Abstract
ABSTRACT Garriga and Vilenkin have argued that under certain cosmological assumptions “the number of distinct histories in an [observable universe] is finite.” Consequently, each of us exists in infinitely many widely scattered copies. This essay explores some implications of an alternative cosmological hypothesis, which states that a full description of the universe doesn’t privilege any point or direction in space. The implications of this hypothesis include a proposed solution to the measurement problem of quantum mechanics and a new physical interpretation of Gibbs’s ensembles (collections of imaginary copies of a macroscopic physical system). An account of cosmic evolution that comports with the hypothesis makes randomness an objective property of the physical world and assigns a much wider role to chance than conventional pictures; but is not inconsistent with the possibility that we exist in multiple copies. At the end of the essay I speculate that creative biological processes, from evolution to cultural evolution to individual human lives, create qualitatively unique and unrepeatable varieties of biological order.
David Layzer