Hi Gilles,
Please find my comments below.
Jacques.
==========================
Jacques Bailhache
Y2K Centre of Expertise (BRO)
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gilles HENRI [SMTP:Gilles.Henri.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: Thursday, January 14, 1999 10:39 AM
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: Re: Amoeba croaks -
>
> À (At) 21:59 -0800 13/01/99, hal.domain.name.hidden écrivait (wrote) :
> >Steve Price, MD, <SLP.domain.name.hidden>, writes:
> >> The decisons you make are already "pre-programmed." All things
> "happen"
> >> with "predetemined" measures and it is quite naive to think that you
> can
> >> change those measures. As Jacqus Mallah has said repeatedly, your
> >> decisons simply are the laws of physics in action.
> >>
> >> Everythng that is, was, or will be is contained in the universal wave
> >> function. No one can change that. Even the notion of things
> >> "happening" in time, in a sense, is a illusion. The Wheeler-DeWitt
> >> equation is timeless. What is, is. Period.
[JB--] At first sight, I agree with this, but I admit the
possibility that it could be false, and it's important to admit this
possibility since it could be the only possibility to give a meaning to
life. If the above idea is true, the concepts of decisions and ethics does
not mean anything. As I said in a previous message,
MWI and other theories are mental constructs subjects to
doubt, and the error is much more serious in one sense than in the other :
if one thinks that decisions have no sense, but in fact they have (if MWI is
false, or perhaps also if Multiple Minds interpretation is true), this is
catastrophic : one could make no efforts to reach his goals, thinking that
everything is perdeterminated (at the level of all worlds), but in fact only
one world (in which he will not reach his goals) will become true if MWI is
false. But in the other sense, the error has no importance. The situation is
similar to Pascal's Bet. This consideration could lead to a rather strange
position for the MWI believers : believe that MWI is true, but act as if it
was false, in the case they were wrong.
See also
http://www.website2u.com/log/text/metaphys/thesebm.htm
> À (At) 19:06 +0000 13/01/99, Jacques Bailhache écrivait (wrote) :
>
> > If we considef that the laws of physics are not totally
> >deterministic and that
> > a place remains for free will, we could conceive that this free will
> >could act
> > on both directions of time.
>
> Does everybody agree that these two positions are mutually incompatible
> and
> that there cannot exist any theory satisfying both of them? It is of
> course
> a fundamental issue that happens in any theory of Universe, independently
> of MWI.
[JB--] It depends at which level we consider determinism : the laws
of physics could be non deterministic at the level of one world, appearing
as probabilistic from the point of view of one person, but they could be
deterministic at the level of the set of all worlds.
>
> À (At) 21:59 -0800 13/01/99, hal.domain.name.hidden écrivait (wrote) :
> >
> >When I speak of "choosing" to maximize the measure of good outcomes,
> >you can, if you like, think of my activities as the working out of an
> >incredibly complicated deterministic mechanism. But the latter view
> >doesn't have any relevance to me as I make my decisions.
> >
> >Hal
>
> except that you don't really choose your decisions...Another issue is that
> the notion of "good" is not universal but depends on your own subjective
> perception of reality. The best way to be sure to make the good decisions
> is to decide that all what happens is good (see Leibniz).
>
> > But there could be a possibility of choice if there are several
> >potential trees (with different proportions associated to the branches,
> or
> >even a different structure of the ramifications) and if we can chose one
> >tree which becomes real.
>
> Jacques, if you can choose the tree or anything else in your future, I
> engage you to bet in a quantum roulette that measures randomly the spin of
> an electron...
>
> Gilles
>
>
>
>
>
Received on Thu Jan 14 1999 - 08:38:24 PST