Many worlds, many problems… one of them serious
| October 23, 2018 | Posted by News under Intelligent Design, Multiverse, Physics |
To hear the multiverse enthusiasts tell it, many worlds theory offers no problems. But you probably sensed that that wasn’t very likely:
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.
Its implications undermine a scientific description of the world far more seriously than do those of any of its rivals. The MWI tells you not to trust empiricism at all: Rather than imposing the observer on the scene, it destroys any credible account of what an observer can possibly be. Some Everettians insist that this is not a problem and that you should not be troubled by it. Perhaps you are not, but I am.
Yet I have pushed hard against the MWI not so much to try to demolish it as to show how its flaws, once brought to light, are instructive. Like the Copenhagen interpretation (which also has profound problems), it should be valued for forcing us to confront some tough philosophical questions.Philip Ball, “Why the Many-Worlds Interpretation Has Many Problems” at Quanta
They aren’t just philosophical questions any more. We are dealing daily with various wars on science — not just disagreements about climate change or how evolution happens but attacks on the fundamental nature of scientific enquiry as a tool of oppression.
That doesn;t directly answer Ball’s question but it reminds us what is at stake when someone claims that consciousness is an evolved illusion and so forth.
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See also: The multiverse is science’s assisted suicide
and
Education prof: Upend science to benefit the oppressed One gets the impression that many people in science think that the social justice warriors are not serious and that after a certain point, they will just go away. That is the mistake of the people in science.
15 Responses to Many worlds, many problems… one of them serious
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as to:
And such as it always turns out to be when one denies the Mind of God, and our own conscious minds, as the ultimate substratum upon which all reality must depend.
Although Philip Ball stated this,
,,, Although Philip Ball thinks that it is simply taken for granted within Darwinism that “you are here, observing this stuff”, the fact of the matter is that the reductive materialistic foundation of Darwinian evolution directly denies that very fact that “you are here, observing this stuff”.
First off, Darwinism denies there really is a real “you” in the first place.
Within the Darwinian worldview, “you” are no longer the real person that you and everybody else knows you to be, but instead ‘you’ become merely a neuronal illusion that is generated by your material brain.
Moreover, if Darwinian evolution were actually true, not only do you yourself become a ‘neuronal illusion’ of the brain, but all the observations and/or perceptions of your brain would become illusory as well.
Donald Hoffman has shown, through numerous computer simulations of Darwinian evolution, that if Darwinian evolution were true then ALL of our observations of reality would be illusory.
Yet, reliable observation is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method.
Thus, since Darwinian evolution denies ‘reliable observation’, which is a necessary cornerstone of the scientific method itself, then Darwinian evolution can never be based upon the scientific method and is therefore falsified once again in its claim to be a scientific theory.
Moreover, completely contrary to what Hoffman found for Darwinian theory, it turns out that accurate perception, i.e. conscious observation, far from being unreliable and illusory, is experimentally found to be far more integral to reality, i.e. far more reliable of reality, than the mathematics of population genetics predicted. In the following experiment, it was found that reality doesn’t exist without an observer.
Apparently science itself could care less if atheists are forced to believe, because of the mathematics of population genetics, that their observations of reality are illusory!
As Richard Feynman stated: “If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are who made the guess, or what his name is… If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Besides you yourself becoming a ‘neuronal illusion’, and your conscious observation becoming illusory and unreliable, if Darwinian evolution were actually true, many other things become illusory too. Many things that normal people resolutely hold to be absolutely concrete and real.
Thus, although the Darwinian Atheist firmly believes he is on the terra firma of science (in his appeal, even demand, for methodological naturalism), the fact of the matter is that, when examining the details of his materialistic/naturalistic worldview, it is found that Darwinists/Atheists are adrift in an ocean of fantasy and imagination with no discernible anchor for reality to grab on to.
It would be hard to fathom a worldview more antagonistic to modern science than Atheistic materialism and/or methodological naturalism have turned out to be.
Verse:
Supplemental Notes:
I have always had an issue with something that is Omni presesnt, Omni potent, and Omni stupid. The multiverse is exactly that. It’s every where CAN AND WILL produce anything, and has no clue it’s doing it. With enough time, given the odds, as long as there is not a 0% chance it will happen, it WILL happen infinitely and indeffinitely. It just will. Even though a lot of people have the issue that it validates everything,
( in one universe God exists, in another, so does the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it evolved, evolution can do that too).
I have issue with the fact that anything goes as long as there’s not a 0% chance that it can happen. Here’s why, if there is at least any percentage chance that something can happen, such as another universe affecting another universe somewhere else in the multi-verse, or a universe has been destroyed by a cosmological phenomena, like a cosmological wormhole that would open up, and tear that universe part, if there is the remotest chance that any of this can happen, it will happen, indefinitely and infinitely.
Which means the multi verse can kill itself and emplode back into its original singularity at any one given moment as long as there is the tiniest of chances that it could happen.
That, unfortunately, is a check Darwinism can’t cash, and the only feasible way to circumvent the whole multi-verse blowing itself up, is by invoking some level of structure and intelligence to prevent universes from being destroyed or the multi-verse killing itself.
You can try to say that only nondestructive events would survive only universe is that behaved would have survived to this point.
The issue is, what I’m talking about, only has to happen wants to end it all and no universe would exist and it is impossible to say that can’t happen.
Ugh I hate talk text,
“Only universes that behaved”
“Only has to happen once”
“Implode”
Sorry about that
Ugh I hate talk text
“Implode”
“Universes that behaved”
“Only has to happen once”
Sorry about that talk text is a joke, if you all want proof of an AI’s enability to understand context, use talk text regularly
AS78, I note, the FSM cannot be a substitute for God as it is a composite being. God is a necessary (and maximally great) being, and that is key. A serious candidate NB either is impossible of being or else is actual as being framework for a world to exist. KF
PS: I note, God would contemplate all possible worlds so by implication all PWs exist as simulations. Ours has been actualised with us in it as significantly, responsible and rational, morally governed, embodied creatures. That I think is one key to the difference between a sim in God’s mind and an actual physically instantiated world.
PPS: Any composite being is made up from separately existing prior parts. Thus it is contingent. BTW, atheists should ponder the implication of their disbelief, implicit commitment to God being impossible of being. This becomes particularly pernicious on the issue of bridging IS-OUGHT at world root level, thus grounding moral government. Links to the current civilisationally suicidal crisis over moral government are not coincidental.
KF,
Excellent points. Thanks.
BA77,
Interesting comments. Thanks.
What has always perplexed me about the “many world interpretation” of quantum mechanics is how they slide over the probability aspects. If the world splits in two whenever a quantum state “collapses”, how are the probabilities of the collapse translated into the two new worlds? If the two outcomes are equally likely, one can sort of see two equivalent worlds resulting (barring other major issues). But what if one outcome has a 30% chance and the other a 70% chance based on the calculations? Is the 70% world somehow more real than the 30% one? With all its supposed problems the Copenhagen interpretation seems more realistic and meaningful to me.
Fasteddious, it may interest you, and others, to know that “the problem of deriving the Born rule” within the MWI is discussed at the 4:30 minute mark of the following video:
Fasteddious,
As I understand it (which may admittedly be wrong), the world doesn’t “split” into two new worlds with each quantum event, but rather into everything in the “wave function” – in other words, an unimaginably huge number of worlds. And thus if something has a 70% chance of occurring, then that outcome will occur in 70% of the “new” worlds, and so we’ll have a 70% chance of finding ourselves in one of those worlds.
The MWI certainly sounds crazy, but I don’t know if it’s any crazier than the Copenhagen interpretation.
What’s crazier, that a cat is both dead and alive at the same time in the same world and that it mysteriously becomes just one or the other at the moment we open the box – or that the cat is alive in some worlds and dead in others?
Even the author of the article in the OP in defending the Copenhagen interpretation writes “the wave function collapses (whatever that means)” – because a “collapse” of the wave function doesn’t make any sense. Is it possible that there is no such phenomena, and instead it’s merely us discovering which world we are in when we do the measurement?
goodusername, the failure of MWI to properly account for the Born rule is a far bigger problem than you seem to realize:
Of related interest, there are two approaches to quantum mechanics: i.e. the “realist” and “instrumentalist” approaches:
As you can see, the realist approach contains Everett’s MWI.
As you can also see, Weinberg, an atheist, rejects the ‘realist’ approach because of the insanity inherent in Everett’s MWI, and also because it does not, in his opinion, successfully deal with the Born rule.
Which is all fine and well, but it interesting to look again at exactly why he rejected the ‘instrumentalist’ approach in quantum mechanics. Again Weinberg stated,,,
And although Steven Weinberg, again an atheist, rejects the instrumentalist approach precisely because of free will, (i.e. precisely because of the fact that “humans are brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level”), science itself could care less about how Weinberg and other atheists would prefer nature to behave.
Specifically, advances in quantum mechanics, with Contexuality and/or the Kochen-Speckter Theorem, now confirm the reality of free will within quantum mechanics.
With contextuality we find, “In the quantum world, the property that you discover through measurement is not the property that the system actually had prior to the measurement process. What you observe necessarily depends on how you carried out the observation” and “Measurement outcomes depend on all the other measurements that are performed – the full context of the experiment. Contextuality means that quantum measurements can not be thought of as simply revealing some pre-existing properties of the system under study. ”
And with the Kochen-Speckter Theorem we find, as leading experimental physicist Anton Zeilinger states in the following video, what we perceive as reality now depends on our earlier decision what to measure. Which is a very, very, deep message about the nature of reality and our part in the whole universe. We are not just passive observers.”
Moreover the final ‘free will’ loophole in quantum mechanics has now been closed. Specifically, the “creepy” and “far-fetched” possibility that the “physicist running the experiment does not have complete free will in choosing each detector’s setting” and that “a particle detector’s settings may “conspire” with events in the shared causal past of the detectors themselves to determine which properties of the particle to measure”,,,
,,, that “creepy” and “far-fetched” possibility has now been closed.
Anton Zeilinger and company have now pushed the “free-will loophole” back to 7.8 billion years ago using quasars to determine measurement settings.
Moreover, here is another recent interesting experiment by Anton Zeilinger, (and about 70 other researchers), that insured the complete independence of measurement settings in a Bell test from the free will choices of 100,000 human participants instead of having a physical randomizer determine measurement settings.
Moreover, having the reality of free will empirically validated by quantum mechanics to such a deep level has some fairly profound implications.
First, by allowing agent causality back into the picture of modern physics, as quantum physics itself now demands, and as the Christian founders of modern physics originally envisioned, (Sir Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, Michael Faraday, and Max Planck, to name a few), then a empirically backed reconciliation, (via the Shroud of Turin), between Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, i.e. the ‘Theory of Everything’, readily pops out for us in Christ’s resurrection from the dead.
Besides the reality of ‘free will’ and/or Agent causality within quantum theory bringing that rather startling solution to the much sought after ‘theory of everything’, there is also a fairly drastic implication for individual people being “brought into the laws of nature at the most fundamental level” as well.
Although free will is often thought of as allowing someone to choose between a veritable infinity of options, in a theistic view of reality that veritable infinity of options all boils down to just two options. Eternal life, (infinity if you will), with God, or Eternal life, (infinity again if you will), without God. C.S. Lewis states the situation as such:
And exactly as would be a priori expected on the Christian view of reality, we find two very different eternities in reality. An ‘infinitely destructive’ eternity associated with General Relativity and a extremely orderly eternity associated with Special Relativity:
Again, the implications for individual humans are fairly drastic, i.e. life or death
Verse:
Because of such dire consequences for our eternal souls, I can only plead once again for atheists to reconsider their choice to reject God, and to now choose life, even eternal life with God, instead of death.