On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 10:50 PM Russell Standish <[email protected]> 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 <[email protected]> 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1s%3D31zUaAJSZrHtp3gCbTJxm_tctH%2BEqiPw6yRDrCyQg%40mail.gmail.com.
