Showing posts with label Discworld. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Discworld. Show all posts

Saturday, July 17, 2010

A new argument against an undesigned very large multiverse

  1. In a very large (e.g., infinite) undesigned multiverse, there is nothing incongruous.
  2. There is something genuinely intrinsically funny in our universe.
  3. The genuinely intrinsically funny is incongruous.
  4. Therefore, our universe is not a part of a very large undesigned multiverse.
The point behind (1) is that when you have all these probabilistic resources, you don't have incongruity, no matter how weird the stuff in it is.

Terry Pratchett suggests that his Discworld is either the product of gods with a sense of humor, or just something in an infinite multiverse. If the latter, then according to (1) and (3), nothing happening in the Discworld is genuinely intrinsically funny: it is only funny relative to us, i.e., the incongruity is between that world and ours. I prefers the divine sense of humor hypothesis as an interpretation. (I am now reading Making Money. Lots of fun so far.)