Question I recently read <i>Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</i>, and it claimed that the universe is so big that any thing you can imagine is true somewhere. If that is true, does it mean that as I or someone else imagines a place that it blinks into existence right then or was it there all along? In a way are we all collectivly creating the world we inhabit now? I apologize for my spelling and grammar. I've never studied philosophy so sorry if that was a bad question.

Accepted:
November 30, 2005

Comments

I think the idea in the book was that anything that is possible is actually true somewhere: It is not that anything one does imagine becomes true, but that anything one can imagine is true, somewhere or other, the assumption being made that, if one can imagine it, it must be possible. (Whether that is true, whether "conceivability implies possibility", is a much contested issue.)

It seems unlikely that the Universe is actually as described in the Hitchhiker's Guide,if only because the universe is finite and it would seem that there areinfinitely things that are possible. But David Lewis has held a view that is in some ways similar: Reality consists of ever so many universes, all of which are spatio-temporally disconnected from one another, and anything that might have been true is actually true in one of those universes. So, for example, since it is possible that I should explode, leaving nothing but a pile of gold in my chair, there is a universe somewhere in which not I, since I live in this universe, but someone otherwise exactly like me explodes, a pile of gold being all that is left not in this chair, since it is here, but in a chair otherwise just like this one. Poor guy.