Re: Macroscopic Emergence in MWI worlds

--- In [email protected], David Deutsch <david.deutsch@...> wrote:
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> 
> On 19 Aug 2013, at 16:55, hibbsa <hibbsa@...> wrote:
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> > So the problem is, MWI has basically has no macroscopic influence. 
> 
> Compared with what?

compared to most all major scientific theories I should think. Even QM minus mwi is hugely influential since it is probably behind a large amount of the emergence that creates macroscopic reality. 

But the point about mwi is that the conception doesn't appear to have any differential effect on emergence. Or do you say different?

Does it matter? If you say it doesn't, then are you willing to generalize that thought by saying if science had produced popper good explanations but technology, the industrial, medical and institutional revolutions never happened, it wouldn't reflect on the explanations? 
 You seem to believe philosophy is the same as science, but what is the actual point by point similarity? How much more like science is it, than like religion, or an ideology? 

Would one of the classical greeks find the workings of your philosophy so unfamiliar?

You seem to discount all of these, what are, defining features, unique features. Granted you say it's fundamentally about good explanations and the juice is criticism. 

But there's no history that I know of, or even energy, that gives reason to think actually getting criticism, and actually wanting to throw out whole chunks right away if shown wrong, and wanting the details and/or lack of depth and details to also be structured so as to be vulnerable. 

Now you say it doesn't matter if the multiverse as defined is intrinsically incapable of getting past the first level of emergence such that a difference emergences. I mean, that's ok I suppose, but it's yet another huge swathe of what might have material for criticism, now enjoying immunity. 

But ok. But is it even interesting? What about the implications for the way you define fungibility..are there any ramifications? For example can you answer this. You say in BoI that by fungible you mean both the same and in the same physical place. 

So if the multiverse doesn't differentiate macroscopically, in what way has the macroscopic world moved to a different place? If it's because the multiverse is driven by quantum divergence and macroscopic reality just effortless tags along, why is that picture preferable to, say, a multiverse shaped like a pyramid,  where the large base represents divergent quantum worlds but going upward sees a progressive convergence to the one macroscopic world. Maybe because that's the only way to do it.  

So this being a reply to the other post as well, I think things like productivity, or predictions and all the rest, do matter if they or what they caused to happen,  are indivisibly important to our conception of what it has done for us. 

Technological breakthroughs are fundamentally enabled by the predictive quality of theories. It's only when we can describe something so finely, that we can predict what is going on in each scenario, that we ever break out to the level of actually devising ways to manipulate the physics, with also finely predicted effects. That is the ascent to technology. Do you not regard that as profound...I think it's wondrous. 


> 
> I would have thought that X can be said to have an *influence* if events that happen when X is present are different from those that happen when it is absence.


 

> 
> What do you have in mind by the "MWI" being present or absent?
> 
> -- David Deutsch
>