Can we consider the multiverse as the capstone of the Copernican Revolution?

Question

The Copernican Revolution was a major shift in our mindset as a species. No longer were we the special center of the universe. If we generalize this notion, we see it surface in many areas beyond physics and cosmology.

We can call this broader notion the

Generalized Copernican Principle: Nothing is sui generis.

1. Life is just the proper confluence of (lifeless) physiochemical conditions.
2. Humans are but the latest iteration of one of many branches of the phylogenetic tree
3. We orbit a star that is just like countless others
4. Our galaxy is a middling galaxy among countless galaxies
5. Euclidean geometry is just one of an infinite variety of possible geometries
6. Our "now" is one of an infinite number of "nows" depending on relative motion
7. Physics looks the same regardless of your state of motion

and so on...

Each of these discoveries basically "took us down a notch" from being special to being ordinary. It seems that the natural conclusion of this line of thinking is that even this universe/reality we experience isn't privileged/special; that there are countless realities out there, that whatever can happen is does happen in at least one reality.

In a way, this feels like the most complete type of reality, since we are not limiting it to our particular history of this particular universe/reality. What is there that really would stop being (unconstrained) from realizing every single facet of itself?

Given the above, is the link between Copernican ideas and the multiverse something that has been written about before? Are there alternatives?

Answer 1

How stable is the Copernican principle, though? The so-called cosmological "axis of evil", for example, for now can be taken (inconclusively) as some sort of possible contraindication of attempts to situate local regions as "unimportant" or "not special."

At least, the centrality of every human subject, relative to the world as they perceive it, seems to be a manifestation of uniqueness and a transcendental counterexample to the impersonal abstraction of the Copernican principle to an alleged multiverse. But so perhaps one should say either that (A) there is no way to refer specifically to any ultimate totality of things, not even by a phrase like "the multiverse," or (B) the totality of all things is such that local regions are neither important nor unimportant in any robust sense (c.f. Kant's take on Zeno's view of the world, that the world-as-a-whole is neither similar nor dissimilar to any "other" thing). Imagine, for example, that everything is trivially important (if that description be allowed!), or importance itself is "Copernican": why is that not a way to reevaluate, for the better, all local regions, including ours?

One imagines that it is easy to get lost in the supposed power and impressiveness of general and abstract realities, and to lose sight of what is special everywhere, both relative to us and to other local domains. To not see the trees for the forest, in other words. Can we not imagine that there is a universe in the multiverse where everything is special? Or, at least, we might want to divide especiality into levels, so that regions in some possible world are all lower-level important, even if there are infinitely many copies of this possible world strewn throughout the array of all possible worlds, which would condition all these worlds (and their interior regions) as higher-level less important, etc.

Answer 2

The astrophysical multiverse is a theory just as much as the set-theoretic multiverse is a theory, in the sense that it is not testable. It is hard to see how such a speculative theory could be seen as the "apotheosis" of heliocentrism, which is eminently testable.

Answer 3

Concerning three of your questions:

1. So why would we say that only certain types of worlds can exist in the totality of being?

   Actually we do not say this. I consider it a great idea of Leibniz to argue with the concept of possible words. A possible world is any world the existence of which does not contradict logic and its principle of non-contradiction.

2. […] is the link between Copernican ideas and the multiverse something that has been written about before?

   Yes, it has been written out by Brian Green The Hidden Reality. Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos, see Chap 11, “The trek on this book has been toward what may be the capstone Copernican correction. […]”

3. Are there alternatives?

   The consequent alternative is to stop speculating about the concept of multiverses until we have some evidence from astrophysics for the existence of other universes.

   Penrose in some of his talks on youtube seems to be strictly against these speculations when recalling: First the theory, then its confirmation or rejection by experiment or observation. This position seems a bit conservative. In particular, because Penrose is a scientist who permanently generates new ideas even on fields where he is not an expert.

   Why prohibit speculation - as long as it is not taken as a substitute for scientific theory?

Aside: "Apotheosis" in the title of your question may give the question a possibly unwanted theistic touch. What about following Green “Can we consider the multiverse the capstone of the Copernican correction?”

Answer 4

For the most part, these examples have nothing in common except for the subjective and rather forced opinion that they all "took us down a notch".

Copernicus

It has been claimed that the Heliocentric universe "took us down a notch" because the earth was no longer at the center of the universe, but humans weren't at the center in the thought of the time. Humans were below fire and air and above earth and water. Furthermore, being nearer the center was no special status because the center was the bottom. The top was rarified and perfect; the bottom was full of sin and corruption. So there is no sense in which the Copernican revolution "took us down a notch" except in the revisionism that came centuries later.

Life is just the proper confluence of (lifeless) physiochemical conditions.

"Taking us down a notch" implies some sort of damage to pride or status, but this conclusion did not damage either. Vitalism wasn't developed to explain why humans are special, it was a theory developed to deal with real scientific observations, no different in principle from other scientific theories like phlogiston or electrons. And it's hard to see how it "takes us down a notch" just because one theoretical force was eliminated. And besides, that, physical reductionism is no longer the dominant view.

Humans are but the latest iteration of one of many branches of the phylogenetic tree

Alternatively: humans are the latest iteration of the most advanced branch of the phylogenetic tree! We are the latest and the best! I don't think it's useful or insightful to attribute subjective values to a scientific theory, but if you do, any value is as good as any other.

We orbit a star that is just like countless others

There was never a time when the heliocentric universe was the general belief of academics. By the time the heliocentric solar system became the general belief, the question of other suns was already being debated. So this belongs with Copernicus.

Our galaxy is a middling galaxy among countless galaxies

I'm pretty sure there was never a time when scientists knew what a galaxy is and thought that our galaxy was special, so this is just a change that never happened.

5, 6, 7

I have no idea how these theoretical advances "took us down a notch". They made us aware of parameters and possibilities that we had not been aware of before, but how is that a blow to human status or a blow to human pride more so than any other discovery of something we hadn't known before?

Answer 5

Leibniz is the inventor of the multiverse.

Gilles Deleuze -- Seminar on Leibniz: Philosophy and the Creation of Concepts

Lecture 02, 22 April 1980 https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-02-9/

Imagine this: you dream, and a kind of wizard is there who makes you enter a palace; are you following me? This palace... – so, I am insisting because otherwise, you won’t listen to me: I am only relating a famous text by Leibniz for which I’ll provide the reference later, a very beautiful text which is the Dream of Apollodorus -- here we have Apollodorus going to see a goddess, and this goddess leads him into the palace, and looking more closely, this palace is composed of several palaces.

Leibniz loved that, boxes containing boxes. In [another] text [...] he explained that in the water, there are fish and that in the fish, there is water, and in the water of these fish, there are little fish of fish... It's always infinite analysis. The image of the labyrinth hounds him. He never stops talking about the labyrinth of continuity.

Fine, so there we are, he is led toward a palace, and realizes that this palace is composed of palaces, and it has the form of a pyramid, the point up above, and it is endless. And he notices that each section of the pyramid constitutes a palace. [...]

In the highest section of my pyramid, closest to the point, I see a character who is doing something. Right underneath, I see the same character who is doing something else in another location. Even underneath him, [it's] as if all sorts of theatrical productions were playing, and yet completely different ones were playing simultaneously, in each of the palaces, with characters that have common segments. [...]

This is from a famous text, a huge book by Leibniz called Theodicy, namely, God’s justice, divine justice.

[...] What he means is that at each level, this is a possible world. God chose to bring into existence the extreme world closest to the point of the pyramid. How was he guided in making that choice? We shall see, we must not hurry since this will be a tough problem, what the criteria are for God's choice. But once we've said that he chose a particular world, this world implicated Adam being a sinner; in another world, one can imagine Adam not sinning, all that is simultaneous; in this version of the dream, everything is simultaneous: there is also Adam sinning, but sinning in an entirely different way. [...] Each time there is a world; all these worlds are unfolding simultaneously.

Something else: each of them is possible. They are incompossible with one another, only one can pass into existence. And all of them attempt with all their strength to pass into existence. The vision that Leibniz proposes of the creation of the world by God becomes very stimulating. There are all these worlds that are in God's understanding, and each of which on its own presses forward pretending to pass from the possible into the existent. They have a weight of reality, as a function of their essences. As a function of the essences they contain, they tend to pass into existence. And this is not possible. Why? Because all these worlds are possible, each for itself, but they are not compossible with each other. Hence, existence is like a barricade (barrage). A single combination will pass through. Which one?

You already can guess Leibniz's splendid response: it will be the best one! What does “the best one” mean? Perhaps not the best one by virtue of a moral theory, but by virtue of a theory of games. And it's not by chance that here as well, Leibniz is one of the founders of statistics and of the calculus of games...

Answer 6

Although I generally agree with @David Gudeman's description of the "Copernican Revolution" in his initial comment, I will go with a more moderate description, from Wikipedia.

...the phrase "Copernican Revolution" in the 20th century came to be used for any (supposed) paradigm shift.

Can such a paradigm shift occur in our times?

Because a paradigm shift like this - where a heaven with angels is transformed to a relativistic universe with complex mathematical structures - means a re-writing of science.

And if our now familiar entities in universe are to be transformed, I can't even imagine into what.

The multiverse is a vague concept: parallel, flat, other, alternate, multiple, plain ... I suspect it is something more profound than that, yet more close to us.

Perhaps dark matter and dark energy are the manifestations of this multiverse that it is just starting to reveal itself...