On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 10:50 PM Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote:
On Wed, Apr 27, 2022 at 05:14:41PM -0700, Brent Meeker wrote: > > > *If there are probabilities attached to the branches, then Gleason's > theorem shows that the probabilities must satisfy the Born rule. * I agree with what you say, so why won't you also say that's a big win for Everett's Many Worlds? > *if they are probabilities of results that implies that some things > happen and others don't.* If there are probabilities of results that implies that* SOMETIMES* a specific thing happens and *SOMETIMES* that exact same specific thing doesn't. > *other wise** what does "probability" mean* Good question. To a poker player and to a believer in Everett's Many Worlds, probability means doing the best you can with incomplete information. If one wanted to be charitable one would say that to a believer in Copenhagen probability means, to the extent it means anything at all, that "*nothing is real until it is observed**, and never mind what 'real' means*". But I think it would be more accurate to say that to a believer in Copenhagen probability means "*shut up and just use the probability number in your calculation and get a result that can be checked by experimentation, and give up and don't even try to think about what's actually going on at a more fundamental level*". > *and what use is it as an empirical concept? * Whatever probability means nobody can deny it works. Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au> wrote: > > > *Doesn't this just hinge on what I call in my book the semantic-syntactic > distinction, aka the 1-3 distinction (long debates between Bruno and JC on > this), or the subjective-objective distinction, or even discrete-continuous > distinction. Without this cut, the very concept of information makes no > sense, and without information, Darwinian evolution doesn't happen.* > There doesn't seem to have been any "I" versus "you" distinction 2 billion years ago when Eukaryotic cells evolved from Prokaryotic cells, so how did it happen? For that matter, how did the universe evolve from a thin and almost completely even distribution of cold hydrogen and helium gas, as it was about 1 million years after the Big Bang, into a universe filled with stars and galaxies and black holes as it was just a few hundred million years later? By the way, thanks to the new Webb telescope we will probably soon have a more accurate figure on just how long that took, but we already know it didn't take long, cosmically speaking. > QM is a continuous theory, it lacks this cut, which must be added in as > an extra axiom. > It's not just quantum mechanics that has a "solipsism is untrue" axiom, every single conscious activity in everyday life, except in the philosophy classroom, needs and makes use of this axiom. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> ca9 -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1s%3D31zUaAJSZrHtp3gCbTJxm_tctH%2BEqiPw6yRDrCyQg%40mail.gmail.com.
