On Wednesday, November 20, 2024 at 1:08:36 AM UTC+1 Brent Meeker wrote:
On 11/19/2024 3:12 AM, PGC wrote: Your critique of MWI as "bad taste" because of its proliferation of worlds is understandable, but for me, collapse is far stranger and less intuitive. But the "collapse" is still there for you in MWI. As far as anything you can observer or experience or measure a single possibility occurs and this is explained by the action of decoherence splitting your world away from the other possibilities. The only difference is whether you imagine those other worlds as existing or you say that probabilities mean one is realized and the other's are not. If *you don't say that* then you will have trouble saying what those probabilities refer to. This requires a bit of disambiguation and clarity indeed. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bhBSruGSKBlcZoQK2TB7g0RPbJh13LTJ/view?usp=sharing You critique MWI for not deriving Born’s rule from the Schrödinger equation. I agree this is an unresolved challenge for MWI advocates, but I would note that it does not fundamentally undermine MWI. It’s open and I actually share the skepticism towards attempts by Carroll and Co. to bridge that gap. But I don’t advocate MWI; you confuse a preference with advocacy. I prefer the clarity of histories or computations, which avoid unclear ontological commitments. With UDA of Bruno it’s difficult to not acknowledge the multiverse as a confirmation of the many-computations (many implying 2^aleph_0 or more iirc) theorem in meta-arithmetic, which is not an interpretation but derivable from the ontology with the smallest ontological entry fee I’ve seen to date. Collapse postulates, in my view/taste, are conceptually less refined. We all know they assume the wavefunction to be real only to make it vanish upon measurement. This introduces a level of arbitrariness absent in MWI, which maintains coherence between the wavefunction’s status before and after observation. MWI’s probability weights and the Born rule remain open problems but there’s at least room for the possibility, that they do not require the same ontological reversal inherent to collapse and can be smuggled in somehow, a possibility we’ve discussed on this list some years ago. Your concern about skeptical curiosity is well-taken, and I share your interest in understanding how probabilities arise but with the added standard of acknowledging the possibility and problems of doing so without conflating personal/observer accounts and views with objective descriptions. Gödel did happen. A circumstance that explains why none of the frameworks are satisfactory on their own. Deriving something akin to Gleason’s theorem from within mathematical self-reference assuming Bruno’s UDA is an open problem, one that I suppose computational metaphysics acknowledges as both desirable and difficult; perhaps excessively so. If the latter should continue to hold with nobody making progress, the gap between observer perspectives and objective descriptions increasingly isn’t a bug to fix but a feature of the self-referential structures underlying both observed physics and consciousness of the observer in what I understand to be Bruno’s approach. In this light, Barandes' MMI, path integrals, and IST are important contributions, but they too must grapple with the problem of these foundational splits by other means than rhetorical dismissal; all frameworks should at least be acknowledge this difference in some way to indeed clarify what the probabilities refer to. By explicitly acknowledging this, UDA clarifies why observer consciousness, its properties and views, and it’s distinction from objective descriptions, isn’t evasion or gobbledygook but an essential part of the inquiry that can't be swept under the rug. If you can reconcile this within a physicalist or collapse framework, I am - without the obligatory clowning around of the list - genuinely interested. Thank you for enriching my reading. Unfortunately too much work atm. 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 [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/0768af40-e7f5-425f-b950-6bc86d7aae0dn%40googlegroups.com.
