At 08:54 13/04/03 -0400, Howard Marks wrote:
>Paul Davies has written some quite thought provoking books and articles -
>and this article has similar merits. Without data and/or unique hard
>evidence, any theory has to be described solely in hypotheticals. The
>multiverse described by Davies in the article, though differing a bit from
>Deutsch's in thrust, has been propounded before, as Deutsch's has. Problem
>is that without unique hard evidence, you must use the words, "I believe"
>and have "faith" that the hypotheticals are "true".
>
>To my knowledge, there has never been unique hard evidence that a
>multiverse resourced quantum computer element could be made to work, nor
>duplicable experiments that can be performed to conclusively show the
>existence of the "shadow photons" or even the production of the needed
>single photons, each path of which must be tracked and shown to create the
>interference described by Deutsch, etc. I stand to be corrected if unique
>duplicable experiments and other evidence/logic exists that conclusively
>demonstrates the existence of the multiverse.
>
>Without that hard unique evidence for the multiverse, we are left with the
>words of religion, esp, and cults and we must use the words, "faith, hope,
>belief", and we even have the trappings of the big promise that religion
>also propounds, namely immortality, albeit of the "quantum" variety!
>Cheers!
>Howard
>
>Nick Bobic wrote:
>>All
>>- http://archive.nytimes.com/2003/04/12/opinion/12DAVI.html
<SNIP>
The argument presented here works equally well for 0,
1, or 2^aleph_0 universes. And then what is a univers?
But the main point of everythingers, as I understand it,
is that "all universes", or just *everything* is axiomatically
less demanding than one thing or two. It is arguably so
for both naive (platonist) understanding of the computationalist
hypothesis in cognitive science, and, as it is probably
better known, for the simplest realist interpretations of
some unitary transformations (QM, Schroedinger Wave Eq).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Mon Apr 14 2003 - 10:03:18 PDT