On Sun, Jan 12, 2025 at 10:17 AM PGC <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > On Sunday, January 12, 2025 at 5:10:53 AM UTC+1 Brent Meeker wrote: > > > On 1/11/2025 6:13 AM, PGC wrote: > > That's something you keep assuming. I’m not here to defend Many-Worlds or > any particular ontology. I defend nothing. Rather, I’m struck by the > curious fact that insisting on “nothing extra” in quantum mechanics—like > ordering one’s bourbon neat—can mean quietly negating a host of other > flavors that were right there on the menu. Yes, the Born rule is a triumph, > and I fully recognize its power for quantum computing, materials science, > lasers, and more. Still, there’s a subtlety: that “neat” approach—while > perfectly valid pragmatically—relegates all those wavefunction branches to > the realm of “not real.” It looks minimal but actually demands a long list > of invisible exclusions. > > In fact infinitely many that have already been preemptorily ruled out > because they don't satisfy Schroedinger's equation. The reason this is > called the "Everything List" is because the originators wanted to discuss > theories like Max Tegmark's and Bruno Marchal's that *everything*, in > some sense happens and each of us is only a thread of it. Both have argued > that this is "simpler" because no additional assumptions are needed to > exclude all the things we don't see, they are just on different threads. > > > You can convince yourself of explaining the list's raison d'etre to me if > it makes you feel better with the straw man because Many-Worlds never says > “all conceivable worlds exist.” It says, rather, that all the outcomes > allowed by the wavefunction’s unitary evolution (i.e., by Schrödinger’s > equation) are realized in some branch. If you have a hypothetical “world” > that doesn’t satisfy the equation, it’s simply not in the solution space > that Many-Worlds applies to in the first place. Any scenario that fails to > satisfy Schrödinger’s equation is not part of the legitimate solution space > of quantum mechanics; such a “world” is never admitted in the first place, > so it’s not something that gets “ruled out” by Many-Worlds mid-stream. It > just doesn’t belong to the set of physically allowed states. Thus, the > notion that “infinitely many invalid worlds must exist” misstates the core > idea. Many-Worlds covers all valid solutions but does not grant reality to > “worlds” inconsistent with the theory’s mathematical structure. So there’s > no conflict in discarding any scenario that violates Schrödinger’s > equation—those were never “on the table” to begin with. > > Tegmark remains unclear on many issues that Bruno's approach addresses. > Particularly on the questions of multiplicities of perspectives. And in his > PhD, he tackles the question of different flavors of UD, with some being > more efficient than others and avoiding redundancy of computations; > therefore being more effective, if you will. And if it's those theories > we're discussing on this list, then we should discuss them and not split > hairs on collapse vs non-collapse, as that horse is long dead; baring some > resuscitation or contradiction novelty. That's almost off-topic, if we mean > ensemble theories like Bruno's, that make no-ontological commitments, > What do you mean that Bruno's theory makes no ontological commitments? Doesn't he assume that for every possible computation in the universal dovetailer that would correspond to some observer-moment, that observer-moment is "real"? > while everybody here is trying to peddle the truth of their own. I stand > by my conviction that the list in unmoderated form is losing value. Folks > pushing delusions of grandeur, pretense towards sophistication, gift > horses, aimless politics, and just plain old cherry picking + taking cheap > shots out of context without specifying clearly the approach that we're > leaning towards is *everything but* the original intention you reference. > I agree with the general point that there is too much on the list that's unrelated to "everything" theories in the sense of assuming the existence of all members of a given mathematical class, like Schmidhuber/Tegmark/Marchal, but since every possible finite computation would presumably be performed somewhere in the Everett multiverse (and Deutsch showed on p. 11-13 of https://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/deutsch85.pdf that every finite quantum system can be perfectly simulated by a quantum or classical computer), the MWI be seen as a way of assigning a measure to the set of all computations, assuming the problem of deriving probabilities from the MWI is solvable (I pointed to what seems like a promising approach at https://groups.google.com/g/everything-list/c/J1MyRnGtSIA/m/FbB3f-oeBwAJ and https://groups.google.com/g/everything-list/c/J1MyRnGtSIA/m/NTC3oZYiBwAJ ). And as a distant dream, perhaps it could someday be shown that this agrees with some other natural way of defining a measure on the set of all computations like Schmidhumber's speed prior at https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/speedprior.html , so in effect one would then have a derivation of physics from a more mathematical ToE. Anyway if you look at the earliest posts on the list sorted by date at https://riceissa.github.io/everything-list-1998-2009/date.html you can see the Everett interpretation was regularly discussed, see for example the 1998 posts by Hal Finney and Wei Dai at https://riceissa.github.io/everything-list-1998-2009/0021.html and https://riceissa.github.io/everything-list-1998-2009/0039.html Jesse -- 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]. 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