What is MWI?
"hibbsa" <hibbsa-/[email protected]> Sun, 05 May 2013 17:48:19 -0000
| Newsgroups | gmane.science.physics.fabric-of-reality |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
If you want to read this you'll have to read my most recent reply to Brett first. If MWI is the integration of two knowledge sets, one being say "QM strangeness" then to understand what MWI is we'd need to be really clear what the other knowledge set is. That other knowledge is actually a really quite sophisticed structure featuring multiple assumptions, most of which so far as I know have been allowed to remain implicit. One way to look at the structure would be to start with the concept of Realism. Starting here we begin where the assumptions are at their most explicit so they'll be most familiar to you. Realism becomes 'local realism' which you'll know more about than I do. But what is important is the implicit assumption that follows on from whatever that is: that whatever the answer will be (i.e. the new knowledge that becomes MWI) everything important about that assumption 'local realism' is fixed. Meaning, by implication, what we think about *that* is correct. And the knock-on implication from that is that whatever the answer will be (i.e. MWI) there will be no knowledge about *that*. There could be new explanations concerning how local realism exists in the Multiverse, but that all comes out of a process of reasoning that fixes local realism in from the start. Another big assumption is 'determinism'. So again, we hold that concept as a constant. Another big assumption is that 'QM strangeness' does not need to be explained in terms of, say, the Big Bang. In other words, we've created a structure of assumptions, which amount to holding a variety of variables constant. And then what we are doing is bringing it all together in the biggest top most assumption that QM Strangess is explained in terms of that other knowledge set with all those variables held constant. So hence. MWI can be seen as the answer to the question: What would it take for those [concepts we've held constant] and QM strangeness to be explained in terms of eachother, i.e. consistent, and part of the same thing. Ergo: MWI is what it would take. So....it's really important to see that MWI is not 'incontrovertible' as the implication of QM strangeness. Nothing is ever a clean explanation of just one thing. And the big problem with MWI is that that other knowledge set has not been very well worked through. There's some assumptions in there, but the consequences of those assumptions, and all the play-offs they entail, are not well understood. So far as I have been able to see.