Re: Multiverse Morality

On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 12:04 PM, hibbsa <hibbsa-/[email protected]> wrote:
> Gary - you are too intelligent for me today...I was getting
> confused. So I'll try again tomorrow or day coming soon.

Please do -- I want to understand your ideas.

> You're a smart guy with a dumb theory :o)

Could easily be. At least the dumb theory part.

> Leaving you with this: It's pretty common in science that a theory
> with a lot of reach has humble beginnings in something
> parochial. Stealing word style from Deutsch here.  In the best cases
> that local thing implies the wider implication, which leads to a
> process culminating in a mathematical theory that starts in that wider
> place and eventually finds its way back to the parochial place.

> And so, a few months back I asked this list, whether anyone was
> trying to produce that mathematical theory of the MWI? Sure MWI is
> inferred from QM, but that doesn't matter at all. QM is parochial,
> it implies MWI, MWI is subjected to scientific rigour and genius,
> and a mathematical theory pops out the other end. Maybe profound
> non-trivial predictions are made not only about the multiverse but
> also about things we'd never even imagined right here. The
> predictions hold up, which drive a scientific revolution, which
> eventually sees the greatest ever technological revolution out of
> which humans come riding firmly in the saddle of the force of
> gravity itself. Gravity drives, warp drives, gravity weapons, maybe
> even a special dark door portaling this world to the next with more
> thereafter to the end of the multiverse.

> Alan batted this away saying QM implied MWI not the other way
> around. I did mention at the time I didn't think that a legitimate.

You are correct in my view.  MWI is only one interpretation of QM.
But MWI is principally a mathematical theory -- we put words around
that mathematical explanation to help tell the story.  But the math
_is_ the ground truth.  (This bears on your other posting as well --
all true scientific explanations are primarily mathematical.)  You
could say that MWI is more strictly mathematical than Copenhagen,
since Copenhagen also postulates that quantum states collapse when
observed, and it has no mathematical model for how and when this
happens.  MWI has no such mathematical inconsistency.

> How do you feel about it? And how is the progress coming along?

I'm an engineer.  Not a scientist and certainly not a philosopher,
except insofar as I care deeply about certain problems in those
areas.  And from that engineering point of view, the entire field of
quantum computing, which is admittedly still small but is making
(ahem) quantum leaps every year, does not really exist without a
decent (non-Copenhagen) interpretation of QM.  So I'm pretty excited
about progress here.  I can certainly tell you that the MWI framework
makes it _much_ easier to reason about quantum computers and quantum
information flow.  I think it unblocks whole swaths of engineering
potential and will underpin the growth of the field in the next few
decades.

There's lots of other engineering progress based on QM that
makes a lot more sense with an MWI frame of mind as well;
transistor tunneling, photonics, and so on.

> Not intentionally sarcastic, but yes I do know that absolutely no
> one has put any time into this at all. Why not? If everyone believes
> so much in MWI why is it still a disparate series of explanations?
> Why can it only explain retrospectively? Why has it never told us
> something we didn't expect to hear? The biggest expansion of reality
> of all time by about a million plus infinity, and it doesn't tell us
> a single non-trivial new thing about our world that we didn't
> already know.

Not sure what you mean by any of that.  You think that the idea that
there's infinitely more stuff than we though is something we didn't
expect to hear?  Or that we already knew it?  Or are you saying it
hasn't produced any engineering results yet?  I guess the jury's still
out on quantum computation (and I don't mean D-Wave, I mean _real_
quantum computation) so we will have to wait and see -- the lucky ones
among us will be working to make it happen.

Could you also say what you mean about MWI being "a disparate
series of explanations"?  Seems pretty singular to me.

> Why isn't that a concern? My alarm bells went off about 2 minutes
> after the first time I heard it. Where is everyone else? :O)

Most of them are in the "shut up and calculate" camp, which I think is
what you're advocating (more or less).  There's something to that,
after all; it's the most humble attitude.  As you know, I'm hugely in
favor of "I don't know" being the default answer for hard scientific
questions; I think the Deutschian (and especially some Deutsch
followers) position "whatever our best explanation is should be regarded as
truth" is a very bad way forward.  We can often tell when our best
explanation isn't very good even if we don't have anything better to replace
it with as yet.  I just think in the case of MWI, we have
crossed the boundary from "who knows why this math works" to "this is
a really good explanation".  Your mileage may vary; I've seen that
something like <50% of physicists are MWIers so you're in good
company.

-- 
Gary


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]