On Tuesday, January 7, 2025 at 4:30:46 AM UTC-7 Quentin Anciaux wrote:
Le mar. 7 janv. 2025, 00:39, Brent Meeker <[email protected]> a écrit : On 1/6/2025 1:38 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: It's just improbable, which is quite different from absurd. Every hand of bridge I've been dealt was improbable, but I never considered one absurd. Brent I understand your analogy with improbable bridge hands, but I think the difference lies in the nature of "improbable" versus "absurd" when we scale it to the entirety of existence. The improbability of any specific bridge hand exists within a defined framework with clear rules and outcomes—it is improbable, but not absurd because we understand the context. In the case of existence, a single-world theory suggests that out of infinite possibilities, only one outcome is "realized." This is not just improbable—it's a rejection of the inherent structure of possibility itself. Without a multiverse or some equivalent explanation, the realization of just one world feels like a singular, unexplained "bridge hand" with no deck, no dealer, and no game. It's the framework itself that becomes suspect. With a many-worlds or "everything exists" perspective, there is a structure that accounts for all possibilities, including the one where "I am." It doesn't feel absurd because existence is distributed across possibilities rather than being inexplicably concentrated into one. The absurdity for me isn't about odds; it's about the lack of explanatory context in a single-world view. Does that make sense? Quentin *How did a genius like you miss Eternal Inflation, a reasonable theory for many worlds, as distinguished from Trump physics, aka the MWI? AG * Single world theory says infinitely many worlds are possible and this one exits. MWI says all the infinitely many possible worlds exist and this is one of them. Of the two statements the latter seems more absurd to me, since it's postulating an infinity of worlds (each infinitely complex) so that your experience can be reduced to just one random selection from the infinitude. I understand the attraction since it seems to reduce the work to be done by the random selection to just placing you in the infinitude. In comparison the one-world case is selecting a single world to exist from the same infinitude of possible worlds. complexity means making many random selections. Mathematically they are equivalent: one selection among an infinitude. But one postulates that the infinitude actually exists and you've been selected to be in one; while the other says one has been selected by Nature to exist and so you're in it. Having infinities actually exist seems absurd to me. Having one of many possibilities exist is implicit in the concept of "possibility" as opposed to "certainty", so having one world exist is not absurd. I think where your intuition is led astray is in thinking of all the random choices that must have been made to realize this particular world as compared to just one random selection from all possible worlds...but the two actually are choices from sets of the same size. Brent Thank you for your thoughtful response, Brent. I understand your point, but I think the core of my issue with the single-world theory lies in the fact that in such a framework, there is only one realized history, one singular possibility that exists, while all others remain unrealized and effectively non-existent. This makes the concept of "possibilities" irrelevant in practice, as they have no role or reality in the framework. In contrast, a theory of information where consciousness emerges from the structure of all possibilities, and where all possibilities are realized (albeit perhaps with varying proportions, like with a dovetailing running algorithm), provides a coherent explanation for my "here and now." My current experience is not singled out in an unexplained and arbitrary way; it is one among the totality of possibilities. >From my perspective, the absurdity of a single-world theory is that it assumes this one realized world exists without any explanatory context for why this one, while dismissing the entirety of unrealized possibilities as irrelevant. It’s not the infinity of worlds in a many-worlds framework that I find difficult; it’s the absence of a logical framework in the single-world theory that makes it feel inconsistent or incomplete. Does this help clarify my view? Quentin -- 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 view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/2e0333f5-9d6e-44a2-97f3-fd295378a693n%40googlegroups.com.
