RE: "spooky action at a distance"

From: David Barrett-Lennard <dbl.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 09:21:57 +0800

I'm sure we all agree that QM on its own is not the full story. Ditto
with GR. Has anyone claimed to come up with a self consistent, complete
description of our universe? Saying that "all universes exist which
follow the MWI" is putting too much faith in a partial (and perhaps
merely approximate) model of our universe.

With your line of reasoning you would say that people's consciousness
differentiated at the time QM displaced classical physics. Surely QM
was waiting to be discovered?

For this reason, I think it is important that we look for better
ontologies of QM. Even though these different interpretations make the
same predictions today, they affect the way we reason about things -
and our ability to extend the model in new directions.

Anton Zeilinger has brought up the example of Einstein's publication of
special relativity which provided the missing ontology - when most of
the equations had already been provided by Lorentz, Fitzgerald etc.
There is no doubt that this ontology had enormous benefit.

- David



-----Original Message-----
From: Hal Finney [mailto:hal.domain.name.hidden]
Sent: Friday, 14 November 2003 1:31 AM
To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
Subject: Re: "spooky action at a distance"

This list is dedicated to exploring the implications of the prospect
that all universes exist. According to this principle, universes
exist with all possible laws of physics. It follows that universes
exist which follow the MWI; and universes exist where only one branch
is real and where the other branches are eliminated. Universes exist
where the transactional interpretation is true, and where Penrose's
"objective reduction" happens. I'm tempted to even say that universes
exist where the Copenhagen interpretation is true, but that seems to be
more a refusal to ask questions than a genuine interpretation.

Therefore it is somewhat pointless to argue about whether we are in one
or another of these universes. In fact, I would claim that we are
in all of these, at least all that are not logically inconsistent or
incompatible with the data. That is, our conscious experience spans
multiple universes; we are instantiated equally and equivalently in
universes which have different laws of physics, but where the
differences
are so subtle that they have no effect on our observations.

It may be that at some future time, we can perform an experiment which
will provide evidence to eliminate or confirm some of these possible QM
interpretations. At that time, our consciousness will differentiate,
and we will go on in each of the separate universes, with separate
consciousness.

It is still useful to discuss whether the various interpretations work
at all, and whether they are in fact compatible with our experimental
results. But to go beyond that and to try to determine which one is
"true" is, according to the multiverse philosophy, an empty exercise.
All are true; all are instantiated in the multiverse, and we live in
all of them.

Hal
Received on Thu Nov 13 2003 - 20:25:16 PST