On 1 April 2014 14:33, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/31/2014 6:00 PM, LizR wrote: > > On 1 April 2014 06:04, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > >> The price is not having a unified 'self' - which many people would >> consider a big price since all observation and record keeping which is used >> to empirically test theories assumes this unity. If you observe X and you >> want to use that as empircal test of a theory it isn't helpful if your >> theory of the instruments says they also recorded not-X. >> > > (I suspect some people would consider it a big price not to have a > unified self for other reasons, too!) > > I can't see how it's worse for your theory to say that your instruments > "will record X and not X" as opposed to saying they "will record X or not > X, but we don't know which". > > > That's before the fact. I didn't write "will". MWI is a theory that > says when you read your instrument and it says X, it's only one of an > infinite set some of which say X and some say not-X. >
OK, I suppose I should have used the same tense in my reply, although I can't see that it makes much difference. To recast what I said into the past tense, then, it seems no better to have a theory that says "you got an unpredictable result for no reason" than to have one that says "you got one of a range of results, all of which were realised, for an explicable reason." The former explanation says there will be apparent but explicable randomness, the latter says there will be intrinsic and inexplicable randomness. But is it explicable. Bruno is careful to refer to "uncertainty" or > "indeterminancy". Those are not necessarily probabilities unless they can > be quantified to satisfy Kolomogorov's axioms - and it's not clear to me > that they can. The axioms require that the set of "everything" have > measure 1. But in this case "everything" is ill defined and uncountably > infinite. In common applications of QM one assumes isolation and considers > only a small (at least finite) set of possible results - which works FAPP. > I would say that it seems, at first glance, more explicable than invoking an intrinsic randomness in nature, which is explicitly specified as being inexplicable, at least in some interpretations (any which specify "no hidden variables", I believe). To start with a deterministic equation and keep it deterministic, rather than adding some apparently ad hoc randomness, seems like a good thing, assuming it still gives results which match our observations. What you appear to be asking is whether the explanation works, which is another issue, of course. Maybe it doesn't, in which case we are back to "there is no reason, just shut up and calculate" - which is perhaps fair enough. I assume you are talking about the "measure problem" here. Why do you say the result is uncountably infinite, by the way, I was under the impression no one knows if it's countable or uncountable? If this has been determined, I'd be interested to know. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
