This is what I've been saying for aaaaages. I don't necessarily agree with everything here, especially the stuff about consciousness, but I agree with the overall conclusions.
But one of the most serious difficulties with the MWI is what it does to the notion of self. What can it mean to say that splittings generate copies of me? In what sense are those other copies “me?”
David Wallace, one of the most ingenious Everettians, has argued that purely in linguistic terms the notion of “I” can make sense only if identity/consciousness/mind is confined to a single branch of the quantum multiverse. Since it is not clear how that can possibly happen, Wallace might then have inadvertently demonstrated that the MWI is not after all proposing a conceit of “multiple selves.” On the contrary, it is dismantling the whole notion of selfhood. It is denying any real meaning of “you.”
What this boils down to is the interpretation of probabilities in the MWI. If all outcomes occur with 100-percent probability, where does that leave the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics? And how can two (or for that matter, a thousand) mutually exclusive outcomes all have 100-percent probability?
Or perhaps : how does probability have determinate values within individual realities ?
What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with an experience of pseudo-facts (we think that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value — any meaning — in what remains, and whether the sacrifice has been worth it.
It says that our unique experience as individuals is not simply a bit imperfect, a bit unreliable and fuzzy, but is a complete illusion. If we really pursue that idea, rather than pretending that it gives us quantum siblings, we find ourselves unable to say anything about anything that can be considered a meaningful truth. We are not just suspended in language; we have denied language any agency. The MWI — if taken seriously — is unthinkable.
As usual, I would slightly temper this. I accept that there's no reason the Universe should make sense or that what seems logical and irrefutable to me is definitely the case. There's no particular reason to assume a kilo or so of warm skull-based goop should be able to understand reality. But let's not go nuts with this. It might be that reality is fundamentally incomprehensible, even illogical. But that option is a last resort, and Many Worlds doesn't explain anything. It just resorts to saying everything is a statistical fluke, which is monumentally unhelpful.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-the-many-worlds-interpretation-of-quantum-mechanics-has-many-problems-20181018/
I think that the only think that really makes sense is the universe...we and our interpretations of sense-making are kind of superficial in that regard.
ReplyDeleteIt is still a ton of fun though, don't get me wrong..there are three big puzzles that define each of us as a personality: making sense of ourselves, making sense of our environment(physical/social/meta-social) and making sense of the universe.
The first is a philosophical search, but no guide can be found in the domain of philosophy itself- as a matter of fact if you are not careful you may fail the puzzle and become a philosopher(searching the answer of the puzzle in the second puzzle)
The second is boring- its complexity comes from the volumes of data you need to work, and the more you dig into it, the uglier it will get. The latter may lead to you to depressive manias or to utopian delusions.
The third is a lot of fun. In here data matters a lot, but complexity is a separate dimension...and then there is the universe that constantly throws a "talk to the hand dude, you are way to simple-minded to get that shit" :PP.
OK, find me one that has none of that consciousness bullshit.
ReplyDeleteI tell you straight up it's bullshit because there is no continuity of self anyway.
A self is a series of persons who know each other in one temporal direction, and can help or hinder each other in the other.
Tragic, truly, but no continuity needed.
All that is required for a person who is split (and I am not really hot for MWI myself) at some point in time to feel as if they are still connected to the main node is that they remember enough to "connect the dots" to that node. So, no, consciousness doesn't help topple MWI in any way, and one would have to be a very silly person to think that.
As a programmer it is no problem for me. Ted is a master class. Each MWM (Many Worlds Me) is an instance of that superclass. They are each initialised based on where they are in the system and the state that existed when they were created. Each is, in its way, unique. They may exist independently and in profusion within the system quite comfortably and might even connected, if not dependent.
ReplyDeleteI dunno, I'm really quite comfortable with this aspect of the philosophy. It actually brings me great comfort. It frees me up to be the best possible THIS ted instead of trying to be the One True Ted :D
Ted Ewen I am a bit miffed that quite many of those others deviated wildly from my normal habits, to buy winning tickets to EuroJackpot...
ReplyDeleteI'd have emphasised the problems of probability measurement with MWI rather than consciousness, I think the article is deeply flawed in that aspect.
ReplyDeleteThat said, the moral implications are interesting. The problem of infinite realities is that no-one can be said to be making any kind of meaningful choice. I might think I'm deciding (somehow) to be the best possible Rhysy, but in an infinite number of realities, an infinite number of mes spontaneously turn to infanticide for no reason whatsoever, yet fervently believe they're doing the right thing. Another infinite set of mes become brutal dictators purely by accident. Others are smarter than Einstein while still others are noted landscape architects.
MWI completely and fundamentally obliterates causality at the most basic possible level. Everything, literally absolutely everything, is a statistical fluke and nothing has meaning or consequence. Choice is impossible.
I don't like it.
I don't think choices are impossible, they are however non-linear. The causality remains but the context changes. The problem you are addressing is the non-localizeable definition of a context. As we stack probabilities we do not end with permutations or variations but chains of declarations that both share the pseudo-context caused by their(chains) existence and the global such(context).
ReplyDeleteSuch approach effectively breaks modelling attempts because you can't go for predictive analytics- it is fun to play with on a couple of beers, but a disaster to build upon.
If absolutely all possibilities occur somewhere, then I don't see how one could ever draw a causal connection between anything. There would be no distinction something that happened because of something else, and something that just happened in a coincidental sequence that appeared to suggest a causal connection. If the multiverse is infinite, all values are indeterminate and nothing is quantifiable.
ReplyDeleteNope, I definitely don't like it.
Rhys Taylor Presumably common events would still happen in more instances than rare events?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I don't think causality is a very robust concept. When we zoom in on events, macroscopic causality disappears from sight far sooner than the quantum level, a spark can ignite the fumes that rise from a leaking gas canister... or it can fail to do so.
And our main evidence which kind of event it is going to be will be whether there's a big flame or not.
In a solid state universe, the only one possible if MW is taken to its ultimate abstraction, then consciousness is the only thing that provides causality. What is, is. What does, does. (Massively oversimplified because tired :)
ReplyDeleteIt's not like we don't already, and independently of even QM, have projectionist theories of causality, which say that causality isn't really a thing, it's a perspective humans apply to make sense of the world.
ReplyDeleteImpose meaning on it, that it doesn't actually have.
In that sense, causation is correlation that we think we can explain.
Doesn't matter whether we get it right, as it is really all in our heads... apart from the correlation.
Rhys Taylor "somewhere" is the key here, consider it a time-space and not just place.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere a person is born and somewhere one dies.
Those places can be one- like mother dying while giving a birth this is linear causality(pretty much the only one we can handle).
Those places can be near each other- a mother gives birth in a car on the way to the hospital and since the driver is in a rush he crosses on a red light causing a crash in which other person dies. Here we have locality but no direct causality because the description of the situation leaves too much open- maybe the driver that dies was going too fast and failed to stop. Maybe the road was wet, maybe s/he was distracted for a moment.
It can get even more fuzzy if we vary the time component in the event chain field. The person that died maybe was in an ambulance that ended stuck in a traffic jam caused by an accident caused by the first driver passing on red light. Maybe he died much later in the hospital, partly because the extended waiting in the jam made his condition too volatile and the doctors couldn't handle it.
Those places can be really far in space-time. A leader of a country possessing nuclear arsenal dies and the one that takes his place starts a war, because he nearly died in a car accident caused by the driver in the second example which lead to a brain trauma making him/her hyper-aggressive sociopath.
The further you move the event chain in the spacetime the more "volume" you create between them. They are no longer linked with a thread of causality, but a volume of existence that in most of the cases does not come with its own context. It is an interesting problem on its own, especially if you try to make sense of history. In that context(history) I believe that all written above can be summarized with a simple question: "If we can go back in time and kill Hitler will we avoid WW2?" If you think on that question you will realize that there is no fucking answer to it. There are many speculations you may generate, but because of the volume that comes with the conflict(WW2) you can't generate a quantitative statement, only qualify the lack of that depending on the operators you use to render the volume.
Natural reality is much easier processed in a multi-verse than the classical synthetic context provided by science.
Going back to physics things are a bit more complicated and I agree that the multi-verse is too cheeky way to bypass the almost meta-physical context in which quantum objects create instances of themselves and interact both as containers and content.
I think that there is a lot of value in the multi-verse concept, I am simply not convinced that it applies to the nature of reality in the direction they used it.
As I understand it the whole point of MWI is that it does away with the need for explanation and causality. Anything that can happen, does happen, somewhere. You don't have to explain why any one outcome occurs because they all do. It's not that causality is complicated within any universe. It's that there is fundamentally no such thing as causality, it's all statistics. That is the whole raison d'être of the theory, as I understand it. Having an infinite series of universes in which each one did follow casual chains of events would not necessarily be the same as quantum MWI, though I suspect it would have the same philosophical difficulties.
ReplyDeleteWorse though, the infinite nature means that probabilities cannot be assigned (the measure problem) at all, so it's not possible to say that anything is more likely than anything else. So even the appeal to statistics fails. I don't know what that philosophical system is, but it's nothing I would call science. Interesting to be sure, maybe even valid. But not science.
If it could be shown that you could say some outcomes were more likely despite everything happening infinitely, then this would be a good start. IIRC there are attempts to do so but none successful as yet.
yup...if you approach the causal aspects of reality from the postulate that each system has infinite complexity you end up like that.
ReplyDeleteThe postulate itself is relevant in the general case, but even from a philosophical point of view it falls short since it drops quantification completely out of the analytical apparatus.