On 31 Mar 2014, at 12:44, ghib...@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, March 31, 2014 8:30:35 AM UTC+1, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 31 Mar 2014, at 07:41, LizR wrote:
I'm not sure collapse is an observed fact. Collapse is an
assumption which explains how we come to measure discrete values.
On 31 March 2014 16:27, <ghi...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tuesday, March 25, 2014 3:01:04 PM UTC, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 25 Mar 2014, at 05:48, ghi...@gmail.com wrote:
On Monday, March 24, 2014 4:48:13 AM UTC, chris peck wrote:
The only person in any doubt was you wasn't it Liz?
I found Tegmark's presentation very disappointing. He was
alarmingly apologetic about MWI pleading that its flaws were
mitigated by the fact other interpretations had similar flaws; as
if the fact someone else is ill would make you less ill yourself.
I think in the world of QM interpretations, with bugger all
evidence to decide between them, the game is to even out the
playing field in terms of flaws and then chase parsimony.
Ofcourse, whether an infinite set of worlds is more or less
parsimonious than just one + a few hidden variables, or one + a
spooky wave function collapse, depends very much on what
definition of parsimonious you find most fitting.
MWI is refuted by the massive totally unexamined - some unrealized
to this day - assumptions built in at the start.
?
MWI seems to me to be the literal understanding of QM (without
collapse).
It is also a simple consequence of computationalism, except we get
a multi-dreams and the question remains open if this defines a
universe, a multiverse, or a multi-multiverses, etc. (results
points toward a multiverse though).
How can 'without collapse' in any sense be literal? Collapse is an
empirically observed fact.
That is what I thought. I thought for some time (many years ago)
that computationalism was false, because i implies MW, in some
testable way if we look below our substitution level, but when
reading QM textbook, I was struck by the collapse, and I thought
this was an empiric facts. But I didn't find serious paper showing
this, and got the "QM light" when discovering Everett. From this I
became rather persuaded that QM confirms the comp proliferation of
realities, up to the existence of the arithmetical measure problem.
Some experience with partial superposition (sometimes called
schroedinger kitten) have been proposed a. s evidence for a
collapse, but they are as much evidence of the MWI. An *apparent*
collapse, can be as well considered as an apparent universe
differentiation
This isn't like the structure of my thought on the matter. Intense
immersion is thfeature of yours, in what all appear to be your
hallmark box of horrors :o)
That looks funny, but might also interesting to elaborate. As a
scientist, I completely separate *a priori* the search of truth and
the search of pleasantness. In the case of computationalism I am
agnostic on both level, and somehow my mind oscillates. I don't think
we have really choice in the matter.
Yet the position of many years ago you relate, appears nearer full
inversion of what you believe now than back.
What do you want? My parents were Aristotelians, like everybody, also
atheists at that time. Animals are naturally Aristotelians. We learn
quickly the distinction between dream and reality, and we reify
instinctively and by default the "material reality". The "reversion"
in the human history has been a flash, repeated recurrently in the
east and in the west, then partially rationalized by the greeks, but
still abandoned by the rationalists. In my case, the "reversion" was a
slow process, but the quest started early. Fear of death leading to a
fascination for the amoebas and protozoans, which seems immortal.
And that's a little bit fascinating because there may be a
suggestion what you actually believe and what you corresponding
immerse yourself in, and at what intensity, is decoupled, as least
currently anyway.
In the meantime I understood that in science we always doubt, and so
we don't have beliefs (in the mundane sense), but only assumption or
theories.
Now, on some points, we might have very few doubts, like in elementary
arithmetic, like x + 0 = x, but even there, an infinitesimal doubt
remains and appears when you mix addition and multiplication (and bet
on comp).
Or you kind of just made some of that up,
I would not do that, but I might try to explain myself to myself. I
did got the "many dreams" in arithmetic before reading Everett. My
interest in mechanism did grow from the reading of books in molecular
biology, and I did study QM very superficially, and at that time. It
was just an accompaniment for the needed biochemistry.
To illustrate mechanism, it was important that the molecules were well
defined entities, and not mysterious uncertainty clouds. So, like
most, I will not doubt one instant about the collapse, at that time.
Also, when I opened a book on QM (I got early the excellent Michel-
Yves Bernard, a simple book which do the math in detail for the
Hydrogen Atom) it took not a long time I try to dig on what is a
differential equation, and what are real and complex numbers, and in
such period, I was far away from computationalism and mechanism. I
will not just eventually oppose QM to "digital or DNA-like mechanism",
I will oppose the whole analysis (calculus) to mechanism.
The reversion will occur slowly, I have many diaries, and I show
search to give a precise date. In the "secret of the amoeba", I
explain that I did abandon science for a period, and made all sort of
experiences. I read the chinese taoists, many Indians, and eventually
Plato.
which if so, might serve the purpose in your eyes of helping me to
discover myself
OK. That is my criteria of "best understanding of X": discover that
with *enough* time, you would have understood X, no matter what, even
alone on some island.
- the things you suspect I am tacitly assuming but don't know thato
I am,
I am not sure. I did not thought of you as having prejudice. You are
just not always clear, so I don't figure out very well what are your
basic assumptions or beliefs, and at which level you are reasoning.
It can be confusing to mix science and philosophy of science, which
can be done in the scientific way, or not.
Well there's a thought. And with allowances duly made for that,
another explanation would be along the lines of.......
....it really doesn't take a dogmatic empiricism for an
overwhelming operational bias favouring what we observe as what
happens over what we observe I as what does not happen.
Ooooooh...... But that is the very traditional aristotelian way of
begging the Aristotle/Plato question. I agree you don't have to be
that much dogmatic, because nature looks dogmatic on that question
too, but the appearances might be deceiving, and we should be able to
doubt their ontology, if we find simpler ontology explaining the
phenomenology.
What you say is that reality is WYSIWYG, but this is what I have
learned to doubt quickly, if only by the dream argument and "Alice in
Wonderland". Keep in mind that I work on the mind-body problem, with
the idea that we don't have to eliminate the person, if we are ready
to eliminate the metaphysical primary matter of Aristotle.
The alternative is Dennett or Churchland elimination of the first
person, or of consciousness. Unless I am wrong of course. Here I
suppose you grasp enough of UDA to see what I mean.
Try reeling everything back to the first days of QM, and adjust the
picture a little so as to remove the element of quantum strangeness
from the historical record completely. It never happened there was
quantum strangeness.
?
When some physicists and friends told me that we get the same
interference fringe when sending particles one by one, it seemed to me
that they were joking at me.
I love the bizarre, and it might look a bit like an horror museum, but
that one was a bit too much. Something weird *was* happening. But I
will read de Broglie, and believe that very plausibly there were some
hidden variables. Then it is EPR paper which will make me doubt about
this, and Bell will make that utterly transparent. I think that at the
time Aspect will do its experience, and that we know now that there
are non local sharable features, as I thought (just with Everett) that
the MWI restores locality without destroying the apparent non
locality, I took it as a experimental evidence of the existence of the
parallel dream/realities, but perhaps not yet explicitly as a
confirmation of computationalism, which stemmed from a "naive"
materialism indeed.
You obviously need to cook the books a little so that everything is
just the same, as if quantum strangeness was real. Except in this
world it's not. Real.
?
If you accept the MWI, I agree there is no more big "strangeness".
Just a multiverse, which is reversible, determinist, local, and with
comp it is even the border of a mutlimind deeper arithmetical/
theological structure.
But without MWI, then quantum weirdness is so much weird, and vague,
it seems to me. It smells like going toward some contradiction, or
"don't ask" philosophies.
OK, so in that imaginery world, run me by our impressions the first
time we observe wave function collapse.. (ilremember, it only exists
in this world, when it suits us so we can look at the ways MWI could
still come about without strangeness
?
I pretend nothing. I just show why any rational agent, with the
cognitive ability needed for the understanding of the functioning of a
universal digital computer, or, equivalently, of elementary
arithmetic, can understand that if consciousness is preserved by
digital substitution at some level, then any art of predicting our
first first experience, and this includes physics, has to be retrieved
from what a machine can predict on its own points of view relatively
to all universal numbers/computations.
If you disbelieve in Everett-QM, I think you should better say NO to
all doctors.
No problem with any consistent opinion. Only inconsistencies make a
logician nervous.
All we have, I think, are incommunicable personal experiences, and
communicable assumptions about some possible relations between those
experiences and some hypothetical sharable reality/truth. Of course
with art, you have far more richer communication means, but
eventually, it is the same, and there is a cut, at some level, between
the 1p truth and the 3p hypotheses, which sometimes work well, and
sometimes don't.
Bruno
.
OK...you see an elegant explanation sBould the empirically observed
fact actually not be.
But would even that alone have been remotely near the ballpark of
things taken seriously, had there not been extreme quantum
strangeness irreconcilable at that time, with the most core, most
fundamental accomplishments of science to date?
MWI evacuates all weirdness from QM. It restores fully
- determinacy
- locality
- physical realism
That's the claim. But you don't seem to regard this as an important
characteristic of MWI.
I can what you mean Bruno. You are in a context of the minimum
postulates, and then consequences, to derive a theory. Like MWI.
That's fair enough. But that's a level of definition - an important
one. That may also stand in as the typoical proxy for a full
definition.
,
But, for example, theories solve problems. Theories realize goals.
Theories plug explanatory gaps. Theories, generalize, or simplify.
Theories perform WORK.
For example (which I mentioned) can you explain how it woul d be
possible to make an assessment of the Occam consistency of a theory,
without knowing what was changed / different describing how MWI
improves the picture, arguing MWI is not Occam falsified, MWI is
better than other interpretions, what events aend problems/crises
rdominated the lead up to the first suggestions of MWI, and so on,
and so on,
What I'm saying Bruno, is every single one of those examples is 100%
dependent on quantum strangeness. And these are legitimate
elementhts of theory structure, which also happen to monopolize
everything to do with how a theory came about, what the drivers
where, how a eory made a case for itself, how a theory made a case
for iteoself in Occam, how a theory got preffered over another, and
so on.
ot
What you are saying in reply is something like "Well, I'm going to
ignore all of those dimensions, and wheel out this derivation I've
got here, of MW I derived from linearity of the equations., And if
there's no strangeness in THIS definition there's no connection
between strangeness and mwi
I don't think that's a legitimate argument
The price is not that big, as nature is used to multiplied things,
like the water molecules in the ocean, the stars in the sky, the
galaxies, etc.
Each time, the humans are shocked by this, and Gordiano Bruno get
burned for saying that stars are other suns, and that they might
have planets, with other living being.
It is humbling, but not coneptually new, especially for a
computationalist, which explains the MW from simple arithmetic,
where you need only to believe in the consequence of addition and
multiplication of integers.
And you think this is legitimate for linked feature of MWI, but
absolutely no strangeness? Times like this I wonder
MWI is an extreme explanation that makes the universe infinity more
complex and undiscoverable than it was before.
On the contrary. The *whole universe* becomes conceptually much
simpler. The mono-universe is more complex, as it needs the same
explanation accompanied by a selection principle contradicting the
simple laws.
None of that goes away Bruno, with MWI. It all just gets puished up,
and back as what the multiverse faces. You can probably ignore it,
or not think about it, or say 'you lost me' if eone else raises the
matter. MWI is a vague theory in that it's impossible to generate a
mathemhe matics for the multiverse, nor any predictions, or
anticipations for the nature oother the basic - verbal - notions
about splitting. So of course, it'srob pretty easy to feel like the
challenges of one universe go away. Our theories about this universe
are good, so the problems are brought right out. MWI doesn't do
anythink remotely like that, so pretty easy to pretend those
problems all went away...and that's why mwi is telling us nothing
An intolerably extreme theory unprecedented in all science, to be
taken seriously, requires an even more intolerable crisis. And it
just so happens at that very same point, such an extremity
confronted science...quantum strangeness.
But hold on a mo...I said MWI blasted complexity to the infinite
limit. But that isn't true is it? MWI is Occam consistent, so the
complexity malarkey is refuted good and proper. I will gladly stand
corrected on that then.
Ah! OK.
But you would agree, wouldn't you, that were it not for that Occam
argument MWI would be placed in an untenlaable position?
I am not sure. Not only there are no evidence for a collapse, but
there is no clear definition of what it would be. The SWE is
incompatible with the collapse. If the collapse is true, QM is
false. That's why Bohr insists that QM is false for the macro-
reality. But, since then, QM has been confirmed at all scales, and
is used in the foundation of cosmology, etc.
Sorry I just find what is stated here totally
dispiriting..depressing actually. What the hell way rouind do you
thinsk this works Bruno? you think we treat the phyrisically
observable and describable and triggerable, as the tentative theory?
And then, do we test it against an equation someone wrote, and if
the equation says no, the observed is falsified?
Is that how it works you think?
sorry can't finish all the replies
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