Rick Rosner on Why Existence Is Highly Probable

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/01/28

According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.

He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.

Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.

Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube. Here we – two long-time buddies, guy friends – talk about some physics-y, metaphysics-ish stuff.

Rick Rosner: So, a principle of IC is that consciousness fairly easily and reasonably and frequently arises because it’s an efficient way and an achievable way for systems to model the world to increase their chances for survival, right?

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Yes.

Rosner: Okay. So, evolution evolves; it arises and then that leads to questions about how shitty consciousness is as a thing for beings to have. For a lot of animals, for instance, I’m sure they appreciate being alive while alive and once they’re dead, everything’s erased. So, there’s like no eternal suffering. But the system does seem to have some drawbacks which leads to questions. We don’t know any better ways of existing consciously than the consciousness we’re used to with its drawbacks but it does prompt questions about whether there are better systems. Like, one better system might be or one less drawback might be indefinite existence or at least being able to merge your consciousness into persistent conscious systems. So, you never really go away.

That leads to the question of is that even possible. I mean it’s a whole other question as to whether indefinite existence is even a thing that should be aspired to but we can argue, “Yeah, given the structure of consciousness, we’ve evolved. We want to keep living.”  So, for creatures like us at least, the answer is “Yeah, it would be good to have limitless existence with the possibility of never passing out of existence” That leads to the question of is that even possible.  Philosophically, it doesn’t even sound possible because it involves an infinity and you can’t have an infinity. Living forever equals infinity. Living indefinitely dances around the infinity because the infinity never happens. You never reach infinite time; you just keep existing with a nonzero chance of being able to continue living indefinitely. So, you just keep living.

So, that’s probably philosophically and metaphysically possible because no matter how long you live, you never reach infinite time; you just keep going which is probably allowed but then you get to our model of IC which says there has to be an armature a framework that contains the information from which our universe is built. And were something to happen to that framework, as something happens to the framework for our consciousness, our brains; brains die all the time. So, you can imagine the death of an armature which would wipe out the universe it supports but there’s an argument against that which is, given the age and complexity of the universe, the odds that the universe quits existing and even the very long lifespans of the conscious beings that have evolved within it are really low, maybe vanishingly low, maybe that’s wishful thinking but maybe it doesn’t matter what the outside armature is because that armature is subject to probabilistic calculations about its continuing existence which give a near zero value for it winking out of existence. Do you have any questions or comments?

Jacobsen: There is a physics of annihilation and creation I think, that kind of physics really plays well into a theory of information applied to cosmology.

Rosner: Okay, when you say there’s a physics of how do you mean exactly?

Jacobsen: Annihilation and creation?

Rosner: Yeah,

Jacobsen: A physics of existence and non-existence in a way.  That kind of physics would be more grounded, it wouldn’t be that theoretical.

Rosner: You can mathematize that stuff is what you’re saying.

Jacobsen: Yes, you can provide a mathematical framework for creation of particles of universes of multi- universes and for the annihilation of them but basically a winking out when the universe has its little snapshot moments. At some micro point it could snapshot just out of existence.

Rosner: For instance, you could do the quantum mechanical calculation of what would be, take the visible universe; 10 to the 85^th particles. What would be the quantum probability that that whole thing would just wink out of existence?

Jacobsen: Yes, and I think we could use a statistical argument that the bigger and older the universe, the less likely it is to just wink out because there’s a long history of probability bent towards existence for that particular structure in terms of stability.

Rosner: I’d agree with you and I would guess that the quantum mechanical calculation for the probability is either encompasses the history of the universe or just ends up being kind of mathematically more or less equivalent to that. Basically, I don’t know that you’re calculating with the universe runs into its anti-self over its entire breadth; probably not. But anyway, there’s some way to calculate it and the numbers are really low and then there’s an analogous type of principle which is if you’re trying to determine whether the universe is natural and actually existent or is some kind of simulation. Even if it’s a simulation the odds that the universe will do something that will betray that it’s a simulation at any given moment in any given neighborhood is also probably vanishingly small.

If the universe is simulated and was just created like a second ago or the calculations for it were just implemented and what we think is the 14 billion year or much longer than that, history of the universe is bullshit and the universe was just created as a simulation pretty much now, the odds that will know that are vanishingly low because the universe acting like a natural universe as part of a really good simulation is baked into the calculation. Is that reasonable?

Jacobsen: I’m going to say yes. I’m going to simply go back to the idea that anything informational can then be characterized as computable. So, it wouldn’t be a normal computation because it would incorporate all the different kinds of computation that go on anyway because it happened in the universe anyway. What I’m getting more at is that you can do certain transforms not in the material sense but in the idea of how we think about it, how we conceptualize these processes. So, you can sort of do a transform of basic kinds of information defined as state change; State A to State B and the difference between those, the information change between those two states and then a sort of set theoretic approach to that by just including the element defined difference between those two states where each state is a superset. So, you’d say set C is the difference between set A and set B where set A and set B are state A and state B. So, you can make an informational equivalence with the set theoretic approach and there’s a bunch of things you can do like that.

Rosner: So, what you’re arguing is that each moment of the universe implies a big old set of highly probable next moments.

Jacobsen: Yes, and there are a set number of operators in the universe, for instance, a different types of set particles. So, let’s say, take the standard model of particle physics which as far as I know is complete now with the Higgs boson. Let’s say, you assign all of those individual subatomic particles that are part of the standard model particle physics as a letter or a symbol as an element and you can make a set out of that. So, you could define this mathematically, you could define this set theoretically…

Rosner: What you’re saying is every open quantum situation in the universe is a member of the set and you can determine from that set, a set of next possible moments that conform to that set and the vast majority of those moments depict or embody a universe that looks a lot like the universe we’re in at any given moment just a fraction of a second later and the number of those possible universes far dwarfs the more singular next moments that contain zero information; the universe just goes to nothing.

Jacobsen: Yes, and I think as you’ve explained before and as I agree with, there’s three things; there’s an infinite possible number of something things, arrangements of things or arrangements of elements whatever you want to call them, there are flavors of nothing like zero and 0.0 and 0.00 in terms of the definition of that but then there’s just an absolute actual empty set.

Rosner:  But the universe is the next moments that contain very little information because the universe has been obliterated. The number of those possible universes is just vastly smaller than the number of existent universes.

Jacobsen: Yes. I mean a universe that doesn’t even have a time to exist isn’t even is. Something like that is an empty set and that kind of empty set is really the absolute nothing that we’re… that versus everything else.

Rosner:  With quantum stuff you can probably characterize like a null universe with just like a few quantum numbers which may allow slightly different flavors of nothing but they all still can be characterized by just a few numbers as opposed to an existent moment in the universe that requires well more than 10 to the 80^th numbers all of which can vary in a multiplicity of ways just so that you’ve got some inconceivably large number of next possible moments.

Jacobsen: Yeah. I would even simplify the argument to this. You have more arrangements of something with an implied past and a possible future than with something by which I mean nothing; it doesn’t even have a have a past to exist or an implied future, it just isn’t.

Rosner: Yeah, and as we’ve mentioned before, you can take this back to Descartes, “I think, therefore I am” I don’t know what he meant but the evidence of existence of self-consistency as experienced by a thinking being implies a level of self-complexity, self-consistency, and self-consistency that argues probabilistically for existence in the same way that we’ve just been arguing probabilistically for the existence of the universe. It’s less probable that a human consciousness exists because the number of elements in a human consciousness is way smaller than the number of elements in the universe but it’s still big enough to argue for its existence probabilistically. And then you can get into arguments if you want and somebody would at some point; is if all we can really be conscious of is our consciousness, then arguments for the existence of the universe are not that much stronger because we can’t really know the universe. We can only know our consciousness but at this point we’re just okay to say our existence and the universe’s existence are both highly probable which is all I’ve got.

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