On 12/31/2013 1:58 PM, LizR wrote:
On 1 January 2014 10:46, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>>
wrote:
On 31 Dec 2013, at 03:09, LizR wrote:
But I feel that you must already know this. Are you just being Devil's
Advocate,
or do you honestly not see the usefulness of multiverse theories?
Partly playing Devil's Advocate - but doing so because I'm not convinced
that
Everett's MWI is the last word and because I don't like to see the hard
problem of
predicting/explaining *this* to be fuzzed over by an easy "everythingism".
Your use of disparaging language to sum up the opposing position doesn't fill me with
optimism that you actually get why this hard problem may in fact have been solved. There
is no "fuzzing over" involved in the MWI, quite the reverse - you need to "fuzz things
over" if you want to get "this" out of QM as a unique solution. Collapse of the wave
function and so on -- a "fuzzy" hand-waving exercise.
That's the usual argument of MWI advocates, "It's better than collapse of the wave
function." But is it? It's only better than Copenhagen. What about Penrose? And what
about the subjective Bayesian interpretation.
I'm not 100% ken on the straw man, either. /No one /thinks the MWI is the last word,
because it isn't a TOE. But it /may/ be a good approximation (or it may not, of course).
?? It's an /*interpretation*/. Interpretations are only useful in pointing to new tests
or new theories - they've not approximations.
/If/ it's a good approximation, it solves the problem of "why this history?" without
resorting to any extra doodads on top of the basic equations. Or so I'm told.
I'd say adding infinitely many worlds just to get a probability to come out 1/pi is a lot
of doodads.
AFAICS you either need to have a reason why it "just comes out this way" or you have to
use an Everett/comp style explanation. If you have a third type of explanation, please
tell me!
No, in science you don't always need to have an explanation. Sometimes it's "I don't
know."
Otherwise you're just saying "I don't like it, so it can't be true!"
I didn't say I don't like it. It may point the way forward. But I don't like the
evangelical tone of some of it's disciples.
Brent
--
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 post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
