---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <s3raphita@...> wrote :
I have read Deutsch's Fabric book and you have given an impressive summary of his main idea - though my memory of the work is quite hazy. As you say his view hasn't had many takers yet but I understand it is becoming more popular among the new generation of physicists. Oh cool! Respect! His new one "The Beginning of Infinity" is much better actually, it's very philosophical and concentrates more on how we acquire any sort of knowledge and how science works (or fails to) and the difference between good and bad explanations. It would make a great university course on it's own. I find it invaluable and get more to think about per page than anyone else I've come across. It's an easier read too, but the clarity of it is such that you feel like you always knew what he's just painstakingly explained. Until you get to the multiverse chapter, that is still like having your head kicked in. But he uses a really good analogy based on that episode of Star Trek where the transporter malfunctions and some of the crew enter a parallel universe. That eases you into it but it's still like cycling up hill with your brakes on. For me anyway. It reminds me of the day I finally cracked Einstein's general theory of relativity and felt like I was having an out of body experience. What would it be like to think like that all the time? What makes people dubious is precisely the claim that the idea of multiverses splitting off is the *simplest* explanation. Whatever happened to Ockham's Razor? According to Deutsch it is Occam's razor in its simplest expression. It all sounds bizarre I know, but if I was to say the universe is infinite nobody here would bat an eyelid. But that involves much more space and other versions of us than the multiverse does - in fact it means that everything permitted by the laws of physics has already happened an infinite number of times. And what if the universe really is infinite and is also a multiverse in which case there are infinite parallel universes as well as spacially seperated versions of this one. But they would all add up to the same amount. There's a good chapter on infinity in Deutsch's new book. Re "What's not to like?": Well one thing that might be not to like is that if all these possibilities that fail to make the grade in our world are being actualized elsewhere then doesn't that mean there are worlds where Hitler won WWII (to take the laziest, most hackneyed example)? And so on down the line. In fact(s) there must be innumerable worlds where the inhabitants are living in nightmarish, hellish conditions (but also blissful ones). The theory seems to make all our moral decisions vacuous as even if we do a good deed, "next door" we've chosen the bad option. There's actually something demonic about the idea. Agreed. But maybe it's us that's demonic? Someone (I forget who) wrote a sci-fi book in which the multiworlds quantum theory has been finally proved true and there is a mass outbreak of suicides as people realize that elsewhere there are other "themselves" who made the right career choice, made the right choice of partner, etc, and they can't bear the thought they're stuck in this universe as failures. That sounds eerily familiar for some reason (ahem)... Re "There's no realism to it, that's the problem": Some might regard that as the beauty of it. Maybe the universe is a work of art in progress. I get happier the more "normal" I find things to be. But I wasn't always like that. I read "The dancing Wu Li masters" decades ago and my interest was piqued but it always comes back to the fact that if consciousness was somehow fundamental we would be able to change things and that never happens. Whatever we do the universe carries on cold and oblivious, I get comfort from that, I'd hate it if Johhn Hagelin got the Noble prize before a realist did. All the mental gear changes I'd have to make! So I'm going to take a lot of convincing but it was the TMO and its ideas that made me look further into it than I had before to see if there was any truth to any of it. So I thank John Hagelin for that anyway. Re: "If something is nothing until we perceive it then what was it before we did if the light that carries the information left the subject before we existed?": OK here are two possibilities: 1) Physicist John Wheeler suggested "backwards causation" - in some way we are pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. "We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago." I'll research and think about that. I have heard similar ideas about time running backwards as a quantum explanation and it always makes me think "Why?" 2) There is one Absolute consciousness (outside of time) that is keeping the whole shebang in order. You might call this Absolute "God" but I don't want to give Barry an attack of acid indigestion. Or me, I would call it God too, I don't know why the TMO skirts around the issue and insists on "the constitution of the universe" and "natural law" if you want to invoke an all powerful deity get on with it, if it's real then it's amazing enough to be dignified with the right name! I don't like the idea because what we've seen so far is that things get simpler as they get closer to the source of where everything came from. Introducing a God of any sort is a way of making it much more complicated because all of a sudden we have this intelligence to account for as well as everything else. What we know is that intelligence is complex and complexity like that cannot spontaneously come into being because it has to evolve, otherwise it's just magic and you get into an infinite regress about who developed the trick, they don't do it themselves. It is also unnecessary (as far as we know) and it seems to be something people just want to be true because they like the idea. It all comes down to whether it's a good explanation and it seems not. But maybe it is, who knows? It sounds like God would be a disappointment to me. Ask yourself what this *real* world is supposed to be like? Let's stick to one fact - "what is real about this orange I'm about to bite into?". Is it its colour? Nope - my nervous system adds the sense of colour - colour doesn't exist "out there". What about the orange's texture? My sense of touch. Its taste? My taste buds. Its shape? My visual cortex. Its position in space and time? Space and time are our minds' ways of organising our experience (thank you Immanuel Kant). And so on down the line . . . I would say that space is where the stuff that happens creates the time for itself to happen in. So what is left to your supposed reality? I'll bet the best you can come up with is "structure". Reality must have a structure that matches the structure of my conscious experience (otherwise I'd fall under a bus every time I went to work). But what could be more *ideal* than structure? Someone puzzling over some abstruse theory in pure mathematics is pretty much our archetypal image of what engaging with the ideal is like. If what is real turns out to be information then we are living in a virtual world. Yup, the world we love isn't like the one we live in everyday but it might as well be because we aren't going to directly see it any other way. But doesn't knowing this make you more likely to accept the multiverse theory? If our senses and feelings of solidity and direction are effectively an illusion created by the arrangement of subatomic particles that make up the real us, then isn't it no more an illusion than if the atoms that create our virtual world are also doing the same illusion for many other universes? I like the idea of the brain as a virtual reality machine, it's a good description of what it does and I've always wanted a way to swap programmes with other people's worlds and experience their world as my own for a day, would we die of shock or go Meh? But the information it creates the illusion with is real and deterministic, how to describe it indeed?
