blindmen6:

When I first began exploring the I Ching in early 1964 I was captivated initially by its apparent success as an oracle. Of course it has been used in this manner in China throughout history and I was well aware of this. But despite the historical occurrences of divination  in the West (e.g., the Delphic oracle, Celtic divination, the tarot, etc.) our modern Western orientation is squarely opposed to such beliefs and practices.

On closer examination it seemed the I Ching was not so much predicting the future as mapping out its probable directions of development from the given present moment. The actual course of events was always undetermined and open to change. It appeared the Book of Changes, as it is also known, was a catalogue or categorization of possible changes according to their probability and advantage.

 In addition to its use as an oracle, the I Ching has had a major influence on the philosophy, literature and statecraft of China from the time of the Zhou Dynasty (1122 BC – AD 256). Remarkably, for thousands of years Chinese philosophy has come down firmly on the side of free choice and non-determinism. It admits the existence of prepotent structures or powers (Heaven and Earth) which set the stage for human activity and limit its range, but leave man always free to act as he will within those comprehensive limitations. Far from predicting the future it demonstrates the various possibilities and attempts to indicate the benefit and harm offered by each.

Even at this early stage of my exploration it was not lost on me that the I Ching was a comprehensive and largely self-consistent system of thought or worldview that was much more akin to the probabilistic manner in which quantum mechanics views the world than to the deterministic clockwork world of Newton and Descartes. 

ikenbot:

Time Need Not End In The Multiverse

Imaged Above: Ultimate guide to the Multiverse

Gamblers already had enough to think about without factoring the end of time into their calculations. But a year after a group of cosmologists argued that they should, another team says time need not end after all.

It all started with this thought experiment. In a back room in a Las Vegas casino, you are handed a fair coin to flip. You will not be allowed to see the outcome, and the moment the coin lands you will fall into a deep sleep. If the coin lands heads up, the dealer will wake you 1 minute later; tails, in 1 hour. Upon waking, you will have no idea how long you have just slept.

The dealer smiles: would you like to bet on heads or tails? Knowing it’s a fair coin, you assume your odds are 50/50, so you choose tails. But the house has an advantage. The dealer knows you will almost certainly lose, because she is factoring in something you haven’t: that we live in a multiverse.

The idea that our universe is just one of many crops up in a number of physicists’ best theories, including inflation. It posits that different parts of space are always ballooning into separate universes, so that our observable universe is just a tiny island in an exponentially growing multiverse.

In any infinite multiverse, everything that can happen, will happen - an infinite number of times. That has created a major headache for cosmologists, who want to use probabilities to make predictions, such as the strength of the mysterious dark energy that is accelerating the expansion of our own universe. How can we say that anything is more or less probable than anything else?

Read on..