What? A logical flaw in multiverse reasoning? Aired at Scientific American?
We thought they had swallowed the whole can of lard, can and all. But now this:
Consider the following analogy. You wake up with amnesia, with no clue as to how you got where you are. In front of you is a monkey bashing away on a typewriter, writing perfect English. This clearly requires explanation. You might think: “Maybe I’m dreaming … maybe this is a trained monkey … maybe it’s a robot.” What you would not think is “There must be lots of other monkeys around here, mostly writing nonsense.” You wouldn’t think this because what needs explaining is why this monkey—the only one you’ve actually observed—is writing English, and postulating other monkeys doesn’t explain what this monkey is doing…
But isn’t there scientific evidence for a multiverse? Some physicists do indeed think there is a tentative empirical evidence for a kind of multiverse, that described by the hypothesis of eternal inflation. According to eternal inflation, there is a vast, exponentially expanding mega space in which certain regions slow down to form “bubble universes,” our universe being one such bubble universe. However, there is no empirical ground for thinking that the constants of physics—the strength of gravity, the mass of electrons, etc.—are different in these different bubble universes. And without such variation, the fine-tuning problem is even worse: we now have a huge number of monkeys all of whom are typing English.
Philip Goff, “Our Improbable Existence Is No Evidence for a Multiverse” at Scientific American
There is no scientific evidence for a multiverse. There are a large number of intellectuals who need it to be true. At one time, there was a large number of similar people who needed witchcraft to be true.
Philip Goff may be worth paying attention to. See, for example, “Meet the serious panpsychists.” You don’t have to agree with him. But he isn’t some idiot who is trying to tell you that your consciousness is an illusion.
See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide