Re: The multiverse is unscientific nonsense??

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/22/2023 12:40 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 1:59 PM Brent Meeker  
wrote:


/> You pretty much ignored everything I wrote/


What the hell?!I went over what you said point by point.

/> and were exercised to refute the idea of Heisenberg's cut,
which neither Bohr or I endorsed. /


I don't know about you but Bohr insisted that we treat electrons as 
quantum objects but our measuring instruments as classical objects. He 
also insisted that human observers were classical objects, but he 
never specified exactly where the dividing line between the quantum 
world and the classical world was. And if that dividing line isn't the 
"Heisenberg cut" then what is? But to be fair to you it's difficult to 
know exactly what Bohr endorsed because much of his philosophical 
prose is virtually unreadable; that's one reason the Copenhagen 
adherence can't agree about fundamentally important things even among 
themselves.
The point is that Bohr (unlike Heisenberg) didn't regard the "cut" as 
part of physics.  It was a choice of our description.  It could be 
chosen anywhere up to the macroscopic result recorded or by consciously 
recorded.  This more like QBism (without knowledge of decoherence) than 
you version of the admittedly diverse Copenhagen interpretation.



/> Do you deny that science relies on definite recorded results/


Experimental results are necessary but they are not sufficient, you 
also need a theory to make sense of it all, otherwise it's just a 
bunch of numbers.
Experimental results include theoretical interpretations which get 
written up in arXiv.org, all of which are macroscopic and classical so 
we can all read them and agree on what they say.  They are never in a 
superposition anymore than a cat.


Experiments can never prove that a theory is correct but it can prove 
that a theory is wrong, and it can prove that some theories are less 
bad than others.
Which has nothing to do with my point; which is that it's 
all*/necessarily classical/*.



/> and simply postulating an evolving wave function/


 Postulating "an evolving wave function" is one way to put it, and a 
way to say the same thing with different words is "Schrodinger's 
equation is correct". You're the one who postulates that Schrodinger's 
equation must be wrong because all those other worlds simply couldn't 
exist, that would just be too strange; so despite what the equation 
says the function must collapse for some reason. But neither you nor 
anybody else knows how to fix the equation. As for me, I say if 
something isn't broken then don't fix it.



/> does nothing without a theory of how we see definite events? /


 I've already gone over that in some detail, if you disagree with what 
I wrote that's fine but be specificabout your objection, I refuse to 
just keep repeating myself.


/> Many world has no clear explanation of how many worlds there
areand how they get weighted or divided/


I've already gone over that in some detail, if you disagree with what 
I wrote that's fine but be specificabout your objection, I refuse to 
just keep repeating myself.

I have been explicit and I refuse to repeat myself too.


/> Decoherence theory at least gives us an idea of why a
measurement in the general sense produces an apparently classical
world.
/


 Decoherenceis fully compatible with Many Worlds, in fact the 
interpretation simply wouldn't work without it. Simply put, when 
decoherence occurs the universe splits, and when the universe splits 
decoherence occurs.
And then the Born rule magically applies as a probability...or is it a 
weight?...or is it a frequency among splits?  Anyway you're sure Many 
Worlds is better than than just noting that probability means one thing 
happens and others don't.


Brent
 John K Clark    See what's on my new list at Extropolis 


w3q

eba



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Re: The multiverse is unscientific nonsense??

[John Clark]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2023 at 1:59 PM Brent Meeker  wrote:

* > You pretty much ignored everything I wrote*
>

What the hell?! I went over what you said point by point.

*> and were exercised to refute the idea of Heisenberg's cut, which neither
> Bohr or I endorsed. *


I don't know about you but Bohr insisted that we treat electrons as quantum
objects but our measuring instruments as classical objects. He also
insisted that human observers were classical objects, but he never
specified exactly where the dividing line between the quantum world and the
classical world was. And if that dividing line isn't the "Heisenberg cut"
then what is? But to be fair to you it's difficult to know exactly what
Bohr endorsed because much of his philosophical prose is virtually
unreadable; that's one reason the Copenhagen adherence can't agree about
fundamentally important things even among themselves.


> * > Do you deny that science relies on definite recorded results*
>

Experimental results are necessary but they are not sufficient, you also
need a theory to make sense of it all, otherwise it's just a bunch of
numbers.  Experiments can never prove that a theory is correct but it can
prove that a theory is wrong, and it can prove that some theories are less
bad than others.


> *> and simply postulating an evolving wave function*
>

 Postulating "an evolving wave function" is one way to put it, and a way to
say the same thing with different words is "Schrodinger's equation is
correct". You're the one who postulates that Schrodinger's equation must be
wrong because all those other worlds simply couldn't exist, that would just
be too strange; so despite what the equation says the function must
collapse for some reason. But neither you nor anybody else knows how to fix
the equation. As for me, I say if something isn't broken then don't fix it.


*> does nothing without a theory of how we see definite events? *
>

 I've already gone over that in some detail, if you disagree with what I
wrote that's fine but be specific about your objection, I refuse to just
keep repeating myself.


> * > Many world has no clear explanation of how many worlds there are and
> how they get weighted or divided*
>

I've already gone over that in some detail, if you disagree with what I
wrote that's fine but be specific about your objection, I refuse to just
keep repeating myself.


>
> * > Decoherence theory at least gives us an idea of why a measurement in
> the general sense produces an apparently classical world.*
>

 Decoherence is fully compatible with Many Worlds, in fact the
interpretation simply wouldn't work without it. Simply put, when
decoherence occurs the universe splits, and when the universe splits
decoherence occurs.

 John K ClarkSee what's on my new list at  Extropolis

w3q

eba



>

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Re: The multiverse is unscientific nonsense??

[Brent Meeker]

On 11/22/2023 4:23 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 7:45 PM Brent Meeker  
wrote:


>> There is plenty of direct evidence that quantum weirdness
exists, even the father of the Copenhagen Interpretation Niels
Bohr admitted that "/*Anyone who is not shocked by Quantum
theory does not understand it*/". Something must be behind all
that strangeness and whatever it is it must be odd, very very
odd. Yes, many world's idea is ridiculous, but is it
ridiculous enough to be true? If it's not then something even
more ridiculous is. As for the Copenhagen interpretation, I
don't think it's ridiculous, I think it's incoherent, and if
you ask 10 adherents what it's saying you'll get 12 completely
different answers, but they all boil down to "/just give up,
don't even try to figure out what's going on/". But I think
one must try.

/> I think that's very unfair to Bohr.  His basic observation was
that we do science in a classical world *of necessity*./


Bohr was a great scientist but I think he was a lousy philosopher.  
Bohr thought there was a mystical interface between quantum events and 
conscious awareness, some call it the "Heisenberg Cut", but neither 
Bohr nor Heisenberg could explain the mechanism behind this mysterious 
phenomenon nor could they say exactly, or even approximately, where 
the hell the dividing line between the classical world and the quantum 
world is. By contrast Many Worlds has no problem whatsoever explaining 
the mechanism behind the Heisenberg cut or where the dividing line is 
because the Heisenberg cut does not exist and there is no dividing 
line, everything is quantum mechanical including the entire universe.  
I think this is the reason the Many Worlds interpretation is more 
popular among cosmologists than among scientists in general.


>///Only in a classical world can we make measurements and keep
records that we can agree on. /


But the Copenhagen adherents can't agreeeven among themselveswhat a 
"measurement" is or what a "record" means, but Many Worlds people are 
in agreement, all measurements are a change in a quantum state but a 
quantum change is not necessarily a measurement.


> /when we study the microscopic world we must use quantum
mechanics, but our instruments must be classical. /


We can pretend our instruments are classical, in our everyday life we 
can pretend that everything is classical, but we've known for nearly a 
century that is just a useful lie we tell ourselves because reality is 
not classical, it is quantum mechanical.


/> You can treat a baseball as a quantum system composed of
elementary particles; but your measurements on it must still give
classical values. /


As I said before, you can live your entire life by pretending that 
classical physics is all there is and in fact billions of people have 
had successful lives doing so, but that doesn't make it true. In 
theory classical measurements can be exact,but quantum measurements 
cannot be even in theory. If we wish to study the fundamental nature 
of reality we're going to need to perform experiments with things when 
they are in very exotic conditions that we will never encounter in 
everyday life, and when we perform these difficult experiments we find 
the things get weird, very very weird, and that demands an 
explanation. And waving your hands and saying there is a Heisenberg 
cut is not an explanation.



/> Since the development of decoherence theory this boundary can
be quantified in terms vanishing of cross-terms in a reduced
density matrix. /


Forget theory, every time the precision of ourquantum***EXPERIMENTS* 
improves the lower limit of this mythical boundary between the 
classical world and the quantum world gets larger, I think it's as 
large as the entire universe.


>///What is left unexplained,*in MWI* as well as Copenhagen, is the
instantiation of a random result with probability proportional to
the diagonal elements of the reduced density matrix./


If the concept of "probability" is to make any sense and not be 
paradoxical it must be a real number between 0 and 1, and all the 
probabilities in a given situation must add up to exactly 1. Gleason's 
theorem proved that given those restraints, probability can always be 
expressed by the density matrix, that is to say the Born Rule. So the 
real question is; Schrodinger's equation is completely deterministic 
so why do we need probability at all? The Copenhagen people have a 
range of answers to that question, some say Schrodinger's equation 
needs to be modified by adding a random element, but they can't agree 
on exactly what it should be, others say it is improper to even ask 
that question, but they can't agree among themselves exactly why it is 
improper.  The Many Worlds people have a clear and simple explanation, 
until you open the box and look 

Re: The multiverse is unscientific nonsense??

[Jason Resch]

Very well said!

On Wed, Nov 22, 2023, 7:23 AM John Clark  wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 7:45 PM Brent Meeker 
> wrote:
>
> >> There is plenty of direct evidence that quantum weirdness exists, even
>>> the father of the Copenhagen Interpretation Niels Bohr admitted that 
>>> "*Anyone
>>> who is not shocked by Quantum theory does not understand it *".
>>> Something must be behind all that strangeness and whatever it is it must be
>>> odd, very very odd. Yes, many world's idea is ridiculous, but is it
>>> ridiculous enough to be true? If it's not then something even more
>>> ridiculous is. As for the Copenhagen interpretation, I don't think it's
>>> ridiculous, I think it's incoherent, and if you ask 10 adherents what it's
>>> saying you'll get 12 completely different answers, but they all boil down
>>> to "*just give up, don't even try to figure out what's going on*". But
>>> I think one must try.
>>
>>
>
> * > I think that's very unfair to Bohr.  His basic observation was that we
>> do science in a classical world of necessity.*
>>
>
> Bohr was a great scientist but I think he was a lousy philosopher.  Bohr
> thought there was a mystical interface between quantum events and conscious
> awareness, some call it the "Heisenberg Cut", but neither Bohr nor
> Heisenberg could explain the mechanism behind this mysterious phenomenon
> nor could they say exactly, or even approximately, where the hell the
> dividing line between the classical world and the quantum world is. By
> contrast Many Worlds has no problem whatsoever explaining the mechanism
> behind the Heisenberg cut or where the dividing line is because the
> Heisenberg cut does not exist and there is no dividing line, everything is
> quantum mechanical including the entire universe.  I think this is the
> reason the Many Worlds interpretation is more popular among cosmologists
> than among scientists in general.
>
>  > *Only in a classical world can we make measurements and keep records
>> that we can agree on.  *
>
>
> But the Copenhagen adherents can't agree even among themselves what a
> "measurement" is or what a "record" means, but Many Worlds people are in
> agreement, all measurements are a change in a quantum state but a quantum
> change is not necessarily a measurement.
>
>
>> > *when we study the microscopic world we must use quantum mechanics,
>> but our instruments must be classical. *
>>
>
> We can pretend our instruments are classical, in our everyday life we can
> pretend that everything is classical, but we've known for nearly a century
> that is just a useful lie we tell ourselves because reality is not
> classical, it is quantum mechanical.
>
>
>> *> You can treat a baseball as a quantum system composed of elementary
>> particles; but your measurements on it must still give classical values. *
>>
>
> As I said before, you can live your entire life by pretending that
> classical physics is all there is and in fact billions of people have had
> successful lives doing so, but that doesn't make it true. In theory
> classical measurements can be exact, but quantum measurements cannot be
> even in theory. If we wish to study the fundamental nature of reality we're
> going to need to perform experiments with things when they are in very
> exotic conditions that we will never encounter in everyday life, and when
> we perform these difficult experiments we find the things get weird, very
> very weird, and that demands an explanation. And waving your hands and
> saying there is a Heisenberg cut is not an explanation.
>
>
> * > Since the development of decoherence theory this boundary can be
>> quantified in terms vanishing of cross-terms in a reduced density matrix. *
>>
>
> Forget theory, every time the precision of our quantum *EXPERIMENTS*
> improves the lower limit of this mythical boundary between the classical
> world and the quantum world gets larger, I think it's as large as the
> entire universe.
>
>
>> > *What is left unexplained, in MWI as well as Copenhagen, is the
>> instantiation of a random result with probability proportional to the
>> diagonal elements of the reduced density matrix.*
>>
>
> If the concept of "probability" is to make any sense and not be
> paradoxical it must be a real number between 0 and 1, and all the
> probabilities in a given situation must add up to exactly 1. Gleason's
> theorem proved that given those restraints, probability can always be
> expressed by the density matrix, that is to say the Born Rule. So the real
> question is; Schrodinger's equation is completely deterministic so why do
> we need probability at all? The Copenhagen people have a range of answers
> to that question, some say Schrodinger's equation needs to be modified by
> adding a random element, but they can't agree on exactly what it should be,
> others say it is improper to even ask that question, but they can't agree
> among themselves exactly why it is improper.  The Many Worlds people have a
> clear and simple explanation, 

Re: The multiverse is unscientific nonsense??

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 21, 2023 at 7:45 PM Brent Meeker  wrote:

>> There is plenty of direct evidence that quantum weirdness exists, even
>> the father of the Copenhagen Interpretation Niels Bohr admitted that "*Anyone
>> who is not shocked by Quantum theory does not understand it *".
>> Something must be behind all that strangeness and whatever it is it must be
>> odd, very very odd. Yes, many world's idea is ridiculous, but is it
>> ridiculous enough to be true? If it's not then something even more
>> ridiculous is. As for the Copenhagen interpretation, I don't think it's
>> ridiculous, I think it's incoherent, and if you ask 10 adherents what it's
>> saying you'll get 12 completely different answers, but they all boil down
>> to "*just give up, don't even try to figure out what's going on*". But I
>> think one must try.
>
>

* > I think that's very unfair to Bohr.  His basic observation was that we
> do science in a classical world of necessity.*
>

Bohr was a great scientist but I think he was a lousy philosopher.  Bohr
thought there was a mystical interface between quantum events and conscious
awareness, some call it the "Heisenberg Cut", but neither Bohr nor
Heisenberg could explain the mechanism behind this mysterious phenomenon
nor could they say exactly, or even approximately, where the hell the
dividing line between the classical world and the quantum world is. By
contrast Many Worlds has no problem whatsoever explaining the mechanism
behind the Heisenberg cut or where the dividing line is because the
Heisenberg cut does not exist and there is no dividing line, everything is
quantum mechanical including the entire universe.  I think this is the
reason the Many Worlds interpretation is more popular among cosmologists
than among scientists in general.

 > *Only in a classical world can we make measurements and keep records
> that we can agree on.  *


But the Copenhagen adherents can't agree even among themselves what a
"measurement" is or what a "record" means, but Many Worlds people are in
agreement, all measurements are a change in a quantum state but a quantum
change is not necessarily a measurement.


> > *when we study the microscopic world we must use quantum mechanics, but
> our instruments must be classical. *
>

We can pretend our instruments are classical, in our everyday life we can
pretend that everything is classical, but we've known for nearly a century
that is just a useful lie we tell ourselves because reality is not
classical, it is quantum mechanical.


> *> You can treat a baseball as a quantum system composed of elementary
> particles; but your measurements on it must still give classical values. *
>

As I said before, you can live your entire life by pretending that
classical physics is all there is and in fact billions of people have had
successful lives doing so, but that doesn't make it true. In theory
classical measurements can be exact, but quantum measurements cannot be
even in theory. If we wish to study the fundamental nature of reality we're
going to need to perform experiments with things when they are in very
exotic conditions that we will never encounter in everyday life, and when
we perform these difficult experiments we find the things get weird, very
very weird, and that demands an explanation. And waving your hands and
saying there is a Heisenberg cut is not an explanation.


* > Since the development of decoherence theory this boundary can be
> quantified in terms vanishing of cross-terms in a reduced density matrix. *
>

Forget theory, every time the precision of our quantum *EXPERIMENTS*
improves the lower limit of this mythical boundary between the classical
world and the quantum world gets larger, I think it's as large as the
entire universe.


> > *What is left unexplained, in MWI as well as Copenhagen, is the
> instantiation of a random result with probability proportional to the
> diagonal elements of the reduced density matrix.*
>

If the concept of "probability" is to make any sense and not be paradoxical
it must be a real number between 0 and 1, and all the probabilities in a
given situation must add up to exactly 1. Gleason's theorem proved that
given those restraints, probability can always be expressed by the density
matrix, that is to say the Born Rule. So the real question is;
Schrodinger's equation is completely deterministic so why do we need
probability at all? The Copenhagen people have a range of answers to that
question, some say Schrodinger's equation needs to be modified by adding a
random element, but they can't agree on exactly what it should be, others
say it is improper to even ask that question, but they can't agree among
themselves exactly why it is improper.  The Many Worlds people have a clear
and simple explanation, until you open the box and look you have
insufficient information to know for certain if you are in the branch of
the Multiverse  where Schrodinger's cat is alive or the branch in which the
poor cat is dead. Before you open