The caveman analogy from my book "The Big Defreeze of the Universe - Analogies & Thought Experiments"
Let`s travel back in time to meet a caveman & give him a
glimpse of the future with a nice movie. We will leave the TV with the caveman
for a while and observe how he deals with it.
What would be his expected reaction?
He might get scared and run away and never come back. Then
he might start scratching his head and try to understand what is going on. He
will get closer to the TV touch it and hit it. He will search for the source of
the people in the movie, he will try to talk to them with no response from their
side, and they will continue doing whatever they are doing.
The caveman might notice few cables connected to the TV, he
will pull one cable the sound will go away with more gestures of curiosity and
surprise, and our caveman might plug the cable again, or pull another cable,
now the people in the movie disappeared. He will plug the cable again, the
people will come back. The caveman will not understand what is going on and
there is no hope that during his lifetime he will get it unless he gets a revelation
or something, and even with that, he might still not understand the full
technicalities of how this is operating.
The best guess he could make is that the source of the
people and the sounds on the TV are the cables he is pulling out and plugging
in, which would be considered as a smart observation compared to the people of
his time and they may assign him as the king of the tribe. He might take it
further and say that these cables are creating the people and the sounds on the
screen, to be then tagged as the greatest philosopher of his time thanks to his
genius observations and conclusions. Ego might hit him harder and he can claim
that he can manage the death and resurrection of the people in the movie by
pulling out and plugging in the cables and he might claim that he is the God of
this tribe.
For us, we know that the TV is merely a tool receiving and
transmitting waves of information, this information has been recorded in a
different time and location. The source of this information is the writer, director,
and actors in that movie from a different place and a different time.
We decided that we want to stop our friend the caveman from
brainwashing his tribe and try to explain to him what is going on. The guy is
quite smart and surprisingly he is almost philosophically outsmarting us by a
shocking reply:
Why do not you guys be receivers and transmitters too? And
the wires in your brains are like the cables in the TV. Yes, if you pulled out
one of them it will affect some of your functions but they are merely cables
helping you to receive and transmit the information. Yet one TV can transmit
high-quality sound and pictures, giving you a great experience. Other TV can
ruin the sound and the picture and in a sense pollute them.
Now we are the ones scratching our heads with gestures of
surprise and confusion. We decided to ask him if that is the case what would be the
source of information?
He gets closer to us, looks us in the eye, and then looks at the sky and
says confidently: The universe, there could be more than one, it could be a
multiverse.
We decided to pack our TV and tools, get on board with our time
traveling machine and go back to our people in the future, we have some
interesting stuff to report.
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