From: *Bruno Marchal* <marc...@ulb.ac.be <mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett <bhkellet...@gmail.com
<mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 8:45 PM Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be
<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
On 7 Sep 2019, at 08:04, Bruce Kellett <bhkellet...@gmail.com
<mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:
On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything
List <everything-list@googlegroups.com
<mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> wrote:
On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now
evangelizing Many Worlds.
What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's
rule from it...which I think is impossible. But it does go
a way toward making the story of measurement more consistent.
Amplify the above statement.
Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks
that ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.
But irrelevant does not mean false. So it is irrelevant in
physics, but it is not irrelevant in theology. It might plays a
role concerning the interpretation of death, like with quantum
immortality.
If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum
immortality, then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has
been shown many times to be a complete nonsense.
Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.
Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide. The main problem with the
idea of quantum immortality is that not all life-threatening events that
one can encounter are in the form of alternative outcomes to quantum
processes. Quantum suicide is an attempt to overcome this problem by
linking death or survival directly to the outcome of a particular
quantum process. David Deutsch was sceptical that this worked:
'PhysicistDavid Deutsch <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch>,
though a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation, states regarding
quantum suicide that "that way of applying probabilities does not follow
directly from quantum theory, as the usual one does. It requires an
additional assumption, namely that when making decisions one should
ignore the histories in which the decision-maker is absent....[M]y guess
is that the assumption is false."
Tegmark was also doubtful about the chances for quantum immortality --
pointing out that dying is rarely a binary event; it is more often the
result of a slow cumulative process.
Another argument that has been given here before is that if quantum
immortality is true, then we should expect to see a number of people who
are considerably older than the normal life expectancy -- and we do not
see people who are two or three hundred years old. Even if the
probabilities are very low, there have been an awful lot of people born
within the last 500 or so years -- some must have survived on our branch
if this scenario is true.
That would be an indice that Mechanism is false, given that quantum
immortality is deduce here from the already much more obvious
arithmetical immortality, which is disturbing, but hard to avoid.
Well, as you know, I consider mechanism to be false in any case, so the
failure of quantum immortality is no news to me.
Are you saying that quantum suicide is also a non-sense
(metaphysically, it is a practical non-sense).
It relates to the standard problem for Many worlds theory -- if a
quantum experiment with binary outcomes is performed many times, there
will always be observers who see major deviations from the expected
quantum probabilities. In which case, we cannot rely on repeated
experiments to be a reliable indicator of the underlying probabilities.
And if you cannot use long-run relative frequencies to estimate
probabilities, what do you use? David Wallace attempts to get around
this by simply dismissing the outliers as "irrelevant" (You, I recall,
have made a similar argument.) Wallace even suggests that these outlying
sets of results are "lost in the quantum noise", but he does not
elaborate on this totally stupid claim. (Wallace, in "The Emergent
Multiverse" (2012))
If the reference assume a wave packet reduction, or a way “matter” can
interfere with the computations in arithmetic, no need to give the
references. It is just working in different theories.
None of this has anything to do with wave-packet reduction, so you can
rest easy.
Bruce
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