On 01 Jan 2014, at 01:18, meekerdb wrote:
On 12/31/2013 1:58 PM, LizR wrote:
On 1 January 2014 10:46, meekerdb <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.
I disagree with this. Everett did propose a new theory. It is SWE,
that is QM without collapse. *All* interpretations of it are multi-
realities. Everett is just QM, and the Everett branches comes from not
avoiding the contagion of superposition, which follows from SWE
linearity. The existence of the relative superposition is a theorem
of QM. Copenhagen is SWE+ collapse, and this is self-contradictory or
quite fuzzy (what is the collapse?).
Bruno
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.
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.