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New books mount aggressive but ultimately unpersuasive defenses of multiverses

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: New books mount aggressive but ultimately unpersuasive defenses of multiverses

#71
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “ I see little difference between the religious dogma of the 19th century and the scientific dogma of the MWI.” That suggests you badly misunderstand MWI or else have your own dogma in terms of how you’ll define it. Either way, comparing MWI to religious dogma is beyond ridiculous. > “ For it to be remotely "settled," there actually has to be evidence. There is none.” We have nearly a hundred years of quantum mecha…

You have nearly a hundred years of quantum mechanical experimental evidence that supports CI as equally as MWI. But you have no experimental evidence of any kind which would allow you to rule out CI, or any of the many other interpretations, in favor of the MWI. See, no one disagrees about the evidence itself. That's why there is an "I" in "MWI." It is one of many possible interpretations of the evidence. So that put…

> “ You have nearly a hundred years of quantum mechanical experimental evidence that supports CI as equally as MWI.”

But you absolutely do not.

“Thing plus totally extraneous, unnecessary additional complicated hypotheses” is not equally as supported as just “thing”.

Science says let the simplest, most parsimonious explanation that survives contact with the data prevail.

There can be multiple hypotheses that are all congruent with the same experimental observations. That does not make each hypothesis equally valid.

Those hypotheses, like anything specifying needless extra collapse physics, that are not as slimmed down as they could be while maintaining congruence with the observations must be rejected in favor of those which make fewer unnecessary assumptions or invoke fewer unnecessary details.

The evidence is always for all theories that are congruent with it. That does not at all mean science equally supports all those theories.

Re: New books mount aggressive but ultimately unpersuasive defenses of multiverses

#72

> “ The universe supposedly splits, or branches, whenever one quantum particle jostles against another, making their wave functions collapse.” I’m very tired of seeing pop science articles describe this so incorrectly. It’s a similar mistake as describing quantum computing as simultaneously trying a bunch of solution states “in parallel.” The multiverse theory doesn’t imply any “splitting” action and certainly no suc…

The fact that we observe decoherence is the reason that people talk about "splitting". If things were consistent (either behaving in a classical or "quantum" mannner), the idea that the universal wavefunction was in constant superposition would be much more intuitive. Also, your assumption that there is no "collapse" is predicated on the notion that whatever wavefunction amplitude is modeling is a continuous variable…

I disagree about your claim re: decoherence. Decoherence is just when any informational aspect of a system leaks such that the mind of an observer can update it’s state of knowledge to know which Everett branch it had been on all along. Nothing “splits” .. you just discover which version of “you” that you are.. which of the continuum of possible outcomes your personal measurement happened to see.

Likewise I think you are incorrect about your discreteness claim. I agree with you that QM suggests the nature of reality is fundamentally discrete, but that reality also places the Born rule as a continuous mixture model across discrete states, and this is specifically what allows there to be a continuum of universes of every measurement regardless of whether the outcome is continuous or discrete.. like reality’s own Lesbesgue-Stieltjes measure.

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