Don Page - What Exists?

Don, I love these FQXI conferences. We deal with such fundamental issues, multiverse and time and information. We're at this conference now talking about observers and events, but one of the categories that we're talking about is what exists. It's really one of my favorite questions because it allows you to get this big, get your arms around everything, and maybe there's something you're missing. You just keep going out and out and out. Some of the people I'm talking to here are physicists. When I ask them what exists, they talk about quantum wave functions, and that's all they talk about. I mean, that's the only thing they think exists. I think you have a bigger version of what things exist in all reality. Yes, okay. Well, of course, there's the platonic existence of logical truths such as mathematical theorems, but let me go on to the things that I don't believe are logically necessary. But I guess for me as a Christian, first I would believe in God, and God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. So that's a category of God? Yes, so there's a category of God, and there's a category of the universe or multiverse, and then there's a category of other things that God may have created. So there's like three categories, and I guess within this, I might say, well, for God, I think there's a benevolence of, you might even say using sort of an ethical requirement to create the best possible world consistent with his nature, and then there's, I believe, omniscience of knowing what the best would be. Okay, so that's a God category, and there's one in it that may have three persons in Christian religion or however you think about that. Is there anything else in that category but God, or that's a separate, that's its own category? Well, it's, yeah, I think I would say that it's, you know, it's its own category. All right, so that's one. The second you say is the multiverse in some sense, you know, the physical existence. Right, and for that, here I'm sort of laying out what is the primary existence. And so I think in some sense, I think most primary are the sentient experiences we have, that the consciousness we have. And then I, but I do believe that the way that this is connected with physics is that for each sentient experience, for a sentient experience being a conscious perception or all that we're aware of at once, for each one of those, there's what we call in quantum theory a positive quantum operator. Now that's a little bit of an abstract thing, but the idea is that there's a third thing, third fundamental thing for the universe, and that is the quantum state of the universe or multiverse. And this quantum state then gives what we call expectation values to operators. It allows you to get a number for each one. And I would interpret it for these operators, for each one that is corresponding to a sentient experience, then this expectation value would say, would give the measure of that, would give to what extent it occurs. And so, for example, I know from introspection that I have sentient experiences, and I very strongly believe that you and other humans also do, and I believe pets do, and higher animals, and probably to a lower degree even the lower ones. But I might think, for example, of ants. There are far more ants than humans. But yet I suspect that the measure for each ant perception is much lower than that for each human perception, so that the total reality or the total measure for human perceptions is, I suspect, higher, or at least not much lower. So these are all in your second category. Yes, this is in the second category. And so where you first said multiverse, what you really mean more complex is the sentient experience, almost a creation in a way of the multiverse. But God created it. Right, yes. The God category, now the multiverse category in all of its different ways, but interacting with sentient experience. Yes. And you can't have a multiverse without the sentient experience. God, I suppose, in your worldview, created both the sentient experience and the opportunity to have it with the multiverse. Yes, I think if God wanted to, he could create a multiverse or universe with no sentient experience. I don't know whether he would have a motivation to do that. But it seems like he's created one with sentient experience. And therefore, I tend to think that for him, it's a high value of creating something with sentient experience, but also high value of creating something that's very elegant. So what's very interesting to me is that you did not separate out consciousness and the multiverse as two separate categories that God created, but you, in fact, had them as one category. Yes, I believe that they're very strongly related. We don't know the laws of psychophysical parallelism. How do you get from one? As I say, I have a framework where it's expectation values of operators that give the measure of conscious perceptions. That's a framework, but not a theory, because I don't know what these operators are. Right. Some people would say, who believe in God, that God created consciousness separately. Some people say consciousness is the only fundamental thing. There is no God or consciousness created God in some way. But I just want to understand that your concept of consciousness is in the same category as all of the physical experiences in this very broad sense of a multiverse in time and space and potentially a multiverse in quantum physics as well. Yes, that's true. Although, you know, I do believe God, in a sense, has his own consciousness, which probably has quite a bit different character from ours. Okay, but that's in the God category. Yeah, right. That's in the God category. Okay. But there's, of course, there's this third category of other things God might create. So what's in that? And I do believe that Jesus has promised that there will be created new heavens and new earth, and then they will have us resurrected in that. And we don't know what the physical laws are like that or the physics, but, you know, I do believe that there's going to be something like sentient experiences there. Maybe the physics will be different. What other things have God created? I mean, people talk about angels. People talk about different realms of non-physical spaces. People talk about platonic objects. Is all that stuff in the other category? Well, I think there would be, I mean, there's various possibilities. And, of course, I don't know what God has created. Now, I will say, I guess from my own view, this platonic thing of mathematical truths, I think that they just exist as logical necessities, and they can't be created or destroyed. So those things I think have, well, sort of a fuzzy existence, but that's apart from God. They have their sort of abstract existence independent of God. That's at least my own personal view. Now, of course, God can use them. But, anyway, so I believe, yeah, God and our universe and then other entities that God has created.