Infinity and the human mind

This article is about the philosophy of the finite nature of the human mind. For the book by Rudy Rucker, see Infinity and the Mind.

The Universe (sometimes also called the "World", or the Multiverse, or the Omniverse) could be described as everything that exists, even if it never affects an individual observer. However, it is not clear what might affect an observer like a human mind. Just by existing, something may increase the probability of it being encountered, even if it never is encountered.

If the universe is infinite, it may contain structures of unlimited size and complexity. In that case, there may exist an infinite number of infinite minds. However, this raises major philosophical questions about the existence and nature of human minds.

Infinity and the human mind

Human minds are limited in several ways:

• Human minds are not only finite, but almost minimal in size compared to a randomly selected possible mind, which might appear inconceivably large to us.

• Human minds appear to exist near the beginning of the observable universe and near the start of history, assuming the universe and history will continue forever.

• Human minds appear to inhabit a perfectly consistent universe. There are many more ways a human mind could experience an inconsistent universe, in which anything at all could happen.

These paradoxes of complexity imply that human minds are not randomly formed conscious patterns (like Boltzmann Brains), but are embedded in some sort of larger physical or mathematical universe.

Principles of mediocrity

Some unknown universal process appears to be creating:

• more finite human-like minds than it creates infinite minds.

• more consistent human-like minds than it creates inconsistent or absurd human-like minds.

• more human-like minds inhabiting relatively early or simple civilizations than it creates human-like minds inhabiting boundless or timeless civilizations.

These identical human-like mind copies would have shared awareness, with the perception they are one unique individual.

The unknown process creating the above human-like minds might be quantum mechanics.

Infinity and physics

According to the many worlds interpretation, quantum physics is constantly generating countless new, but slightly different, copies of our universe. In this controversial interpretation, even the smallest subatomic event creates a new universe copy.

A hypothetical extension proposes that quantum physics could also create new "offspring" universes that would "sprout off" from existing universes. Quantum physics might allow this to occur constantly (with low probability), from every point of every existing universe.

If these offspring universes are indeed being generated, most universes would tend to be young. Intelligent life would tend to find itself at a relatively early stage of its evolution, inhabiting a consistent universe created by physics.

Physical patterns creating awareness

In addition, the "wasteful" and redundant complexity of the non-optimally organized matter composing human brains (and our environment), might create more awareness than an equally complex but much smaller and "maximally efficient" artificial mind made of computronium. If a small amount of organized matter creates a certain amount of awareness, double the matter organized in the same way might create twice the awareness. It's also conceivable the matter of our universe happens to be unusually efficient at "amplifying" awareness.

Objections to infinity

Extremely large things do exist in nature. However, intuitionists imply that the universe may not actually be infinite. While infinity exists as a mathematical concept, it may not exist in physical reality, and therefore be impossible, or a contradiction in terms. This is also known as finitism.

Even if the universe is infinite, it might not be exhaustively infinite. The number Pi has not been proven to be a normal number, so it might not contain all conceivable strings of numbers. Even if Pi is proven to be a normal number, it may not actually exist if the universe can't contain it, though the equations that generate Pi do exist.

Such speculations also conflict with the beliefs of many or most existing religions.