Thursday, July 8, 2021

Why A Multiverse Could Never Be Scientifically Demonstrable

Believing that the laws of nature could have differed very dramatically from their current perceived natures is a logically correct stance.  After all, this is a matter of logical possibility and hypothetical alternate versions of the universe.  To deny that it is even possible for the universe to have involved different scientific laws is pure stupidity.  So, too, is denial of what logically follows from this.  What follows is that scientific laws are not necessary truths (truths that could not be or become false and that could not have been any other way) and thus could potentially change or cease to be true at any moment, as well as that they might not all apply to the entire scope of the cosmos.  This has important ramifications for every subcategory of science, from quantum physics to cosmology.

In light of these logical facts, it is far from within the capacity of scientific observation to ever truly demonstrate if a multiverse, or an assembly of separate universes that might have wildly different scientific laws and histories.  How so?  Suppose that there actually was even a shred of evidence for an actual multiverse.  Perhaps a division between universes is pulled away by some natural or supernatural event.  There would be no ultimate way to prove that even this seeming dimensional rift and path to another universe is indeed a gateway to a distinct universe.  A single universe could be more than vast enough to contain very diverse environments and even different laws of physics.  Only assumptions can be held onto by those who pretend like there is some inherent philosophical connection between a physical world and a specific manifestation of something like gravity or magnetism, and once a person has shed such assumptions, it becomes rather clear that there is no guarantee that even the same universe would display its laws of nature unilaterally.

Hell, even if laws of physics like gravity behaved differently on the other side, there would be no way to prove it is not some other part of the observer's universe that is being seen, for scientific laws, unlike the laws of logic, do not have to remain static or universal by some inherent necessity.  This is true even within the same universe.  In other words, seeing a small part of the cosmos in person and noticing specific patterns of how the material world behaves does not prove anything about how a separate part of the universe is functioning, and this is even setting aside the epistemological unverifiability of seeing scientific laws as they are.

If this is the epistemological nature of the senses as they relate to scientific matters in the external world, how could anyone but a fool truly believe that they would be able to know if they are gazing at anything more than perhaps another planet at most?  Science can never deliver people from the major epistemological limitations of having senses without also possessing omniscience with respect to the physical world.  Between the utter fallacies of induction, taking the external world at its mere appearance, and assuming that even constant correlations are most certainly causal connections, science cannot even establish things about life on Earth tomorrow that so many people would just take for granted.

Sometimes people commit the fallacy of assuming that science will somehow escape from its epistemological limitations, as if mere sensory perceptions alone could ever do such a thing!  Even if the process of scientific observation itself truly did change instead of inevitably retaining a fixed nature even as humans use it to uncover more correlations, it would be folly to just assume that some previously unknown metaphysical possibility about the universe--like the issue of a possible multiverse--will specifically become provable at some point in the future.  There is not and never could be a way to prove by simple observation that a multiverse exists.  Moreover, it is neither logically impossible nor logically necessary for there to be more than one individual universe, so this leaves humans unable to prove anything more than conceptual truths about a hypothetical multiverse.

No comments:

Post a Comment