There are several dimensions by which we may feel small.
You may feel spatially small. Like how it may feel to be in a big city, or at the extreme, the realization as one's self as a morsel of matter in the entire universe.
You may feel temporally small. As deeply enriched a lifetime may feel, it spans a time that pales in comparison to the preceding and following billions of years.
I figure most people, at some point, have experienced some kind of awe, fear, or some other reaction to the listed examples. To reflect on the time spent understanding the world you've come to know and realize you stand before expanses perhaps 100s of orders of magnitude beyond your comprehension. This could be just as much panic-inducing as it is freeing depending on how you've constructed your notion of self and purpose.
If this wasn't enough existential fun, I'll toss another axis into the mix. We'll call it Multiverse Insignificance. Depending on which quantum theories you buy into, this can manifest in a couple of ways, though differences are primarily philosophical.
In one case, we can imagine that the universe we live in is the sole existing sample. In another case, we can imagine that there almost infinitely many concurrent parallel universes reflecting all the alternative trajectories our universe could have gone down at points where there have been a "fork" in the road.
Regardless of your interpretation, this leaves us pondering the infinite possibilities of "what could have been", both in the scope of our own decisions, but also in everything that has happened prior to our existence. This graphic helps illustrate the idea from the perspective of a person's life. This is our universe on a random walk.
The 2D plane simplifies things quite a bit, but its a great place to start.
One thing you'll notice is that there are often many paths that pass through a certain point, or at least frequently cluster around a certain area. Other areas are much more sparse.
If we imagine a region corresponds to the occurrence of a certain event, the amount of paths passing through this region tells us how probable it is.
For instance, if we ran 1 million simulations of the universe from the start and found the creation of a solar system resembling our own happening in 100k of these, we may estimate the probability of this happening to be 10%.
Also notable in this graph: The larger the time horizon, the more branches, variance, and unpredictability we encounter.
This also has a fairly intuitive explanation. If you asked me if we'd achieve life on Mars within the next hour, I'd be quite confident giving that about 0% probability. If you asked me about the 5 years, I'd have to think on that for a bit, assessing all the "ways" it could and could not.
We can represent the probability of this with this equation
Both the numerator and the denominator aren't really things we can measure experimentally, but we can often consult our knowledge of the world for a loose approximation. A guess is the best we can offer, and often this has practical merit!
i.e. The Walmart by my house tends to be busy the week before Christmas, so I imagine with high probability this will be the case in the future.
With these concepts laid out, we can start to talk about the true absurdity that anything is the way it is at all.
A thought experiment I keep around in my toolbox is
"If we went back in time N years and ran simulations from there, in what % of the simulations would X occur?"
Here's a couple:
If we went back to the time of the American colonies, in what % of universes did America break from Britain?
If we went back in time to the start of the first primates, in what % of universes is human right-handedness dominant (of those that reach something that resembles humans)?
If we went back in time to the first signs of life on earth, in what % of universes are traits like symmetry, or cells, or centralized brains, or gendered reproduction prevalent?
In how many universes, post industrial revolution, did humans develop smart phones?
If we went back in time to before the universe even began, in what % of universes do things like matter, or space, or temperature, or light and everything else we take for granted exist?
Once again, many of these are intractable, and this time around we may not even have relevant experience to depend on to tell us what kinds of outcomes tend to be probable. That said, these kinds of questions should give us a sense of how insanely vast the space is of possible universes and all the things that have to sequentially and jointly occur together to reach our specific instantiation of the universe.
And really, how absurd it is that all of the familiar constructs of our world: automobiles, hair, the stars, foreheads, years and months, art, plastic, twitter, grandmas, spicy, sweet, beaches, the color you get when you mix blue and yellow, promotions, political views, open sets, stained glass and seven story parking garages, opposites and almost synonyms, the need to wear clothes, bowling, cartoons, birds perched on telephone wires, lawnmowers cutting grass the sprinklers help grow, being able to have memories, life, death, The Beatles, botany, ancient Mesopotamia, getting in 10,000 steps a day, bruises, aging, ant colonies, electric eels, bald eagles, anteaters, last names, that 2+2=4 or how things are discretely quantifiable into countable integers, bacteriophages, ripped jeans, trees, twitch streamers, betting on horses, exchanging QR codes, what makes things funny, smoking plants for highs or rituals, jumping in front of the tv to cheer for a sports team, what makes sounds discordant or harmonious, MattressFirm, gender roles and etiquette rules, cats, water, love... all of it, is the result of just one of nearly infinite possible realities.
(I find this genre of artifact from our generation a piece of art celebrating the absurdity of this)
I imagine there are two kinds of reactions to this.
Unlike the aforementioned feelings of smallness, I foresee some might feel gratitude, supernatural intervention, or grandiosity that out of all the possible universes we could have ended up in, we ended up in a Goldilocks zone where all of the nice things we have today could form.
I think this is a fine reaction, and perhaps the healthy one. Though it's a bit biased. We're attached to this reality because it's the one we've lived through and we haven't seen anything else. We can't even know how much there is we don't know. Also, not to mention that we will only observe realities where awareness did develop. We might look at all the perfect conditions that allowed for life and take pride in the rareness of it, though for all we know the universe may have run its course repeatedly 10^1000 times without consciousness ever arising to be aware that this happened. If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
The other is the realization that there is nothing special about our reality. It is just another cosmic happenstance. This is also up for ambiguous interpretation. The insignificance felt here can feel like a loss, or it can be feel like letting go of the burden of needing to be significant.
Though there is something "special" I think we can talk about.
Let's go back to our original question for a moment, and let's generalize it a bit more.
"In what % of Y would X occur?"
Now this opens the door to scenarios with some tractability.
A scientist may culture bacteria across many different populations and assess how many develop a certain gene.
We can look at all the cultures through time and look at how many developed something like chopsticks. Or how many read left to right or right to left.
We can look at a set of houses and see how many were sold between 2015 and 2017
These smaller experiments can't exactly tell us about what goes down in other universes, though they can serve as microcosms of what could happen in nearby branches.
From this I'd like to describe a concept of what I call "oughtness" or what "ought to be".
If we find that across many different samples, there is a characteristic that occurs with very high probability, or maybe in every single sample, it might appear there is something intrinsic driving this outcome to happen over and over again across every world. There is something intrinsic in the state we began from and the rules that govern our universe that make this thing effectively written in the stars.
For example, perhaps every culture ever developed music and language, highlighting something properly unique about being human in this specific universe.
This becomes more difficult to evaluate when we bring oughtness back out to our universe-scale assessments as we now only have our single sample we can observe, but we can still speculate. If we did have some means of simulating the universe, I would wager we would see interesting patterns of attractor states and common events many trajectories of the universe would gravitate towards. I say this by virtue of the fact that the progression of the universe is a random process, but an interpretable structured kind of random unlike that of a whitened gaussian process. Its rules give it lower dimensional structure; thats our Manifold Hypothesis at work.
We can start off with a conservative guess and say that >99.99% of paths our universe could take have a star in them somewhere. This doesn't require much of a leap of faith from us; this "special" property that's being highlighted here is simply gravity.
A deeper question may be in what % of universes does intelligent life arise in? Is intelligent life something that the the universe is guided towards?
Taking a step back and observing the inhospital and cruel indifference of space, we might think not. Though some argue that life naturally caters to the universe's desire to increase entropy, perhaps making life another special property.
I invite you to take a look at all the familiar things of our world around us and question the probabilities of these characteristics. Are these abnormal outliers? Are these typical samples? Or are these things that simply ought to be?
This is something I think about often. We, to each other, very often criticize and impose how one ought to act. Different political ideologies, cultures, groups clash over standards for being, sometimes even calling upon the divine to bolster their case. And there's something about humans and a built-in compulsion to keep their fellow man from deviating from the norm, punishing or ostracizing those who do, and ultimately maintaining a distinction between in-group and out-group. This is an artifact (perhaps at the genetic level) of an old world, where safety in same and fearing the different made for convenient survival heuristics.
Nowadays, in a civilized world, these traits may misfire on their original usefulness, enforcing a standard of normalcy that really came by fluke! It is chance that in this universe it is normal to dunk newborns in water to celebrate their arrival. It is chance that the backpack is conventional but the fanny pack is not so stylish. It is chance that a smile signals happiness and a frown sadness (or even that these emotions exist at all!). It is chance that it is odd to smell someone as a greeting, while it is a commonplace, and perhaps a great honor, for dogs. The point here is that humans are all samples drawn from the distribution of humanity, an ever-changing distribution that is highly specific to this current universe and moment. An outlier in one world could be rated as a typical sample in another. Oughtness tells us that some realities are more common, but without a concrete frame of reference, accusations of deviance sit on shaky ground. Deviant from what? A transient construct with often spontaneous origin that we've just decided to play along with in the past 0.000000001% of history?
While we've mostly engaged with the macro level, it's interesting to reflect on micro level of your own life. Am I currently living the outlier path? Has my nature and nurture primed me to be a firefighter, and this is how 99% of all other branches starting from my birth played out? I've never even considered the thought of being a firefighter, but who knows?
We can't be too sure without being able to see outside of our limited frame of reference. One possible hint is that the existence of a very low probability event (in the scope of our world models for the present universe) may suggest a low probability branch. Maybe in some world there was a freak accident fire at the hospital at the time of my birth and being rescued by a fire fighter imprinted on me to go and pursue this career path.
Although now looking at a micro level, we are still looking across whole universe branches, just with a magnifying glass. These different life paths still map to entirely different universes; we've just been exclusively looking at how things differ from an individual's POV.
In looking at a life's path as being tied to a specific branch of our universe, it might be unclear where our own will exists in this story. For the record, it's unclear to me if free will how we typically imagine it exists at all. Or at least contrary to the default, I am in disbelief until proven otherwise.
Anyways. Once in a while, after getting worked up over another triviality, it can be fun to take a step back and realize what you are in the scope of all of history, in all of space, and across all possible spaces and times.
I have never been particularly religious, though I think this perspective
A motto I've lived by is "trying to feel the magic", for which "feel" is a very deliberate choice of word as opposed to "discover" or "find". From the topics discussed in this post, it is evident there's an abundance of magic in every place you look, it is now just a matter of taking that to heart and realizing how absurd it is that anything is at all.
Hopefully I rustled some jimmies, cheers.
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