On 31 Mar 2014, at 20:14, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/31/2014 10:41 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 31 Mar 2014, at 19:04, meekerdb wrote:
On 3/31/2014 12:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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
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.
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.
Really?
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.
It is helpful when it is part of the only theories which are
working, like QM, or arithmetic.
No it's not. It's reason the Born rule is needed and the source of
the difficulty of interpreting probability in MWI and the 'white
rabbit problem' in comp.
In my opinion, Gleason theorem solves this problem for the case of QM.
And if the Zs logic verifies some quite plausible conjecture, the case
of comp is reduced to the case of QM.
This is a technical point, 'course.
But even if such solutions did not exist, the MWI remains
understandable, which is not the case for QM+collapse. It provides a
clear 3p pictures, and reduces the measure problem to a (solved or
not) phenomenological problem. Any collapse or physical selection
theory seems to add something to the wave, which seems always to be
justified in an ad hoc restriction of what the wave described.
We need only the unity of the first person self, from the first
person self point of view, and that is guarantied by the comp
hypothesis.
Guarantee by definition doesn't mean much.
Almost. It is guarantied once you are willing to believe that the
brain is an organic Turing emulable machine, or that consciousness is
sub-susbt-level computations invariant.
Ah! Brent, this list is called "everything" because it is open to
the idea that everything, or nothing, is simpler than any mono-
thing.
I know why it's called that, but I assumed that I didn't have to be
true believer to participate.
On the contrary, that is welcome, I think, as some of us have a taste
for discussing and are skeptic at all level.
I am certainly not true believer in anything, (with one common
exception like consciousness), but I like to take a theory seriously
and push its logic up to the possible contradiction.
The point here was a remind that some people believe that a simple
theory, which provides an explanation for the phenomenology, is better
than a more complex theory, even if that later satisfies some human
coquetry like being 3p unique.
We don't know the truth, but we can evaluate the plausibilities and
the consistencies, etc.
I can understand that it is counter-intuitive, but the brain has
not been programmed for the big picture, so we can expect the
possible truth to be shocking, it seems to me.
Alas, there is a temptation regard how shocking a theory is as
evidence for it.
We can only hope God is not malicious.
Now, I don't use shocking as evidences, given that I defend MW as more
plausible than ~MW, indeed by arguing that it is more conservative, as
it preserves (or keep the hope of them being preserved) locality,
determinacy, and some form of physical realism.
BTW, are you OK in the math thread? Are you OK, like Liz apparently,
that the Kripke frame (W,R) respects A -> []<>A iff R is symmetrical?
Should I give the proof of the fact that the Kripke frame (W,R)
respects []A -> [][]A iff R is a transitive?
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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