This remains an important and difficult question. Although I don't think he deserved to be burned at the stake (that's a joke folks), I do believe that Giordano Bruno led us down the wrong path. The idea of infinite worlds is a moral cop-out in my estimation. We have chucked our cosmic responsibilities by pretending to be horrified at being lost in space. We are like Adam trying to hide behind the tree of knowledge. We are only hiding from ourselves.

Rather than appeal directly to anthropocentrism, I will try to stick with a more neutral logic - namely the identity of indiscernibles. At the same time I'll employ the notion of possible worlds and the virtual experiential chaos which is a background, but not strictly the source, of our world.

Philosophers find that a robust and realistic notion of possible worlds is a necessary construct to support many of our logical structures. This is anathema to traditional realists, and it does get support from quantum cosmology.

If we consider a quantum modal Bruno smoldering at the stake, we get a headache at the redundancy of you and me. This would make even the most ardent reincarnationist blush. It is only a robust Leibniz who can rescue us from this morass.

A monad will be a robust experiential episode. There can only be so many distinguishable such monads, and our world comprises most of them that we can imagine. Any other humanoid world that attempted to bootstrap itself out of the soup would get sucked into our reality vortex by the II, and our own imagination. What are left over are the ufonauts and nuts.

When time permits, I will elaborate. Something to look forward to, I'm sure!

.

rev. 5/30/98