Hi Bruno
>> With respect to the UDA, graves and me are just using different
vocabulary.
Really?
the last time I quoted her:
"What ... should Alice expect to see? Here I invoke the following premise:
whatever she knows she will see, she should expect (with certainty!) to see.
So, she should (with certainty) expect to see spin-up, and she should (with
certainty) expect to see spin-down."
But that can only be a 3-1 description. She handles the 1p by a maximization of
the interests of the copies, and that is equivalent with the FPI, without
naming it.
Funnily enough Bruno, if I was opportunistic I would just about accept that. I
mean personally, I would argue that the vocabulary used is identical between
you and Greaves and she explicitly denies your probability distribution from
the first person perspective. But a bigger problem for you raises its head if I
put that to one side.
if, as you claim, there is no substantive difference between your theory and
Greaves' just because she has some other mechanism of deriving the bare
quantities you want, then you may as well say that there is only a difference
in terminology between your theory and any other interpretation of QM. After
all they all deliver 0.5 by some now irrelevant metric too. You've just
relugated your theory to the purely metaphysical. You're tacitly admitting that
all these theories are just re-skins of the same underlying engine with bugger
all to choose between them.
In a way that is something that I have felt for a while. Everettian QM does not
improve upon QM + collapse in the way say relativity improves on Newtonian
physics. There is no concomitant improvement in predictive capability on offer.
Its a purely theoretical change intended to smooth out conceptual difficulties
but it can only do that by delivering further difficulties of its own. All your
theories are scientifically irrelevant.
Date: Sun, 9 Mar 2014 11:32:08 -0700
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Tegmark and UDA step 3
On 3/9/2014 12:47 AM, Bruno Marchal
wrote:
On 08 Mar 2014, at 06:16, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/7/2014 8:26 PM, LizR
wrote:
On 8 March 2014 08:14,
meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 3/7/2014 1:24 AM, LizR wrote:
On 7 March 2014
18:29, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 3/6/2014 9:15 PM, Jason
Resch wrote:
A
related question is, is there
any such thing as true
randomness at all? Or is every
case of true randomness an
instance of FPI?
Or is FPI
just a convoluted way to
pretend there isn't true
randomness?
If one assumes QM and the MWI
are correct then it isn't
pretending,
True; but I don't assume that.
Since your original statement above only makes
sense in some context - which you haven't
revealed, as far as I can tell - perhaps you could
tell us what you are assuming?
I'm not assuming anything, I'm just pointing out that one
could assume something different than QM and MWI. For
instance, start with MWI but then suppose that at each
"branching" only one instance of you continues. Doesn't
that accord with all experience?
Like Ptolemeaus epicycles. The point is to accord with the
simplest theories we have for most if not all experiences,
like QM, or computationalism.
At each "branching" only one instance of you continue, you
say, but that does not accord well with the simplest
explanation of the two slits experience. You will have to
explain why the superpositions act in the micro and not the
macro, and this needs big changes in QM (= SWE), or even
bigger to computationalism.
But you have to explain this anyway; except the question is
transformed into why do I only experience one reality. Presumably
the answer is in decoherence and the off-diagonal terms of the
density matrix becoming very small (or maybe even zero). Once you
have this answer then you can look at the density matrix, as Omnes
does, and say, "QM is a probabilistic theory, so it predicts
probabilities. What did you expect?"
My point is that these sharp questions are asked of QM because it is
a mature theory with lots of very accurate predictions, but "comp"
as a new speculative theory kind of gets a free ride on the very
same questions, e.g. why do we not experience superpositions? Why
isn't there a superposition of the M-guy and the W-guy according to
comp. How can consciousness be instantiated by physical processes?
Most people on this list just assume it can't and dismiss the very
idea as mere physicalism. But they don't ask how can consciousness
be instantiated by infinite threads of computation - that's
mysterious and consciousness is mysterious, so it's OK.
If not, you can always consistently assume everything is
done by a God to fit your favorite philosophical expectations.
You can do that, *logically*, but this is no more truth
research, but wishful thinking.
But you know that is not what is done. QM predicts probability
distributions that are confirmed to many decimal places. QFT
predicts some measured values to 11 decimal places. And you rely on
QM to explain the world in in you theory of comp. Your approach is
to explain QM and then let QM do the rest of the work - which is
fine. But my point is that QM can still do the work even if it's a
probabilistic theory. So unless comp can make some better
predictions than comp it's just an interpretation and it's trading
off a distaste for randomness (a very restricted and well defined
randomness) for a love of everythingism. Which is why I hope comp
can predict something about consciousness; where it may offer
something beyond just interpretation.
Brent
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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