Here's a link I read a bit ago.
http://home.earthlink.net/~dolascetta/MetaFrameSet.html
(I've been having some fun with the ideas of consciousness and quantum uncertainty)
I'm going to make some wild guesses and see how much of this is true for various people out there. I'm going to guess most of you:
1) Live in areas of moderate to high population
2) Have at least one other sibling.
3) Are not representative of a very small minority in your area.
4) Would find life more difficult if relocated 100 miles north of where you live.
5) Have an internet connection
Ok, maybe I missed one of those - my mind reading skills are a bit rusty.
The point is that all of these tend to be true for anyone reading this because they are based on sampling bias. The audience isn't truly randomly selected and these seem easy to demonstrate:
1) Live in areas of moderate to high population
(Few people live in low population areas)
2) Have at least one other sibling.
(Larger families create a larger representation in the population than small families)
3) Are not representative of a very small minority in your area.
(By definition, minorities don't represent most people)
4) Would find life more difficult if relocated 100 miles north of where you live.
(Most random locations on the Earth are likely harder to live in than where you are now - and that's not even including up or down but simply on the surface of the Earth)
5) Have an internet connection
(If anyone needs this explained, don't bother reading the rest
)
Now this can be expanded upon - I'll presume everyone here is conscious, so I'm not talking to unconscious beings, and we can safely assume the planet we live on supports life and the solar system we're in was also capable of this, and that we don't live in a solar system incapable of supporting consciousness. Also, given two random solar systems, one supporting a single consciousness, while another that supports a billion,
if we are a random selected consciousness between these two, then we'd very likely be one of the billion, instead of the 1 chance in a billion and one, of being a lone consciousness in the other.
If quantum mechanics, selects single events to become true out of random possible universes, which could be either more supportive or less supportive of conscious beings, it would seem likely our conscious selves are represented in a universe out of many possible random ones, that happens to support a large number of conscious beings.
So, as an example of how this could be tested, if the coefficient of gravity could randomly fluctuate some through quantum mechanical "decisions" being made, it would seem very likely that gravity is currently at a value (relative to other characteristics of the universe) close to optimal in supporting consciousness. This isn't an original thought of mine, and others have done some calculations along these lines that tend to imply this is true.
Or if an atom could randomly be positioned somewhere through quantum uncertainty, it would likely ultimately come to be positioned at a location that supports maximum consciousness - any universe or evolution of it that fell away from this would be unlikely to be observed, because by definition, there would be few conscious beings to observe such a state.
Another way of looking at it could be to say that the universe we live in likely represents one of the most likely universes to be observed, and that events that occur in it are possibly events that are most likely to be consciously observed. Something that seems to be a trend is ever increasing information complexity, or sensitivity and connectedness in information processing. Life needs senses to detect its state and complexity in order to make intellegent decisions and survive. History seems to be a record of ever increasingly more sensitive and complex/interconnected systems (from the big-bang a point of energy and sub-atomic particles, to atoms, to molecules, to single celled organisms, to animals and humans, then societies and the internet ... to ???). The trend of the universe may not be toward entrophy, but life, with entrophy being simply the cost of creating it.
Now I have my doubts, because it seems like the universe could be filled with a lot more conscious minds, but things aren't usually as simple as they appear. There could be consciousness we don't recognize (like dark matter), or just as we don't typically see ants as intelligent, they likely don't see us as intelligent either
and because of limitations imposed by the speed of light, we can't truly see most the universe as it is now, only how it was. There's also the possibility that there's always a fixed amount of consciousness so selection of universes doesn't affect the likelihood of it being observed, or that selection of conscious observation isn't random, but anyway I thought this might be something interesting to people.
P.S. This could also possibly explain why we don't see many aliens around - ignoring that we likely wouldn't recognize them, and the fact that such encounters might be short lived - consciousness is most likely found in areas of the universe where it is most present.