The Art of Putting up with People

The Impossibility of All Possible Worlds

Okay, so this post comes partially from a dream that I had this morning. The dream itself is unimportant, and my thoughts can probably be refuted by any person who has had beyond two weeks in junior high physics, but here we go...

When I hear people talk about about how all possible universes exist simultaneously, they usually say something along the lines of "There's a universe where you wore a red shirt today, one where Al Gore became president in 2001, where the Cubs win every World Series..." And it is at this point that I know that this premise is false.

The inevitability of the Cubbies ineptitude serves here to illustrate what is the anthropocentric view of the all possible universes conceit. It's always painted as human decision-making that multiplies the universe out to all its possibilities, and frankly, that's BS. Our whims are not the only possibility generators around. When the cat decides to poo in your right shoe or the left one, that is a possibility. But let's go ahead and skip all the way to the pot-head infinite regression scenario. There are an infinite number of possibilities for every sub-atomic particle, so every instant (way shorter than a second, folks) spins off an infinity of its own.

Now, I know infinity is bigger than I can imagine, but multiplying infinity to the power of infinity by an infinite number of yoctoseconds just strikes me as silly. Pardon my incredulity.