infinitely remote in time and space.

We know from experience that it is easier to propagate life by seed and transplanting than to create it from scratch, so we must suppose that when we encounter life in a region of the multiverse, it is more likely that it was transplanted their than evolved from scratch. Remember the analogy with the volcanic islands of the Pacific?

On the other hand there could be (and therefore must be) regions so remote that evolution from scratch would be more likely than propagation of existing life from some other region.

Personally, I don’t think our big bang region is that remote.

Is Joseph Smith’s explanation of the origin of the Book of Mormon logically impossible, or just extremely unusual?

If it is not logically impossible, then it has happened exactly like he said in some region of the multiverse, and why not here?

Joseph claimed to have a personal interview with two other resurrected beings whom he identified as the Father and the Son. I personally have received many spiritual witnesses that corroborate his words.

I suppose there are regions of the multiverse where their version of Joseph Smith turns out to be an imposter. I don’t worry about that because we know that there are many false prophtes and false Christs even here on this planet in its relatively short span of history.

For that matter it is possible that my spiritual witnesses could be hallucinations. I recognize that. But we all must judge such things according to our best judgement, keeping in mind that we will be judged by the same standard that we used in making our judgments.

The point is that the multiverse doesn’t let us off the hook. We have to face up to the hard decisions rather than reject things out of hand, like the orthodox creationists and orthodox evolutionists have been doing for a century or more. (much more if we go back to Korihor, for example)

It gives us another reason to avoid unnecessary risks. Suppose I can take some kind of shortcut with only one chance in a billion that it will result in an accident, where without the shortcut there is only one chance in a quadrillion. Ordinarily one might say, no biggy, I’ll take the shortcut. But if you know that it is going to increase the number of copies (by a factor of a million) of yourself that suffer the accident, then you will think twice about taking the shortcut.

I followed the link to your speculations. I found it to be a very nicely written introduction to the multiverse concept, and interesting food for thought on restoration theology.

I hope to read more from you in the future, or in other words, I’m sure that “I” have already enjoyed reading more from you in many futures!

your Occam razor perspective is the same of mine. I’m glad that I’m not the only one to think of it that way.

Arthur, your questions cut to the heart of the matter.

Nobody really knows the answers to you questions. This field is wide open!

First, what do we mean by “all things exist?”

One of the four basic approaches given by Tegmark basically treats the Multiverse as a cellular automaton that extends infinitely in all directions of time and space, and where each “cell” is an infinitesimal volume of space-time, i.;e. a kind of “action atom.”

To say that everything exists in some part of this cellular automaton universe could mean, for example, that every distinguishable local cellular automaton configuration exists somewhere in this grand cellular automaton. Two cellular automata are indistinguishable if they have the same value in each corresponding cell.

So somewhere there is a world in which Shakespeare’s works have been typed without any typos by monkeys typing at random, using a type face indistinguishable from that of a 1960’s Underwood typewriter.

If we want to go beyond Tegmark we could model the “infinite extent in all directions of space and time” with copies of the Surreal Numbers of John Horton Conway, which are infinitely richer than the real numbers in extent and continuity, including all ordinal numbers and all orders of infinitesimals.

The point is, that just because two regions of the cellular automaton are indistinguishable to us with our current instruments, does not mean that they could not be distinguished at some deeper level.

There could be another region of space time say 10^(10^(10^10)) light years from here that is indistinguishable from our currently observable universe over the next 100 billion years, yet detectable differences might begin to emerge after that, because all along there were “hidden variable” differences that we could not detect.

Your twin in that part of the multiverse would eventually take a different path from yours.

I do talk about these things in the post I linked, so I’ll limit this to “preview of coming attractions”.

A level four multiverse and even some models at lower levels) includes the notions of not only initial conditions, but the laws themselves being different. They can produce things which our laws would regard as contradictory. Indeed, if you look at the post “Duality and Divinity” there on my site, you’ll see that there are completely contradictory descriptions of our iwn universe that are becomming increasingly important as complementary to our understanding of our own universe’s laws.

As to physical consciousness, there is a lot of research going on in that field suggesting (with several competing models) that even the sense of “I” is a considerable over-simplification of what actually exists in the human brain. I hope to write some posts on that soon, but you people keep writing such interesting things to read that I can’t keep up with my own blog schedule ambitions!

My personal suspicion is that our individual spirits are a collective property of multiple physical copies scattered throughout spacetime: spirit is to person as mind is to neuron. I think a lot of the unique features of Restoration beliefs that are simultaneously the most attractive and the most troubling can pop up naturally in such a model.

But it still brings me back to the idea of “I exist.” If there is another situation somewhere else in which the exact initial conditions of my birth also happened, is it “me” over there or not? Would my consciousness exist in both places? If so, and the consciousnesses existed independently of each other, then there’s something else besides the initial conditions of the atoms of a zygote that makes up “me.” I also don’t seem to be experiencing any more than one consciousness now, so I can safely assume that either there is another “Arthur” out there with a different consciousness (thus demonstrating weakly that consciousness is not located in the brain), or there is no other “Arthur” out there at all.

I’d like to tie the contemplation of the mystery of the “I” to the current multiverse notions a little more broadly.

It seems there are 3 possibilities: (1) nothing exists, (2) everything exists, and (3) some things exist and some things do not exist.

Since possibility 1 can be ruled out experimentally, I’ve always thought that possibility 2, that EVERYTHING exists, ought to be the the preferred default position from an occam-razor prospective.

The idea that everything exists really raises some new possibilities about the relationship between the physical and the spiritual, as well as about how some of the elements in Mormon cosmology might be reinterpreted in ways that resolve some of the pains in the church over family relationships here on earth.

The idea that everything exists is something that the Tegmark article cited in 44 above actually touches on — he refers to it as a Level 4 multiverse. You can link directly to the article and Tegmark’s discussion of his entire hierarchy of multiverses, as well as my own speculations on the theological implications for Restoration theology here .

One of the great features of multiverse theories is that they strongly imply that anything that is not outright impossible has surely already happened in infinitely many worlds.

So if it is not absolutely impossible for intelligent beings to attain to a status of power, intelligence, and goodness so far beyond our own that we would call it “godhood,’ then it has already happened infinitely many times.

We’re not talking some being, like the god of orthodox Christian creeds, that exists independent of the multiverse.

Joseph Smith taught (in the King Follet sermon, for example) that our Heavenly Father was once a man like us, and that we can progress as He did to a similar status relative to our future creations.

Does multiverse theory make the existence of gods and devils inevitable?

That depends on how you define these terms. If you mean some philosophical impossibility, then no. But if you only mean infinitely more advanced in evil or good (respectively) than anything we can detect in our society, then yes.

How about evolution? We know that natrual selection happens. It seems to me that five billion years is infinitesimal in comparison with the expected time that it would take for evolution of matter from scratch (i.e. inert elements). But that is no problem in the multiverse, there are infinitely many worlds that that have been around infinitely longer than five billion years. No matter how long the time needed, that much time has already passed on infinitely many worlds.

So how did life get started in our extremely young “big bang” neighborhood?

It was brought here.

By whom?

By the gods that saw useable space here after the big bang cooled off, just like the islands of Hawaii became inhabited after the volcanoes had sufficient time to cool off.

A few hundred thousand years ago the Hawaiian islands began surfacing as volcanoes from the depths of the pacific ocean. The molten magma was pretty much sterile until it cooled off enough for bacteria to find little niches, etc.

Fast forward to Captain Cook. He finds these islands inhabited by humans and a great variety of other life. Did he assume that all of this life evolved from scratch on the island? Of course not. The islanders had legends of arriving there in out rigger canoes from far away Samoa, etc.

To me it’s just as ridiculous to think that life evolved from scratch in this tiny, young “big bang” remnant as it is to think that life evolved from scratch on the young volcanic islands of the Pacific Ocean.

Thanks for pointing us to those “one eternal round” scriptures. Here’s a possible interpretation based on multiverse theory:

Let D be a distance much smaller than any known theoretical or physical device can discern, say a trillion times smaller than any distance that can be seen with an electron microscope.

Let N be the number of times this distance will go into a trillion light years.

Then N^4 is much larger than the number of events that could ever be distinguished in our COU (currently observable universe) [because the space-time capacity of our COU is much less than (10^12 light years)^4]. If you believe in string theory, use an exponent of ten or eleven instead of 4.

So let M = 2^(N^11). Then this number M is much bigger than the number of distinguishable states that could obtain in a section of the universe comparable in size and extent to our COU.

But M is still finite and “numbered unto man,” so less than the number of creations of God.

So many of the sections of the “multiverse” must be indistinguishable from each other.

If God has seen all of these, then God is familiar with how they all play out, at least over a trillion year period.

Because of the finite number of distinguishable options, over long enough time periods, some of these typical looking space-times have to come arbitrarily close to repeating.

Taking intelligent advantage of sensitivity to initial conditions, an intelligent being could, by appropriate infinitesimal interventions (i.e. very “small means”) herd the almost periodic trajectory into a periodic trajectory and keep it there (by further infinitesimal interventions) even if the periodic trajectory is not stable..

Voila! One eternal round.

If the imploding matter lacks in total inward momentum, or it arrives out of phase to the crunch region, or it has any angular momentum to speak of, then a black hole will not form.

Various combinations of phase, angular momentum, and inward momentum can result in various kinds of explosions. The various possible outcomes are examined in the “Big Bounce” SciAm article referred to above.

The interesting question is about the implosion leading up to the explosion out of which came our own COU. Was there sufficient angular momentum to keep us from getting pinched off from the rest of the universe?

I would assume an affirmative answer, since observed massive bodies tend to rotate, and it would be hard to implode many such bodies together in such a way that all of their angular momenta would cancel.

This brings up Mach, who brought up the question, “Why is angular momentum absolute, when linear momentum is relative?” A person in a black box in space can easily do experiments to see if she is rotating relative to the “fixed stars,” but there is no experiment she can do to see if she is translating at a constant velocity relative to the fixed stars. In other words, Inertial reference systems are equivalent, but they are all non-rotating.

It doesn’t make sense to ask if the universe as a whole is rotating (rotating with respect to what?), but it does make sense to ask if our COU is rotating relative to the larger substrate out of which it came. That’s the angular momentum that we are talking about in the context of being pinched off or not.

It seems more likely that God would notice that “there is space there” to be organized if it were not pinched off from the rest of the universe. On the other hand, it might be safer to quarantine us by putting us in a separate component of space-time.

Here are a few more Scientific American articles that are relevant to this discussion:

From the May 2003 Scientific American Magazine: Parallel Universes: by Max Tegmark

From the October 2008 Scientific American Magazine:
Big Bang or Big Bounce?: New Theory on the Universe’s Birth
“Our universe may have started not with a big bang but with a big bounce—an implosion that triggered an explosion, all driven by exotic quantum-gravitational effects.”

From the July 2008 Scientific American Magazine
Using Causality to Solve the Puzzle of Quantum Spacetime
“A new approach to the decades-old problem of quantum gravity goes back to basics and shows how the building blocks of space and time pull themselves together.”

with regard to your question about the second law of thermodynamics:

Two conditions have to be satisfied before you can invoke the second law:

(1) The entropy in question has to be the entropy of a closed system.

(2) The system has to be near thermal equilibrium.

(3) The closed system has to have only a finite amount of entropy. (If total entropy is already infinite, then it cannot increase.)

The universe as a whole is a closed system, since there can be nothing outside of the class of all things. But it is extremely doubtful that it is a finite system.

Conditions (1)and (3) may apply to our local component of the universe, but (3) cannot apply to the entire universe. Condition (2) applies only rarely in placid locales.

For a relaxation of condition (2), see the Scientific American article

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-nature-breaks-the-second-law

Here’s a part of the heading:

Waste is unavoidable—a sad fact of life quantified by the famous second law of thermodynamics. But if the world is steadily becoming more disordered, how do you explain the self-organization that often occurs in nature? At root, the trouble is that classical thermodynamics assumes systems are in equilibrium, a placid condition seldom truly achieved in the real world.
A new approach closes this loophole and finds that the second law holds far from equilibrium. But the evolution from order to disorder can be unsteady, allowing for pockets of self-organization.

“We can (and do) easily put an upper limit on all explosions that we observe in astronomy. That is: convert the entire rest mass of the progenitor object(s) into energy, and add in any chemical energy or gravitational potential energy as well.”

I reply: So when the rest mass is unlimited, the size of the explosion is also unlimited.

Andrew continues:”My point in this, though, is that the Big Bang model argues that space itself is expanding, not that there was an ‘explosion’ of anything. Thus, talking about the explosions we see (e.g. supernovae) is not related to the origin of the universe or to any sort of expansion of space, which is what we use to deduce the early phase of the universe when it was really really hot, and really really small (the Big Bang).”

The “universe” you are talking about is not the entire universe; it is merely a mathematical model in the form of a closed space-time manifold analogous to (an idealized version of) the expanding bubble on the pancake substrate. The creature on the pancake doesn’t believe in the pancake substrate, because an elegant closed manifold model accounts for all of the observable phenomena fairly precisely, even the microwave echoes of the explosive birth of the bubble. [These are microwave pancakes;)]

If a super nova were dense enough, we would never see the explosion, because it would have an event horizon beyond which no light could travel. Likewise, our local component of the universe was dense enough at one time (perhaps 20 billion years ago)to nearly pinch off from the the substrate of the universe.

Like the creature on the bubble, we may falsely assume that the pinch was a complete severance.