On 15 Nov 2017, at 16:33, agrayson2...@gmail.com wrote:
On Wednesday, November 15, 2017 at 7:51:09 AM UTC-7, Bruno Marchal
wrote:
On 15 Nov 2017, at 00:17, agrays...@gmail.com wrote:
On Tuesday, November 14, 2017 at 3:32:08 PM UTC-7, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 11:52 PM, <agrays...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think every macro system, although comprised of a huge
number of individual constituents, is in one definite state;
No object large enough to see with your unaided can is in
one definite state, that is to say can be described with a single
quantum wave function, with the possible exception of a Bose–
Einstein condensate, and even then it would be so small it
would be at the limits of visibility. And you're not going to see
one in everyday life unless you visit a lab that can cool things
down to less than a millionth of a degree above absolute zero that
is needed to make a Bose–Einstein condensate. Incidentally
unless ET exists and is also interested in physics research
that lab you're visiting is the coldest place in the universe.
Any macro object is in a definite state -- not a superposition of
states -- at every moment in time, but obviously the state is
constantly fluctuating due to interactions with its constituents
and entities external to it. Due to the huge number of
constituents, we can't write it down explicitly,
> the lack of ISOLATION is the condition for the existence of
this macro definite state.
A baseball made of 10^25 atoms has 10^25 times more ways to
interact with the environment than a single atom does, so we'd
expect to see a baseball in just one state about 10^25 times
less often than we do in a single atom.
> The concept of Multiverse and Many Worlds come from entirely
different contexts and theories,
I don't think anybody was even talking about the Multiverse
before 1957 when Hugh Everett introduced the idea of Many Worlds,
and Evert's idea won't work without the Multiverse. That doesn't
sound entirely different to me.
Multiverse arose in the context of string theory, after Everett's
MWI. The difference between Multiverse and MWI is striking and
obvious.
To my knowledge, "multiverse" is the terming given by David Deutsch
for the Many-Worlds. Then, String Theory has used that terming in
its context, but it could have used "many-World". String theory is a
special application of QM.
As "Multiverse" is now usually used, it refers to the multitude of
possible universes with different basic parameters that might exist
in parallel as claimed by String Theory,
OK. I will not dispute this, except that it leads to confusion, and
dialog of the deaf in many forum. It is not a problem, because the
misunderstanding are easy to clarify, but that has to be repeated very
often. In fact "many-worlds" is not a formidable terming too, and I
prefer "relative state theory". I have been a bit disappointed that
Everett would have prefer "many-worlds" instead of "relative state"
which was firmly suggested by his publisher.
whereas the way Many Worlds is used it refers to the (uncountable!)
universes
Well, I agree the "worlds" are uncountable in the interpretation of
QM, based on classical physics, or SR, but with Gravitation, and a
possible quantization of space itself, it could become countable or
finite.
As long as GR and the quantum are not unified, some points seems just
open to me, and eventually, if mechanism is true, I would say that
there is 0 "worlds", only number's dream cohering enough in some
arithmetical sense. It is out of this topic, but I do not thonk that
physics is the fundamental science. It will be explained in term of a
mathematical phenomenon (in fact, if mechanism is true in cognitive
science, physics has to be reduced to digital-machine/number"
theology").
allegedly automatically created when Joe the Plumber goes into a lab
and shoots an electron at, say, a double slit.
Eventually this will be explained in term of consciousness
differentiation along consistent histories/dreams. The notion of
"world" is a very fuzzy one, and physicists are not so much delving in
metaphysics, even when pressed by the (quantum) facts. When I was a
student, some long time ago, it was not well seen to mention EPR, nor
even Bell, nor even Aspect later, which was considered as philosophy.
And now, after Deutsch, it is considered as ... engineering (which in
the mind of some pure scientist is just worst ...
The two types of multiple worlds are conceptually different, hugely
different, and that was all I was asserting.
OK. I agree. There are many "many-worlds", like Tegmark illustrated
(very partially).
To claim that the two concepts are somehow the same is a common
error, and egregiously misleading to equate them.
Absolutely.
For example, the former has nothing to do with Joe the Plumber
shooting an electron at a slit in a lab and creating an awesome
(uncountable!) number of NEW universes.
> For example, we know that irrational numbers exist
Do we?
Of course. It has been proven that pi and e are not rational. It's
also been proven that the irrationals are dense in the reals; that
is, many "more" irrationals than rationals; the difference between
countable and uncountable infinities.
The rational are dense, but countable. The real are not countable.
But this is mathematics, not physics. You need some metaphysical or
theological hypothesis to talk about the existence or non-existence
of a mathematical object in a physucal reality, or vice versa. See
my work for an explanation that if Mechanism is true in cognitive
science, then, there is 0 physical universe, as arithmetic emulate
all dreams, and the physical apperances emerges from "number's
dream" statistic. It seems you assume Aristotle metaphysics, which
assumes that there is a primary/primitive/non-derivable Physical
Universe.
Why are you splitting hairs? Clark questioned whether irrational
numbers exist.
Is it Clark? I thought someone made a statement on the existence of
the irrational numbers in relation with physics. Soryy if I get it
wrong.
I asserted their existence has been proven, obviously in the context
of mathematics and mathematical logic. I didn't assert, and
wouldn't, that they exist in the physical world, any more than I
would assert you can find a perfect triangle in the physical world.
OK.
I am interested in your opinion that, as I contend, the universe
we inhabit, must be finite in spatial extent since it is finite in
age.
Your argument makes sense to me, if the Big Bang was the beginning of
the Physical reality. But I can conceive that the start could be an
infinite space, with, say, 24 or 26 dimensions, and that the big bang
comes from some singularity (a division by zero cured in some quantum
way, or a collision between two branes), I really don't know.
With Mechanism, I can argue that the "Physical Reality" is the border
of the "Universal Mind" (and this one is basically the denotational
semantics of the Universal Turing Machine. It can be proved equivalent
with universal dovetailing, or with the set of sigma_1-true sentences
of arithmetic. Despite many equivalence imposed by the machine looking
at this from inside, I would expect the Physical Reality to be infinite.
This is the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss,
apparently.
The reason for me, is that without a quantum theory of gravitation, I
am not sure we have the tools to formulate the question. Some theories
assume a big-bang almost embedded in a classical infinite space. I do
have problem with the notion of quantum vacuum when applied in any
"global" or "cosmological" setting. I do think that the quantum vacuum
is probably equivalent with the set of sigma_1 sentences "seen from
inside" (in the Gödelian sense), and that the physical universe(s) are
the branch of the quantum vacuum superposition in some Fock space, but
without a theory of space and time, or of space-time, quantized in
some appropriate way, I can't really ascribe sense to a notion like
beginning, ... except eventually as consciousness differentiating on
all computational histories, which makes time-duration into an
indexical of the mind. I have never really believed in notion like
time and space which are (provably when accepting the greek definition
and identifying belief and provable (Gödel's arithmetical beweisbar
predicate) emulated from the perspective of the machine supported by
computations.
If you understand that all dreams/subjective experience are emulated
in a tiny part of the arithmetical truth/reality, it is not so clear
if we have any evidence for a physical universe, as irreducible
ontological being. We have only evidence for a lasting sharable "video
game", and, when the math is done, consciousness differentiates and
stabilize on deep histories (in Bennett sense) by rare people in the
local sense, but with an extremely high measure in the relative sense.
And that is somehow what is offered by some Hamiltonian in the quantum
formalism (without reduction). With mechanism, it is the only way to
make sense of a machine consciousness as related to a "reality": from
the third person description of the first person experiences, they are
determined by a statistics on infinitely many computational histories.
Like the old boy said "reality is an illusion albeit a persistent one.
Einstein just missed the universal machine/number as the universal
audience and performer, like Gödel, despite he is the first one to see
the isomorphism between (recursive) computation and number (sigma_0)
relations (Gödel missed also the Church-Turing thesis).
We should expect that most people are afraid by the elephant in the
room, also.
Bruno
Bruno
We know that mathematicians can use the language of mathematics to
write stories about irrational numbers, but nobody has ever
seen a irrational number of anything in the physical world.
And we know that a English professor can write stories about The
Lord Of The Rings, but noddy has ever seen Frodo Baggins or
The Shire.
> if your conjecture were true, it would be impossible for
irrational numbers to exist, since recurring repetitions of subset
strings would be impossible to avoid.
If the conjecture is true then there might be a
infinite number of Turing Machines in the Multiverse but they
couldn't communicate with each other and none of them would have a
infinite amount of tape. So any real Turing Machine in the
Multiverse is certain to eventually stop, not for any software
reason but because of hardware failure. Eventual any real Turing
machine will get a command like "move the read/wright head one box
to the left write a 1 in the box and then change to state
6.02*10^23" but it will be unable to move one box to the left
became it is already at the end of the tape and there is no more
matter in the observable universe to extend it. If no physical
process can produce them that seems to me a pretty good indication
that the physical universe doesn't need irrational numbers (or even
real numbers). Many Worlds is a theory about physics not
mathematics so the philosophic debate about the existence or
nonexistence of irrational numbers has no bearing on existence or
nonexistence of Many Worlds.
I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about Turing machines to
comment. HOWEVER, if you prefer, forget about number theory and
consider the FINITE AGE of our universe, the observable and
unobservable regions. It's been expanding for 13.8 billion years,
so its spatial extent must be FINITE. This undercuts your argument
about infinite repetitions of whatever.
John K Clark
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