On 1/12/2025 7:17 AM, PGC 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.
Exactly. My point is you're reverting back from the original list's
founders to a "Few Worlds" and calling it "Many Worlds" because you've
rejected the more comprehensive idea. If you believed the arguments you
make for MWI as simpler you would apply them consistently and arrive at
Wei Dai and Bruno's ideas. That's where they came from.
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, while
everybody here is trying to peddle the truth of their own.
Do you think metaphysics can be show true or false?
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.
Instrumentalism and over-focusing on domain-specific discussions is
crude. Divorcing physics from metaphysics, as is sad common practice
here these days by many posters, leads trivially to a collective
psychology that prioritizes building the most advanced weapons for the
richest opportunists, while being confused on fundamental questions
surrounding our nature and the limits of the knowable. Your logic
course must've missed Gödel.
I actually took a full semester in graduate school on Goedel's theories
of mathematics and provability. I've never found him very useful on
physics He discovered a solution of Einstein's equations that described
a rotating universe that allowed closed time-like loops.
Brent
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