Energy conservation in many-worlds

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Bruce Kellett

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Nov 26, 2019, 10:51:09 PM11/26/19
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A standard objection to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
mechanics concerns energy conservation. When the universe splits on some
quantum event and a new branch(world) is created, where does the energy
come from?

Sean Carroll tackles this question on page 173 of his new book. But I am
not convinced that he gives a convincing answer. Basically, he says that
since the universe as a whole evolves according to the Schrödinger
equation, this unitary evolution conserves energy. He goes on:
"Not all worlds are created equal. Think about the wave function. When
it describes multiple branched worlds, we can calculate the total amount
of energy by adding up the amount of energy in each world, times the
weight (the amplitude squared) for that world. When one world divides in
two, the energy in each world is basically the same as it previously was
in the single world (as far as anyone living in it is concerned), but
their contributions to the total energy of the wave function of the
universe have divided in half, since their amplitudes have decreased.
Each world got a bit thinner, although its inhabitants can't tell any
difference."

I see some problems here. One is that the total number of branches in
the branching wave function is continually increasing, and the number of
branches is not well defined -- indefinite even if not actually
infinite. So the energy in each branch is effectively zero, unless we
renormalize or something on each split. The second worry is that taken
at fact value, multiplying the energy by the weight of each branch on a
split would mean that if we have a Stern-Gerlach measurement of spin, or
a photon on a half silvered mirror, the weights of each of the two new
branches is one half, so the energy of the photon that is reflected off
my half-silvered mirror should be one-half the energy of the incident
photon. The other half of the energy has gone to the photon (in another
world) that was transmitted. This is not what is seen, and contradicts
the assertion that energy is conserved in each branch. If new branches
are continually forming out of any branch, there is no way the energy
could be conserved without it being obvious to the observer of the
photon incident on the half-silvered mirror. (Or is any other quantum
interaction.) As any world branches, energy cannot be conserved without
it being obvious along any decohered history.

Carroll given another example; "I have, say, a bowling ball, with a
certain mass and potential energy. But then someone in the next room
observes a quantum spin and branches the wave function. Now there are
two bowling balls, each of which has the energy of the previous one.
No?" He answers: "That ignores the amplitudes of the branches. The
contribution of the bowling ball to the energy of the universe isn't
just the mass and the potential energy of the ball; it's that, times the
weight of its branch  of the wave function. After the splitting it looks
like you have two bowling balls, but together they contribute exactly as
much to the energy of the wave function as the single bowling ball did
before."

Clearly, when the split is due to a quantum  event in another room, you
are not aware of the split and of the sudden reduction of the
mass-energy of everything around you. So you could get away with that by
a simple renormalization. But if you are observing the atom in the S-G
magnet, how does this approach avoid the conclusion that you would have
to see its energy halve? I do not think that locutions about the energy
of the wave function of the universe being conserved, and branches
decreasing in energy by their Born weights, are actually going to avoid
the problem of accounting for energy conservation, as observed in each
continuing branch.

It seems to me that the best one can do is say that energy is conserved
in each branch, even over splitting. That is, after all, what is
observed. Consequently, the energy of the overall wave function is not
conserved. This might cause some problems for the insistence on unitary
evolution of the wave function as a whole...........

Bruce

Brent Meeker

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Nov 27, 2019, 1:32:44 AM11/27/19
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On 11/26/2019 7:51 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> A standard objection to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum
> mechanics concerns energy conservation. When the universe splits on
> some quantum event and a new branch(world) is created, where does the
> energy come from?
>
> Sean Carroll tackles this question on page 173 of his new book. But I
> am not convinced that he gives a convincing answer. Basically, he says
> that since the universe as a whole evolves according to the
> Schrödinger equation, this unitary evolution conserves energy. He goes
> on:
> "Not all worlds are created equal. Think about the wave function. When
> it describes multiple branched worlds, we can calculate the total
> amount of energy by adding up the amount of energy in each world,
> times the weight (the amplitude squared) for that world. When one
> world divides in two, the energy in each world is basically the same
> as it previously was in the single world (as far as anyone living in
> it is concerned), but their contributions to the total energy of the
> wave function of the universe have divided in half, since their
> amplitudes have decreased. Each world got a bit thinner, although its
> inhabitants can't tell any difference."
>
> I see some problems here. One is that the total number of branches in
> the branching wave function is continually increasing, and the number
> of branches is not well defined -- indefinite even if not actually
> infinite.

For radioactive decay the split is a continuum of "events".

> So the energy in each branch is effectively zero, unless we
> renormalize or something on each split. The second worry is that taken
> at fact value, multiplying the energy by the weight of each branch on
> a split would mean that if we have a Stern-Gerlach measurement of
> spin, or a photon on a half silvered mirror, the weights of each of
> the two new branches is one half, so the energy of the photon that is
> reflected off my half-silvered mirror should be one-half the energy of
> the incident photon. The other half of the energy has gone to the
> photon (in another world) that was transmitted. This is not what is
> seen, and contradicts the assertion that energy is conserved in each
> branch.

Is it?  If you measured the momentum change of the mirror due to the
photon, you would find it was either zero (transmitted) or h/f
(reflected).  Of course you would also have welcher weg information.

> If new branches are continually forming out of any branch, there is no
> way the energy could be conserved without it being obvious to the
> observer of the photon incident on the half-silvered mirror. (Or is
> any other quantum interaction.) As any world branches, energy cannot
> be conserved without it being obvious along any decohered history.
>
> Carroll given another example; "I have, say, a bowling ball, with a
> certain mass and potential energy. But then someone in the next room
> observes a quantum spin and branches the wave function.

The other room?  How about Alpha Centari?   Or another galaxy?  In fact
the lesson the C60 buckyball experiment is that there doesn't have to be
anyone measuring anything.  All that's needed is decoherence into the
environment and you and the rest of the universe have split.

> Now there are two bowling balls, each of which has the energy of the
> previous one. No?" He answers: "That ignores the amplitudes of the
> branches. The contribution of the bowling ball to the energy of the
> universe isn't just the mass and the potential energy of the ball;
> it's that, times the weight of its branch  of the wave function. After
> the splitting it looks like you have two bowling balls, but together
> they contribute exactly as much to the energy of the wave function as
> the single bowling ball did before."
>
> Clearly, when the split is due to a quantum  event in another room,
> you are not aware of the split and of the sudden reduction of the
> mass-energy of everything around you. So you could get away with that
> by a simple renormalization. But if you are observing the atom in the
> S-G magnet, how does this approach avoid the conclusion that you would
> have to see its energy halve?

How you would see it.  The act of observing it splits you too.

Brent

scerir

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Nov 27, 2019, 1:37:04 AM11/27/19
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It seems to me that the best one can do is say that energy is conserved in each branch, even over splitting. That is, after all, what is observed. Consequently, the energy of the overall wave function is not conserved. This might cause some problems for the insistence on unitary evolution of the wave function as a whole...........
Bruce

The principle of conservation of energy, in MWI, seems obscure to me, at least.

"In more general cases, where there are superpositions of states of different energy, energy can increase in one universe at the cost of decreasing in another." -David Deutsch

"Now, there isn't really a story to tell about what the total energy in individual universes is during that whole process [of measurement]. Because the universes are not autonomous during it. But one thing's for sure, there is no way of construing it so that the energy in each particular universe is conserved, for the simple reason that the whole system starts out the same on each run of the experiment (before the non-sharp state is created), and ends up different". -David Deutsch

Philip Thrift

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Nov 27, 2019, 2:31:19 AM11/27/19
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Sean (and some other physicists) do not think either that that matter exists, or  that it is what reality is made of. 

Or, they will say it (matter) exists, but it is defined in terms of information: 

            Information (not matter) is what reality is made of.

If matter can be continually created in an infinitely branching process (as information can multiply at no cost), then Many Worlds are fine.

@philipthirift

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 27, 2019, 6:15:53 AM11/27/19
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It is just a form of matrix majorization. The total energy is E = sum_n p_nE_n prior to each splitting and after. The observer who finds an outcome E_i is in a sense frame dragged along a geodesic direction in the Fubini-Study metric corresponding to p_i = |ψ_i|^2. This means from the phenomenology of that observer the observable world is along that geodesic and p_i → 1. So the observer may find that energy is conserved, but this appears not consistent with MWI. 

This is really one of the least concerns I have with MWI. 

LC


On Tuesday, November 26, 2019 at 9:51:09 PM UTC-6, Bruce wrote:

John Clark

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Nov 27, 2019, 7:13:01 AM11/27/19
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On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 1:37 AM 'scerir' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> It seems to me that the best one can do is say that energy is conserved in each branch, even over splitting. 

That can't be right because we've know since 1998 that energy is not conserved in our branch. Energy conservation is not a law of logic it is just a empirically derived idea that seems to be approximately true locally. But ever since it was discovered 20 years ago that the universe is accelerating we've known that even in one world theories (Sean Carroll calls them disappearing worlds theories) the idea of energy conservation must be abandoned. When a scientist makes a measurement in his lab energy seems to be approximately conserved and that is something he should expect from Noether's Theorem because his lab and its immediate environment looks approximately the same today as it did yesterday, but the entire accelerating universe looked quite different 10 billion years ago than it does today thus you wouldn't expect energy to be conserved at that level and it isn't.

So whatever problem Many Worlds has with energy conservation it is a problem it shares with every other quantum interpretation and with physics in general when you get to the cosmological level.   

John K Clark

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 27, 2019, 7:27:48 AM11/27/19
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Energy and momentum transferred to the mirror is part of the accounting for energy conservation in this world.

> If new branches are continually forming out of any branch, there is no
> way the energy could be conserved without it being obvious to the
> observer of the photon incident on the half-silvered mirror. (Or is
> any other quantum interaction.) As any world branches, energy cannot
> be conserved without it being obvious along any decohered history.
>
> Carroll given another example; "I have, say, a bowling ball, with a
> certain mass and potential energy. But then someone in the next room
> observes a quantum spin and branches the wave function.

The other room?  How about Alpha Centari?   Or another galaxy?

That doesn't matter.
In fact
the lesson the C60 buckyball experiment is that there doesn't have to be
anyone measuring anything.  All that's needed is decoherence into the
environment and you and the rest of the universe have split.

It is not the splitting that is the issue. It is whether energy is conserved in each branch separately, or only in the total wave function.
> Now there are two bowling balls, each of which has the energy of the
> previous one. No?" He answers: "That ignores the amplitudes of the
> branches. The contribution of the bowling ball to the energy of the
> universe isn't just the mass and the potential energy of the ball;
> it's that, times the weight of its branch  of the wave function. After
> the splitting it looks like you have two bowling balls, but together
> they contribute exactly as much to the energy of the wave function as
> the single bowling ball did before."
>
> Clearly, when the split is due to a quantum  event in another room,
> you are not aware of the split and of the sudden reduction of the
> mass-energy of everything around you. So you could get away with that
> by a simple renormalization. But if you are observing the atom in the
> S-G magnet, how does this approach avoid the conclusion that you would
> have to see its energy halve?

How you would see it.  The act of observing it splits you too.

I don't think you have seen the point I am trying to make.

Bruce

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 27, 2019, 7:31:52 AM11/27/19
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On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 5:37 PM 'scerir' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

It seems to me that the best one can do is say that energy is conserved in each branch, even over splitting. That is, after all, what is observed. Consequently, the energy of the overall wave function is not conserved. This might cause some problems for the insistence on unitary evolution of the wave function as a whole...........
Bruce

The principle of conservation of energy, in MWI, seems obscure to me, at least.

I agree with that completely. In fact, many-worlds seems to me to be incompatible with observation, at least if what David Deutsch says below is correct.

 
"In more general cases, where there are superpositions of states of different energy, energy can increase in one universe at the cost of decreasing in another." -David Deutsch

"Now, there isn't really a story to tell about what the total energy in individual universes is during that whole process [of measurement]. Because the universes are not autonomous during it. But one thing's for sure, there is no way of construing it so that the energy in each particular universe is conserved, for the simple reason that the whole system starts out the same on each run of the experiment (before the non-sharp state is created), and ends up different". -David Deutsch

It looks as though Deutsch is taking the hard line -- that unitarity and Schrodinger evolution of the total wave function of the universe means that it is only at that level that energy is conserved. So there can be no conservation in the individual branches -- even though energy is conserved to a high degree of accuracy in each branch! There is a problem somewhere........

Bruce

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 27, 2019, 7:36:17 AM11/27/19
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Of course. It is well known that global energy is not conserved in a non-static universe; where there is no time-like Killing vector field.

But that was not the issue I was addressing. Energy is conserved locally, even in GR with a non-static universe. So is it conserved in each branch of the wave function separately? Or only in the total wave function, as Deutsch (and Carroll) seem to suggest?

John Clark

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Nov 27, 2019, 9:27:39 AM11/27/19
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On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 7:36 AM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Of course. It is well known that global energy is not conserved in a non-static universe; where there is no time-like Killing vector field. But that was not the issue I was addressing. Energy is conserved locally, even in GR with a non-static universe. So is it conserved in each branch of the wave function separately?

I'm not sure why you care what a Troll like me thinks but you just answered your own question if by "locally" you mean one particular branch of the multiverse. We live in a non-static universe so energy is not conserved, so obviously energy is not conserved in each branch of the wave function, although it may be approximately conserved at smaller scales.  
 
> Or only in the total wave function, as Deutsch (and Carroll) seem to suggest?

If you insist you can jerry-rigged things and shoehorn global energy conservation in by multiplying the energy in each branch by the square of the absolute value of the amplitude of that branch in the universal wave function of the entire multiverse, but what would be the point? I can't see how that approach could lead to anything constructive. It seems to me it would be better to just say energy conservation is not a very useful idea when applied at the cosmological level.

 John K Clark

Brent Meeker

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Nov 27, 2019, 3:36:43 PM11/27/19
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On 11/27/2019 3:15 AM, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
It is just a form of matrix majorization. The total energy is E = sum_n p_nE_n prior to each splitting and after. The observer who finds an outcome E_i is in a sense frame dragged along a geodesic direction in the Fubini-Study metric corresponding to p_i = |ψ_i|^2. This means from the phenomenology of that observer the observable world is along that geodesic and p_i → 1. So the observer may find that energy is conserved, but this appears not consistent with MWI. 

This is really one of the least concerns I have with MWI. 

I'd be interested to hear your major concerns.

Brent

Brent Meeker

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Nov 27, 2019, 4:48:27 PM11/27/19
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I don't think I do either.  Certainly we think energy is (locally) conserved in the world we observe, which according to MWI is only one branch.  So either energy is created in order supply it for all the other branches, or there's some scaling principle (which LC seems to suggest) such that if everything in a branch is scaled to the appropriate probability, including the energy, then there will be no observable difference.  The latter is why I brought the half-silvered mirror case, since it's not just energy that is conserved, but the energy-momentum.  And there's angular momentum too, and charge.  It's not just energy. 

Brent

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 27, 2019, 5:13:24 PM11/27/19
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On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 8:48 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 11/27/2019 4:27 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote: 
I don't think you have seen the point I am trying to make.

I don't think I do either. 

After overnight reflection I am no longer sure that there is a point!

The starting point was the section on page 173 of Carroll's new book. I didn't think that that was actually a satisfactory answer to the question of energy conservation in MWI: energy is conserved in the global wave function by unitarity, but when there is a split in one branch, where does the energy of the other branches come from? The answer given is that the original energy is split according to the Born weights. That, at least, gives the global conservation. So half the original energy in my laboratory goes into the branch that sees spin-up in an S-G experiment, and half goes into the spin-down branch. Why am I not aware of this? I think the answer would be that it is the energy of the whole of the original branch that is split and that branch extends over time, so it looks as though the split occurs before the spin measurement -- at least as far as energy is concerned. So the picture that emerges is that in any superposition, the energy is split between components according to the Born weights, whether a measurement involving decoherence is made or not. Whether such an idea is even coherent is not clear. But that seems to be what MWI is committed to.

Certainly we think energy is (locally) conserved in the world we observe, which according to MWI is only one branch.  So either energy is created in order supply it for all the other branches, or there's some scaling principle (which LC seems to suggest) such that if everything in a branch is scaled to the appropriate probability, including the energy, then there will be no observable difference.  The latter is why I brought the half-silvered mirror case, since it's not just energy that is conserved, but the energy-momentum.  And there's angular momentum too, and charge.  It's not just energy.

I think your point about other conservation laws is interesting -- especially charge. How would you divide the charge of a state among the superposed basis states according to the Born rule and get charge conservation in every branch? Simple scaling as with energy would seem not to work.

Bruce

John Clark

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Nov 27, 2019, 5:29:52 PM11/27/19
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On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 5:13 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think your [Brent Meeker] point about other conservation laws is interesting -- especially charge. How would you divide the charge of a state among the superposed basis states according to the Born rule and get charge conservation in every branch?

Our branch of the multiverse is electrically neutral and it seems likely all of them are, so preserving conservation of charge doesn't seem like much of a problem.

 John K Clark
 

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 27, 2019, 5:41:42 PM11/27/19
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As far as I can see it makes little sense to be concerned about WMI and energy conservation for the cosmos at large. The Hamiltonian constraint NH = 0 for the FLRW metric is

H = 0 = (a'/a)^2 - 8πG(ρ_m + ρ_dm + ρ_r + ρ_de)/3c^2, a' = da/dt

for  ρ_m + ρ_dm = k/a^3 the matter plus dark matter density,  ρ_r = k'/a^4 the radiation density and ρ_de = const the dark energy density. The time variable t is defined on the so called Hubble frame. This can be used in Hamilton's equation to give the dynamical equation. In this there is no definition globally to energy. This also shows the standard argument the kinetic energy part is equal to the negative of the potential energy so they balance out and the total energy is zero. This FLRW equation within the quantization HΨ[g] = 0 gives the equation

[p^2  - 8πG(ρ_m + ρ_dm + ρ_r + ρ_de)a^2/3c^2]Ψ[a] = 0, p = -i∂/∂a

and is the Wheeler-DeWitt equation in mnisuperspace. What is noticable and odd is this looks a lot like the Schrödinger equation with -i∂Ψ[a]/∂t = 0. We may think of this as a Killing vector-operator on the wave, and it is zero. There is no Killing vector defined globally. 

What I can do though is to define the wave as Ψ[a, φ], for φ defined with some exponential trailing off amplitude with a, thus making it local, and this will give a local field equation with time. This seems to be the best we can do with energy. Energy can be defined locally, where after all we have no problem here on Earth or in local space or spacetime to consider energy conservation. Then with MWI you can majorize the energy operator according to the probabilities of the quantum states. 

LC

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 27, 2019, 5:46:35 PM11/27/19
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There is to my mind an open question about the nonlocalizable nature of measurement and the definition of probabilities. In some ways this is related to the problem with majorizing the Hamiltonian with probabilities for each branch, but then resetting the probability of a measurement to unity according to the observer "frame dragged" along a particular path in Fubini-Study metric. This is still a sort of projector, which in the Bohr approach is considered with a local definition of a measurement, but here we are considering a nonlocal situation where the global wave continues.

LC

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 27, 2019, 5:51:55 PM11/27/19
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Consider firing an electron at a screen. There are a very large number of sub-branches created -- one for every position that the electron can land. There was only one negative charge originally -- now there are a very large number. Where did the extra charges come from?

Bruce

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 27, 2019, 6:39:09 PM11/27/19
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The electric charge in one branch is the same electric charge in all other branches.

LC 

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 27, 2019, 6:46:46 PM11/27/19
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Yes. There is charge conservation in each branch separately. The challenge is to explain this when the number of branches increases exponentially.

Bruce

Pierz

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Nov 27, 2019, 6:47:56 PM11/27/19
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I think it's a misapplication of rules that empirically apply (locally, as JC points out) within branches, which is the only world we ever directly know. "Where did the extra charges come from?" is the same question as "where did the extra matter come from?", yet that is simply what happens ex hypothesi in MWI. We observe that time evolution is unitary - and that observation is naturally always within the context of individual branches. Therefore it seems to me to be over-extending the principle to even try to apply that rule across branches as well. Perhaps there is some "renormalization" we can do to make a preserved quantity, but why bother - just so that we can say, hey, look at that, we preserved it!? I tried to explain MWI to a physics-naive friend once and she said, "but then you'd see the other copies!" (or something like that). Well of course that is silly, but fundamentally it's the same mistake - thinking that principles that apply across individual branches must also apply between them.
 
Bruce

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 27, 2019, 7:05:29 PM11/27/19
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Fair enough. That sounds reasonable. The trouble is that conservation in the wave function comes from unitary evolution. And unitary evolution applies only to the universal wave function -- time development on individual branches is not unitary.

Bruce

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 27, 2019, 7:39:15 PM11/27/19
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There are no charges created in this branching. The electric charge in one branch is the same electric charge in all others.

LC 

Pierz

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Nov 27, 2019, 7:46:21 PM11/27/19
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But that is because of "collapse", which MWI does away with.  

Bruce

Brent Meeker

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Nov 27, 2019, 7:49:33 PM11/27/19
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Although it's not in the way contemplated for MWI, it has been known since Wigner that some measurements will not conserve energy (even locally) it was proven in general for conserved quantities in the WAY theorem: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1610.04607.pdf

Brent

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 27, 2019, 7:49:55 PM11/27/19
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Are you claiming that MWI does away with individual branches? What about the branch we live on?

Bruce

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 27, 2019, 9:11:45 PM11/27/19
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Does not the Wigner result (and the WAY theorem) depend on the dubious assumption that since measurements are represent by hermitian operators, all hermitian operators correspond to measurements? Clearly, not all hermitian matrices commute with  the Hamiltonian.

Bruce
 

Brent Meeker

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Nov 28, 2019, 1:19:29 AM11/28/19
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As I understand it the theorem says that any exact measurement must commute with the Hamiltonian in order that energy be conserved.  But the catch is "exact".  It means putting the system measured into the eigenstate corresponding to the measured value.  But if a very small deviation is allowed, so that the measured state includes a very small admixture of orthogonal states then the energy conservation can be satisfied even for operators that don't commute with the Hamiltonian...but then the measurement is not "exact" in von Neumann's sense of leaving the system in an exact eigenstate.

Brent

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 28, 2019, 1:22:08 AM11/28/19
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So it is not really relevant to the issue at hand.

Bruce

Philip Thrift

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Nov 28, 2019, 2:51:42 AM11/28/19
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So the number of coulombs  in a branching Many Worlds grows exponentially .

Under the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, which took effect on 20 May 2019,[2] the elementary charge (the charge of the proton) is exactly 1.602176634×10−19 coulombs. Thus the coulomb is exactly the charge of 1/(1.602176634×10−19) protons, which is approximately 6.2415090744×1018 protons (1.036×10−5 mol). The same number of electrons has the same magnitude but opposite sign of charge, that is, a charge of −1 C.


This was the issue about mass raised weeks ago when Sean Carroll's book came out.

There has never been an answer.

@philipthrift


John Clark

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Nov 28, 2019, 5:37:38 AM11/28/19
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On Wed, Nov 27, 2019 at 5:51 PM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:



Our branch of the multiverse is electrically neutral and it seems likely all of them are, so preserving conservation of charge doesn't seem like much of a problem.


> Consider firing an electron at a screen. There are a very large number of sub-branches created -- one for every position that the electron can land. There was only one negative charge originally -- now there are a very large number. Where did the extra charges come from?

What extra charges? That electron existed in a electrically neutral universe, if you multiply that by "a very large number" you've got a very large number of electrically neutral universes and charge conservation is preserved in each branch and of course in the entire multiverse.

 John K Clark

John Clark

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Nov 28, 2019, 5:52:26 AM11/28/19
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On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 2:51 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So the number of coulombs  in a branching Many Worlds grows exponentially .

There are both positive coulombs and negative coulombs, when you add them all up in each branch you get exactly zero, and zero times a number, even a very large number, is zero. And 0,0,0,0.... is not an example of exponential growth.

John K Clark

 John K Clark




 

Under the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, which took effect on 20 May 2019,[2] the elementary charge (the charge of the proton) is exactly 1.602176634×10−19 coulombs. Thus the coulomb is exactly the charge of 1/(1.602176634×10−19) protons, which is approximately 6.2415090744×1018 protons (1.036×10−5 mol). The same number of electrons has the same magnitude but opposite sign of charge, that is, a charge of −1 C.


This was the issue about mass raised weeks ago when Sean Carroll's book came out.

There has never been an answer.

@philipthrift


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Bruce Kellett

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Nov 28, 2019, 7:07:33 AM11/28/19
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That seems to be nearly an explanation. When you single the electron out and consider its wave function as representing a large number of possible positions on the screen, the rest of the universe must have a net positive charge, since it starts off electrically neutral. So as the rest of the universe is split, the electron always arrives in a universe that is lacking one negative charge, so that the result is always a universe that is electrically neutral on every branch.

The trouble seems to be that this account is different from the account given in the energy case, where we were supposed to weight the sub-branches by their corresponding Born weights. With the result that the original energy was split among the branches according to the Born weights, and the total energy of the global wave function was not increased. In the charge case, the original charge is not split according to any weight at all -- that would not make sense. So a corresponding number of positively charged universes have to be created so that each branch can end up electrically neutral. In the global wave function, therefore, the total number of electrons (and cancelling positive charges) must have increased by the number of possible positions that the original electron could have landed.

This all seems a bit ad hoc and odd. Why should the Born weights play a role for energy, but not for charge? Or is it the case that the Born weights play no role at all, and in the energy case, the rest of the universe in which the particle lands is always one lacking the energy of just that particle. Energy being then conserved in every branch separately, but not in the global wave function? Odd, to say the least.

Bruce



 

John Clark

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Nov 28, 2019, 7:32:07 AM11/28/19
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On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 7:07 AM Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The trouble seems to be that this account is different from the account given in the energy case, where we were supposed to weight the sub-branches by their corresponding Born weights. 

That's because the charge conservation explanation is shorter and simpler; I don't have to talk about the square of the absolute value of the wave function, all I have to say is that any number multiplied by zero is zero. Charge conservation seems to be more fundamental than matter/energy conservation, a virtual electron can just pop into existence in the vacuum for a very short time, but even for that very short time charge conservation is preserved because when that negatively charged virtual electron pops into existence a positively charged virtual anti-electron always pops into existence too.

John K Clark 

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 28, 2019, 8:26:39 AM11/28/19
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No, no, no! This happens no more than does the number of coulombs multiply when an electron is in some superposition of states. In MWI, and I am not trying to be a panegyric for MWI,  there is still a superposition of states. The trajectory or geodesic is in the Fubini-Study metric, a line bundle space of  π:H → PH on Hilbert space and its projectivization on the line bundle. The observer is restricted to a sort of "frame dragging" along one basis direction. This does not mean the charge is duplicated in any global sense, but more that the observer simply observes the electron and its associated charge with respect to one measurement outcome. This really is not that different from the CI construct with projector operators. The observer along other paths similarly observes the same electron and charge, but just carried along another basis direction.

THE CHARGE IS NOT DUPLICATED! I don't know how to more emphatically state this!

LC

Philip Thrift

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Nov 28, 2019, 8:55:14 AM11/28/19
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But Sean Carroll says there are multiple Sean Carrolls that come into being as the MWI branches, so whatever charge Sean Carroll now has is "replicated" in World x and World y, and then the multiple Sean Carrolls go do their own things independently.

That's exactly what he says happens.

@philipthrift

Philip Thrift

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Nov 28, 2019, 8:57:11 AM11/28/19
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On Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 4:52:26 AM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 2:51 AM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:

> So the number of coulombs  in a branching Many Worlds grows exponentially .

There are both positive coulombs and negative coulombs, when you add them all up in each branch you get exactly zero, and zero times a number, even a very large number, is zero. And 0,0,0,0.... is not an example of exponential growth.

John K Clark

 

The electrically charged universe

(Submitted on 31 Jan 2012)
The paper discusses the possibility of a universe that is not electrically neutral but has a net positive charge. It is claimed that such a universe contains a homogeneous distribution of protons that are not bound to galaxies and fill up the intergalactic space. This proton `gas' charges macroscopic objects like stars and planets, but it does not generate electrostatic or magnetic fields that affect the motion of these bodies significantly. However, the proton gas may contribute significantly to the total dark matter of the universe and its electrostatic potential may contribute to the dark energy and to the expansion of the universe.
Subjects:General Physics (physics.gen-ph)
MSC classes:83F05
Cite as:arXiv:1201.6585 [physics.gen-ph]


@philipthrift 

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 28, 2019, 9:45:50 AM11/28/19
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Really there are no duplicate Carroll's or Crowell's or anyone else. There are amplitudes for such with a distribution given by a decoherent set, and phenomenologically any of these in such a branch "renormalize" the probabilities to one. It is not so much that I branch and am duplicated, but that I am also existent in other branches.  

LC

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 28, 2019, 9:53:06 AM11/28/19
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The problem with the idea of a cosmos that is electrically charged is electric field lines do not terminate at charges. There would then be electric charges that either wrap around a finite volume space and drive the electrical energy into some divergence, or for a flat or R^3 Euclidean spatial topology there is some electric field reaching out "to infinity" that defines some topological index out there that would violate Hawking-Penrose energy conditions. Much the same would happen if the cosmos has a net angular momentum, where that spacetime would have features of the Gödel universe.

LC

LC 

John Clark

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Nov 28, 2019, 11:06:22 AM11/28/19
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On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 9:53 AM Lawrence Crowell <goldenfield...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Much the same would happen if the cosmos has a net angular momentum, where that spacetime would have features of the Gödel universe.

And if the universe rotated then it would be possible to build a time machine where you could go into the past and kill your great grandfather, so you never existed so you never killed your great grandfather, so you did exist and you did build a time machine where you killed your great grandfather, so ...

 John K Clark

Brent Meeker

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Nov 28, 2019, 12:08:08 PM11/28/19
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Right.  It's not relevant to the duplication/division of MWI.

Brent

Brent Meeker

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Nov 28, 2019, 1:12:22 PM11/28/19
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If you think in terms of the wf of the multiverse, it's just a ray in Hilbert space and moves around.  It doesn't split.  What "splits" is the subspace we're on.  So when we measure a spin as UP or DOWN, our subspace splits into two orthogonal subspaces on which the ray projects.  But they are only orthogonal on that one dimension (the spin of that particle), so any other variable encoded in the ray gets projected with the same value as before, e.g. the energy or the particle.

Brent

Brent Meeker

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Nov 28, 2019, 1:37:46 PM11/28/19
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And you could apply the same reasoning to energy.  Almost all ways of assigning a total energy to the universe find it to be zero.

Brent

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 28, 2019, 1:38:53 PM11/28/19
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That is more in line with what is going on. The charge of an electron, along with all other quantum numbers of the electron or any elementary particle, is not duplicated. It only appears in any sort of branch and with the renormalization of probability there is this mistaken idea of duplication. Nothing is duplicated any more than a superposition of basis states implies duplication.  That ray in Hilbert space is projected onto a tangent vector in projective Hilbert space along a geodesic. The observer is just forced into observing that evolution with the vector projected once again onto a certain basis element. 

Now how that happens with the measurement being ultimately nonlocal, with it might be added an ambiguity as to the probability at the measurement, is an open question. In MWI there is no fundamental localization of a wave function, so assigning that projectivization is ambiguous. However, we may "cheat" and say the phenomenological appearance of a localization by the observer acts as this projectivization that appears as a collapse. 

Nothing is fundamentally duplicated.

LC

Philip Thrift

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Nov 28, 2019, 2:19:06 PM11/28/19
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On Thursday, November 28, 2019 at 8:45:50 AM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote:

Really there are no duplicate Carroll's or Crowell's or anyone else. There are amplitudes for such with a distribution given by a decoherent set, and phenomenologically any of these in such a branch "renormalize" the probabilities to one. It is not so much that I branch and am duplicated, but that I am also existent in other branches.  

LC



This sounds like an interpretation of quantum mechanics, but it doesn't sound like Many Worlds as presented by Sean Carroll. It sounds more like

The concept of multiple histories is closely related to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the same way that the many-worlds interpretation regards possible futures as having a real existence of their own, the theory of multiple histories reverses this in time to regard the many possible past histories of a given event as having real existence.


Suppose Sean had written a book on this vs. what he wrote about.

@philipthrift

 

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 28, 2019, 7:00:22 PM11/28/19
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That is sheer sophistry. If energy, charge, and other conserved quantities, are conserved in each branch, and the number of branches increases exponentially as it does in MWI, then the total amount of these quantities also increases, and  you, and everything else, is duplicated in every branch. If you treat branch weights as probabilities, and then calculate an expectation value over branches, then that expectation value is constant. But that is just a single-world theory.

Bruce

Bruce Kellett

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Nov 28, 2019, 7:18:01 PM11/28/19
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Right. The subsystem we are considering (an electron fired at a screen or through an S-G magnet) is just a subspace of the full Hilbert space. We can take the tensor product of this subspace with the rest of the universe to recover the full Hilbert space:

      |universe> = |system>{\otimes}|environment>

We can then analyse the system in some basis:

   |system> = Sum_i c_i |basis_i>,

where c_i are complex coefficients, and |basis_i> are the basis vectors for (i = 1, ...,, N), N being the dimension of the subspace.

It is assumed that the normal distributive law of vector algebra acts over the tensor product, so each basis vector then gets convoluted with the same 'environment' in each case, we have

    |universe> = Sum_i c_i (|basis_i>|environment>).

Each basis vector is a solution of the original Schrodinger equation, so it carries the full energy, moment, change etc, of the original state. The environment is just the rest of the universe minus the quantum quantities associated with the system of interest. So each term in this sum has the full energy, charge, and so on of the original state.

If we take each component of the above sum to represent a self-contained separate world, then all quantum numbers are conserved in each world. Whether there is global conservation depends on how we treat the coefficients c_i. But, on the face of it, there are N copies of the basis+environment in the above sum, so everything is copied in each individual world. Exactly how you treat the weights in this situation is not clear to me -- if they are treated as probabilities, it seems that you just have a stochastic single-world model.

Bruce

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 28, 2019, 7:25:54 PM11/28/19
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The reason quantum numbers can be conserved in a particular branch and also within the global wave function is that on the branch the probability has been set to unity. On the global wave these observables are majorized by the probabilities that on each branch are set to unity. It is a bit strange to think about, but I think if you give it some reflection you will see this.

LC

John Clark

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Nov 28, 2019, 7:34:14 PM11/28/19
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On Thu, Nov 28, 2019 at 1:37 PM 'Brent Meeker'  <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>> That electron existed in a electrically neutral universe, if you multiply that by "a very large number" you've got a very large number of electrically neutral universes and charge conservation is preserved in each branch and of course in the entire multiverse.

> And you could apply the same reasoning to energy.  Almost all ways of assigning a total energy to the universe find it to be zero.
 
As Sean Carroll points out, if you insist you could say that, you could say there’s energy in the gravitational field but it’s negative so it exactly cancels the energy you think is being gained in the matter fields; but what would be the point? Saying that will not increase anybody's understanding of what is going on, and unlike other forms of energy there is no such thing as the density of gravitational energy so you can only use it while talking about the universe as a whole, you can't use it to solve local problems unless they are isolated from the rest of the universe which rarely happens even approximately. Why not just admit it and say energy conservation stops being useful when things get very big?

John K Clark

smitra

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Nov 29, 2019, 12:56:57 AM11/29/19
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That total amount has no physical meaning. Different branches are
analogous to different moments in time in a single universe setting in
the block universe view. All that happens in the MWI is that instead of
one successor universe you have multiple ones. But it's not that God is
continuously destroying universes and creating new universes using the
energy of the old universe. If it were like that then God would not be
able to implement the MWI, but this is not how it works. All the future
and past states are equally real and time evolution is just an
information conserving mapping.

Saibal

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 29, 2019, 8:30:57 AM11/29/19
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A summation of energy or any other quantum number can make sense in a local frame. In particular if this local frame can be considered, at least to some reasonable degree of approximation, as a closed system then it is reasonable to be concerned over this sum. The thing people are concerned about is the resetting of probability for a particular branch, which is a ψ-ontological procedure similar to such a resetting of probability in the ψ-epistemological method of the collapse. 

LC

Philip Thrift

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Nov 29, 2019, 1:33:26 PM11/29/19
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In any case, in the case of MWI, in the types of examples Sean Carroll talks about, here's a concrete case:

In one branch, Sean Carroll goes out for a jog around the park.

In another branch, Sean Carroll; stays home and takes a nap. 

I don't see how the two Seans (running, napping) are in "superposition", or how Sean's energy is distributed to and within these two worlds.

@philipthrift

Lawrence Crowell

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Nov 29, 2019, 3:49:17 PM11/29/19
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It really is not so much that a person is in a superposition than the quantum particles and states that compose them are.

LC 

Philip Thrift

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Nov 29, 2019, 4:59:38 PM11/29/19
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In the MWI branch world Jog where Sean is jogging and in the branch world Nap where Sean is napping, the jogging-Sean particles in Jog and the napping-Sean particles in Nap are in superposition. 

Then there is another branching of Jog where Sean is hit by a car Jog-HitByCar and one where he isn't Jog-NotHitByCar. Particles in superpositions: Nap, Jog, Jog-HitByCar, Jog-NotHitByCar, ...

This seems like it should make no sense.

@philipthrift

Brent Meeker

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Nov 29, 2019, 8:35:51 PM11/29/19
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On 11/28/2019 4:17 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Nov 29, 2019 at 5:12 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 11/27/2019 11:51 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

This was the issue about mass raised weeks ago when Sean Carroll's book came out.

There has never been an answer.

If you think in terms of the wf of the multiverse, it's just a ray in Hilbert space and moves around.  It doesn't split.  What "splits" is the subspace we're on.  So when we measure a spin as UP or DOWN, our subspace splits into two orthogonal subspaces on which the ray projects.  But they are only orthogonal on that one dimension (the spin of that particle), so any other variable encoded in the ray gets projected with the same value as before, e.g. the energy or the particle.

Right. The subsystem we are considering (an electron fired at a screen or through an S-G magnet) is just a subspace of the full Hilbert space. We can take the tensor product of this subspace with the rest of the universe to recover the full Hilbert space:

      |universe> = |system>{\otimes}|environment>

We can then analyse the system in some basis:

   |system> = Sum_i c_i |basis_i>,

where c_i are complex coefficients, and |basis_i> are the basis vectors for (i = 1, ..,, N), N being the dimension of the subspace.

It is assumed that the normal distributive law of vector algebra acts over the tensor product, so each basis vector then gets convoluted with the same 'environment' in each case, we have

    |universe> = Sum_i c_i (|basis_i>|environment>).

Each basis vector is a solution of the original Schrodinger equation, so it carries the full energy, moment, change etc, of the original state.

??  The basis just defines a coordinate system for the Hilbert space.  It doesn't mean that the wf ray has any component along a basis vector.  The c_i can be zero; in which case that basis vector doesn't carry anything.  No every Schrodinger equation solution is realized because initial conditions may make it zero.


The environment is just the rest of the universe minus the quantum quantities associated with the system of interest. So each term in this sum has the full energy, charge, and so on of the original state.

If we take each component of the above sum to represent a self-contained separate world, then all quantum numbers are conserved in each world. Whether there is global conservation depends on how we treat the coefficients c_i. But, on the face of it, there are N copies of the basis+environment in the above sum, so everything is copied in each individual world. Exactly how you treat the weights in this situation is not clear to me -- if they are treated as probabilities, it seems that you just have a stochastic single-world model.

Yes, I think that's right.  Which is the attraction of the epistemic interpretation: you treat them as probabilities so you renormalize after the measurement.  And one problem with the ontic interpretation is saying what probability means.  But it seems that the epistemic interpretation leaves the wf to be a personal belief.

Brent

Bruce Kellett

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Dec 1, 2019, 7:24:08 PM12/1/19
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On Sat, Nov 30, 2019 at 12:35 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 11/28/2019 4:17 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:

Right. The subsystem we are considering (an electron fired at a screen or through an S-G magnet) is just a subspace of the full Hilbert space. We can take the tensor product of this subspace with the rest of the universe to recover the full Hilbert space:

      |universe> = |system>{\otimes}|environment>

We can then analyse the system in some basis:

   |system> = Sum_i c_i |basis_i>,

where c_i are complex coefficients, and |basis_i> are the basis vectors for (i = 1, ..,, N), N being the dimension of the subspace.

It is assumed that the normal distributive law of vector algebra acts over the tensor product, so each basis vector then gets convoluted with the same 'environment' in each case, we have

    |universe> = Sum_i c_i (|basis_i>|environment>).

Each basis vector is a solution of the original Schrodinger equation, so it carries the full energy, moment, change etc, of the original state.

??  The basis just defines a coordinate system for the Hilbert space.  It doesn't mean that the wf ray has any component along a basis vector.

The formalism supposes that the state represented by each basis vector becomes entangled with the environment to leave a record of the result of the measurement. Coordinate systems do not become entangled with anything. So the schematic above must represent the particle or whatever that is being measured (considered of interest, if you wish to avoid the "M" word.)

 
  The c_i can be zero; in which case that basis vector doesn't carry anything.  No every Schrodinger equation solution is realized because initial conditions may make it zero.

Irrelevant to the main point.
The environment is just the rest of the universe minus the quantum quantities associated with the system of interest. So each term in this sum has the full energy, charge, and so on of the original state.

If we take each component of the above sum to represent a self-contained separate world, then all quantum numbers are conserved in each world. Whether there is global conservation depends on how we treat the coefficients c_i. But, on the face of it, there are N copies of the basis+environment in the above sum, so everything is copied in each individual world. Exactly how you treat the weights in this situation is not clear to me -- if they are treated as probabilities, it seems that you just have a stochastic single-world model.

Yes, I think that's right.  Which is the attraction of the epistemic interpretation: you treat them as probabilities so you renormalize after the measurement.  And one problem with the ontic interpretation is saying what probability means.  But it seems that the epistemic interpretation leaves the wf to be a personal belief.

Yes, I find this easier to understand in a single-world situation. In either case, you have to renormalise the state -- energy, charge and everything -- for each branch in many-worlds as much as in a single-world. In fact, as Zurek points out, even in many-worlds you end up on only one branch (stochastically). So the other branches do no work, and might as well be discarded. If you are really worried about the possibility of fully decohered branches recombining, take out life insurance......

Bruce

Philip Thrift

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Dec 2, 2019, 3:19:27 AM12/2/19
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Sean Carroll himself has said (in a tweet) that if you let probabilities (stochasticity) in - like the camel's nose under the tent - you might as well have a one world - not many worlds - theory.



@philipthrift

Bruce Kellett

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Dec 2, 2019, 3:39:32 AM12/2/19
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We do have only one world. Do you know of anyone who lives in more than one branch of the multiverse?

Bruce

smitra

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Dec 2, 2019, 8:39:53 PM12/2/19
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Your subjective state (everything that you're aware at some instant),
doesn't fully specify the exact physical state of your brain. The number
of distinct physical brain states is so astronomically large that your
mindset and how you are feeling about everything isn't going to be
consistent with only one physical brain state. This means that given
your subjective state, the physical state of your MWI sector should be
described as a very complex superposition involving a large number of
brain states that are entangled with the environment.

If we assume that we can bypass this problem and that we can locate
ourselves in one single branch, then this leads to the following
paradox. Consider simulating such a conscious entity on a computer. At
all moments in time, the physical state of the computer is just
transitioning from one particular state to another state. Since
consciousness is related to the actual physical state of the computer,
replacing the computer by a dumb device that doesn't compute anything,
which simply cycles through physical states that the computer would move
through given some particular set of inputs, will render exactly the
same consciousness.

This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's
a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions
as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for
consciousness, but there is no room to do that within classical single
World physics. But as I pointed out above the generic state of a
conscious involves being located not in a single branch, but being
distributed over an astronomically large number of different branches.

Saibal

Bruce Kellett

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Dec 2, 2019, 9:18:31 PM12/2/19
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On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 12:39 PM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
On 02-12-2019 09:39, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 7:19 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> "even in many-worlds you end up on only one branch (stochastically)"
>
> Sean Carroll himself has said (in a tweet) that if you let
> probabilities (stochasticity) in - like the camel's nose under the
> tent - you might as well have a one world - not many worlds - theory.
>
> We do have only one world. Do you know of anyone who lives in more
> than one branch of the multiverse?
>
> Bruce

Your subjective state (everything that you're aware at some instant),
doesn't fully specify the exact physical state of your brain. The number
of distinct physical brain states is so astronomically large that your
mindset and how you are feeling about everything isn't going to be
consistent with only one physical brain state. This means that given
your subjective state, the physical state of your MWI sector should be
described as a very complex superposition involving a large number of
brain states that are entangled with the environment.

My brain currently has only one state. Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?
If we assume that we can bypass this problem and that we can locate
ourselves in one single branch, then this leads to the following
paradox. Consider simulating such a conscious entity on a computer. At
all moments in time, the physical state of the computer is just
transitioning from one particular state to another state. Since
consciousness is related to the actual physical state of the computer,
replacing the computer by a dumb device that doesn't compute anything,
which simply cycles through physical states that the computer would move
through given some particular set of inputs, will render exactly the
same consciousness.

Yes, and so what? If my consciousness is a sequence of brain states, anything that produces that same sequence of brain states will produce my consciousness. Substrate independence, after all.
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption,

It is not absurd in the least. Argument ad absurdum is not a logical argument. What is absurd to you may be perfectly reasonable to someone else.
it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals.

How can a counterfactual exist? By definition, it is counter to the facts, hence, non-existent.
 
Clearly actions
as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for
consciousness,

But there cannot be any such thing as a counterfactual input. You might consider "What if...." scenarios. But they are not relevant for my current brain state. It will do what it will do, whatever the input.
but there is no room to do that within classical single
World physics. But as I pointed out above the generic state of a
conscious involves being located not in a single branch, but being
distributed over an astronomically large number of different branches.

Different branches are, by definition, non-interacting, so different branches correspond to different persons. Anyway, I choose not to accept this load of speculative rubbish.

Bruce

smitra

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Dec 2, 2019, 10:53:59 PM12/2/19
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Using the argument below
>
>> If we assume that we can bypass this problem and that we can locate
>> ourselves in one single branch, then this leads to the following
>> paradox. Consider simulating such a conscious entity on a computer.
>> At
>> all moments in time, the physical state of the computer is just
>> transitioning from one particular state to another state. Since
>> consciousness is related to the actual physical state of the
>> computer,
>> replacing the computer by a dumb device that doesn't compute
>> anything,
>> which simply cycles through physical states that the computer would
>> move
>> through given some particular set of inputs, will render exactly the
>>
>> same consciousness.
>
> Yes, and so what? If my consciousness is a sequence of brain states,
> anything that produces that same sequence of brain states will produce
> my consciousness. Substrate independence, after all.

It cannot be due to a sequence of events given that you are conscious at
every instant.
>
>> This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption,
>
> It is not absurd in the least. Argument ad absurdum is not a logical
> argument. What is absurd to you may be perfectly reasonable to someone
> else.

Substrate independence implies that you can map any sequence of states
to those of any other system, for example a clock.

>
>> it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals.
>
> How can a counterfactual exist? By definition, it is counter to the
> facts, hence, non-existent.
>

It requires a multiverse.

>> Clearly actions
>> as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for
>> consciousness,
>
> But there cannot be any such thing as a counterfactual input. You
> might consider "What if...." scenarios. But they are not relevant for
> my current brain state. It will do what it will do, whatever the
> input.
>

If your brain is executing an algorithm and the execution of that
algorithm is causing consciousness, then your brain doing something else
if the input where different is relevant.

>> but there is no room to do that within classical single
>> World physics. But as I pointed out above the generic state of a
>> conscious involves being located not in a single branch, but being
>> distributed over an astronomically large number of different
>> branches.
>
> Different branches are, by definition, non-interacting, so different
> branches correspond to different persons. Anyway, I choose not to
> accept this load of speculative rubbish.

A set of "close" branches can define both the approximate output
resulting from the input and also the algorithm that defines the
relationship between the two. A strict single world picture falls prey
to the movie graph argument. At any moment in time your neurons are
processing information in some way, but because consciousness depends
only on the physical state, a fake brain that would always do whatever
your brain is doing regardless of the input would render your
consciousness of that moment.

>
> Bruce
>

Saibal

Brent Meeker

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Dec 2, 2019, 11:21:53 PM12/2/19
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That's true.  But it waaay under estimating the number of brain states
consistent with a thought.  The reason is that many different
quasi-classical brain states will be consistent with that thought...not
only different quantum superpositions.

>
> If we assume that we can bypass this problem and that we can locate
> ourselves in one single branch, then this leads to the following
> paradox. Consider simulating such a conscious entity on a computer. At
> all moments in time, the physical state of the computer is just
> transitioning from one particular state to another state. Since
> consciousness is related to the actual physical state of the computer,
> replacing the computer by a dumb device that doesn't compute anything,
> which simply cycles through physical states that the computer would
> move through given some particular set of inputs, will render exactly
> the same consciousness.

I don't see the difference.  The computer will also have many different
microscopic states and particles in superpositions (depending on how
bases states are defined).  You are simply begging the question by
calling it a "dumb device".  Dumb or smart are not states or sequences
of states, they are relations to an external environment and internal
purposes.

>
> This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption,
> it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly
> actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for
> consciousness,

It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input"
to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything
but crazy?

Brent

smitra

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Dec 3, 2019, 3:25:35 AM12/3/19
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I agree that also in classical computing there will be a huge number of
different states corresponding to the same conscious awareness. The
point is then that the generic state of the (classical) device rendering
the conscious thought plus environment will be an entangled state that
contains information about the algorithm. If we consider a classical
computer computing the square of numbers and the input is 2 then the
output will be 4. Another algorithm that multiples the number by 2 will
also have an output of 4, and there is also an algorithm that always
outputs 4 no matter what the input is.

The output for an input of 2 + u for very small u is for the first
algorithm approximately 4 + 4 u, for the second it is 4 + 2 u, for the
third it is 4. If the computer where to process data from the
environment that are in a small range near 2, then the environment
would be in some random superposition that would yield such inputs, the
state of the computer plus environment would evolve to an entangled
state that tells you how the output is related to the input for small
variations around the input of 2. The entangled state at any instant
tells you which algorithm is running, you don't need to refer to a
sequence of inputs over some period of time.

Now the computer computing the square of a number won't be conscious,
but our consciousness won't be able to specify the exact micro-state
we're in. This means that our consciousness corresponds to an entangled
superposition of input and output states. This then defines the
algorithm that generates our consciousness. There are then
counterfactuals within the range of precision of our awareness.

Saibal

Bruno Marchal

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Dec 3, 2019, 3:28:58 AM12/3/19
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OK. Like with Mechanism in arithmetic, there is only first person self-differentiation, which appears as self-projection in consistent histories, which all exists in an atemporal static embedded in the (structured) collection of all computations.

Bruno




LC

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Bruno Marchal

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Yet, that happens in the arithmetical reality. So it certainly makes sense, up to verify this regularly (the theory might be false). It is counter-intuitive, but there is no contradiction, and it is the simpler way to reconcile mind and matter, and the observations.

Bruno




@philipthrift

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Bruno Marchal

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It is a first person plural belief, sharable by vast collection of interacting universal entities whose existence can be proved in weak theory of arithmetic. It is a view from inside any model of arithmetic, but unprovable in any theory of arithmetic.

Bruno



Brent

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Philip Thrift

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On Monday, December 2, 2019 at 10:21:53 PM UTC-6, Brent wrote:


 The reason is that many different
quasi-classical brain states will be consistent with that thought...not
only different quantum superpositions.


Brent



Doesn't Penrose think that there cannot be thoughts (no such things as real non-zombie thoughts like we experience in our brains) without quantum mechanical stuff going on? :)

@philipthrift 

Bruno Marchal

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Yes, at least aleph_0 “branches”. But there is no real branch, just differentiating first person experiences. The linearity of the tensor product makes the histories partially sharable among different universal machines. In fact Hardegree did show that quantum logic is a sort of logic of counterfactuals. I think the quantum can be said to come from the existence of counterfactuals and our (discrete machine) inability to make low grained distinctions (due to our digitalness).

Bruno




>
> Saibal
>
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Philip Thrift

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On Tuesday, December 3, 2019 at 2:39:46 AM UTC-6, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 29 Nov 2019, at 22:59, Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com> wrote:



On Friday, November 29, 2019 at 2:49:17 PM UTC-6, Lawrence Crowell wrote:
On Friday, November 29, 2019 at 12:33:26 PM UTC-6, Philip Thrift wrote:


In any case, in the case of MWI, in the types of examples Sean Carroll talks about, here's a concrete case:

In one branch, Sean Carroll goes out for a jog around the park.

In another branch, Sean Carroll; stays home and takes a nap. 

I don't see how the two Seans (running, napping) are in "superposition", or how Sean's energy is distributed to and within these two worlds.

@philipthrift

It really is not so much that a person is in a superposition than the quantum particles and states that compose them are.

LC 



In the MWI branch world Jog where Sean is jogging and in the branch world Nap where Sean is napping, the jogging-Sean particles in Jog and the napping-Sean particles in Nap are in superposition. 

Then there is another branching of Jog where Sean is hit by a car Jog-HitByCar and one where he isn't Jog-NotHitByCar. Particles in superpositions: Nap, Jog, Jog-HitByCar, Jog-NotHitByCar, ...

This seems like it should make no sense.

Yet, that happens in the arithmetical reality. So it certainly makes sense, up to verify this regularly (the theory might be false). It is counter-intuitive, but there is no contradiction, and it is the simpler way to reconcile mind and matter, and the observations.

Bruno



This proves my point that Many Worlds can only work in a pure informational (or arithmetical) reality.

The Many Worlders are (like Sean Carroll) anti-materialists - in the sense that they think everything is information (or quantum information).

@philipthrift
 

Bruno Marchal

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On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 12:39 PM smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl> wrote:
On 02-12-2019 09:39, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 2, 2019 at 7:19 PM Philip Thrift <cloud...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> "even in many-worlds you end up on only one branch (stochastically)"
>
> Sean Carroll himself has said (in a tweet) that if you let
> probabilities (stochasticity) in - like the camel's nose under the
> tent - you might as well have a one world - not many worlds - theory.
>
> We do have only one world. Do you know of anyone who lives in more
> than one branch of the multiverse?
>
> Bruce

Your subjective state (everything that you're aware at some instant),
doesn't fully specify the exact physical state of your brain. The number
of distinct physical brain states is so astronomically large that your
mindset and how you are feeling about everything isn't going to be
consistent with only one physical brain state. This means that given
your subjective state, the physical state of your MWI sector should be
described as a very complex superposition involving a large number of
brain states that are entangled with the environment.

My brain currently has only one state.

How do you know that? How could you know that.


Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?

We cannot prove the existence of a physical universe, and if we assume mechanism, we cannot see how a universe could choose one state against the infinitely many others which lead to the same consciousness. 

Of course, this should not be a problem for a non-mechanist, except that he has to provide its non-mechanist theory of mind, and still explain the role of the (not finitely descriptible) substrate in generating its consciousness. 





If we assume that we can bypass this problem and that we can locate
ourselves in one single branch, then this leads to the following
paradox. Consider simulating such a conscious entity on a computer. At
all moments in time, the physical state of the computer is just
transitioning from one particular state to another state. Since
consciousness is related to the actual physical state of the computer,
replacing the computer by a dumb device that doesn't compute anything,
which simply cycles through physical states that the computer would move
through given some particular set of inputs, will render exactly the
same consciousness.

Yes, and so what? If my consciousness is a sequence of brain states, anything that produces that same sequence of brain states will produce my consciousness. Substrate independence, after all.
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption,

It is not absurd in the least. Argument ad absurdum is not a logical argument. What is absurd to you may be perfectly reasonable to someone else.
it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals.

Which will need to assume actual infinities, and very big one.




How can a counterfactual exist? By definition, it is counter to the facts, hence, non-existent.
 
Clearly actions
as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for
consciousness,

But there cannot be any such thing as a counterfactual input. You might consider "What if...." scenarios. But they are not relevant for my current brain state. It will do what it will do, whatever the input.
but there is no room to do that within classical single
World physics. But as I pointed out above the generic state of a
conscious involves being located not in a single branch, but being
distributed over an astronomically large number of different branches.

Different branches are, by definition, non-interacting, so different branches correspond to different persons. Anyway, I choose not to accept this load of speculative rubbish.

Because you speculate on a physical universe which would be ontologically primary. With mechanism, we need not to assume more than 2+2=4, or Kxy = x, …

There is no problem with the MWI once we stop assuming physicalism, which seems to me to be the bg speculation here.

Bruno




Bruce

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Bruno Marchal

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Yes, that is the real problem. Too much states, a priori, many leading to aberrant histories. But then Mechanism put a structure allowing reasonable (quantum) measure. This means Mechanism is not refuted, and rather confirmed by the introduction of statistics at the core of the physical reality.



>
>>
>> If we assume that we can bypass this problem and that we can locate ourselves in one single branch, then this leads to the following paradox. Consider simulating such a conscious entity on a computer. At all moments in time, the physical state of the computer is just transitioning from one particular state to another state. Since consciousness is related to the actual physical state of the computer, replacing the computer by a dumb device that doesn't compute anything, which simply cycles through physical states that the computer would move through given some particular set of inputs, will render exactly the same consciousness.
>
> I don't see the difference. The computer will also have many different microscopic states and particles in superpositions (depending on how bases states are defined). You are simply begging the question by calling it a "dumb device". Dumb or smart are not states or sequences of states, they are relations to an external environment and internal purposes.

They are relations in between universal entities. First person plurality suggest we share some of them, in some degrees.


>
>>
>> This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness,
>
> It's not clear to me. How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur? And why would such a response be anything but crazy?

Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Bruno



>
> Brent
>
>> but there is no room to do that within classical single World physics. But as I pointed out above the generic state of a conscious involves being located not in a single branch, but being distributed over an astronomically large number of different branches.
>>
>> Saibal
>>
>
>
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Brent Meeker

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Dec 3, 2019, 2:58:20 PM12/3/19
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He also thinks Goedel's theorem doesn't apply to the community of mathematicians. 

I don't find philosophical zombies at all plausible.  I think consciousness is a necessary component of human level intelligence; it's implicit in the ability to imagine plans in which you are an actor.

Brent

Bruce Kellett

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Dec 3, 2019, 5:06:48 PM12/3/19
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On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 8:03 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:
My brain currently has only one state.
How do you know that? How could you know that.

It is a pretty good hypothesis.
Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?
We cannot prove the existence of a physical universe, and if we assume mechanism, we cannot see how a universe could choose one state against the infinitely many others which lead to the same consciousness.

The answer is simple. Do not assume mechanism. Then the physical universe is what it is, and your brain, being part of it, is what it is. No need to choose anything.

 
 Of course, this should not be a problem for a non-mechanist, except that he has to provide its non-mechanist theory of mind, and still explain the role of the (not finitely descriptible) substrate in generating its consciousness.

So why should that be a problem? My non-mechanist theory of mind is that mind is what brains do. Why should I need to explain the role of the substrate in generating consciousness? I simply have to do normal science and explore the relationship between my physical brain and my conscious experience. Maybe difficult, but no 
insurmountable conceptual issues. Your problems here are all of your own making.
Bruce

Philip Thrift

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Dec 3, 2019, 9:36:45 PM12/3/19
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The opposite of experiential realism.


@philipthrift 

Brent Meeker

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Dec 3, 2019, 10:06:07 PM12/3/19
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On 12/3/2019 6:36 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:

The opposite of experiential realism.


One wonders what Klein thinks including subjectivity would look like.  Every example he gives is based on someone report subjective feelings...but reports are objective.

Brent

Bruno Marchal

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Dec 4, 2019, 5:09:40 AM12/4/19
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Penrose assumes explicitly the negation of Mechanism (and implicitly the existence of a primary physical universe). 
He argues against Mechanism by using a notoriously invalid argument based on a misunderstanding of Gödel theorem. 
In his second book, Penrose corrected his use of Gödel (going from the invalid "Gödel’s incompleteness shows that we are not machine", to the valid (and “well known”) Gödel’s incompleteness shows that we cannot know which machine we could be, assuming we (our body) are machines (which provides the technic to define the first person using incompleteness). Emil Post foresaw all this already in the 1920s.

Penrose has unfortunately enlarged the gap between logicians and physicists.

Bruno




@philipthrift 

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Bruno Marchal

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Quantum information is, or should be, digital information seen from the “material modes of self-reference”, and this is confirmed so far. It is a typical physical thing, and as such it emerges from the first person view in arithmetic (which are typically NOT arithmetical). Sean Carroll miss the point that the Wave itself must be explained by Mechanism (a classical notion).

Bruno



@philipthrift
 

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Bruno Marchal

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On 3 Dec 2019, at 23:06, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 8:03 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:
My brain currently has only one state.
How do you know that? How could you know that.

It is a pretty good hypothesis.
Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?
We cannot prove the existence of a physical universe, and if we assume mechanism, we cannot see how a universe could choose one state against the infinitely many others which lead to the same consciousness.

The answer is simple. Do not assume mechanism. Then the physical universe is what it is,

In which theory of mind? Once you assume non-mechanism, you need to give your theory of mind, and explain how it allows a unique universe.



and your brain, being part of it, is what it is. No need to choose anything.

You need to choose a non-mechanist theory of mind. You are back to complete ignorance. Note that Mechanism can be weakened a lot (like with Oracular Turing machine) without changing the nature of the problem. Indeed, once you assume some infinities, the complexity of the problem grows, even just its formulation.
I am a scientist, and I like Mechanism, not because I would think it is true, but because the mind-body problem becomes a mathematical problem (extracting physics from intensional arithmetic/computer science), and we can already test the proposition physics (and it fits rather well).




 
 Of course, this should not be a problem for a non-mechanist, except that he has to provide its non-mechanist theory of mind, and still explain the role of the (not finitely descriptible) substrate in generating its consciousness.

So why should that be a problem? My non-mechanist theory of mind is that mind is what brains do.

That is not a theory. How do you explain the qualia and their non rational communicability. To use the ontological (metaphysical) assumption of a primary physical universe to explain mind is not better than to assume a god. It explains nothing. You need a *testable*(refutable)  theory of mind. 



Why should I need to explain the role of the substrate in generating consciousness? I simply have to do normal science and explore the relationship between my physical brain and my conscious experience. Maybe difficult, but no 
insurmountable conceptual issues. Your problems here are all of your own making.

The Mechanist hypothesis is the older hypothesis in science and metaphysics. Darwinism use it. Molecular biology confirms it. To assume non-mechanism is usually done by religious literalist and their explanation is purely magical. I am not sure you are aware of the difficulties of the mind-body problem. At least you don’t use Mechanism to hide it, like many materialist. I will wait for your theory of mind.
And then I will wait for your explanation of why there is a physical universe, something that mechanism explains entirely (and I don’t know any theory succeeding in that task). It explains also why the laws of physics have a mathematical shape.

Bruno




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Philip Thrift

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The subjective/objective distinction is a big rabbit hole to fall into a mind/matter dualism. There is only matter; experiences are material entities:

One thing we do know about matter is that when you put some very common-or-garden elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, etc) together in the way in which they're put together in brains, you get consciousness like ours – a wholly physical phenomenon. (It's happening to you right now.) And this means that we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.


@philipthrift

Brent Meeker

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Dec 4, 2019, 12:59:45 PM12/4/19
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On 12/4/2019 2:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
> I am a scientist, and I like Mechanism, not because I would think it
> is true, but because the mind-body problem becomes a mathematical
> problem (extracting physics from intensional arithmetic/computer
> science), and we can already test the proposition physics (and it fits
> rather well).

But nothing has been extracted.  It's like saying you like the God
theory because it explains everything, we just have to figure out why
God did things the way He did.

Brent

John Clark

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Dec 4, 2019, 3:05:21 PM12/4/19
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we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.

John K Clark

I don't think mind (intelligence + consciousness) is a form of matter anymore than fast is a form of racing car, mind is what a form of matter does when it is organized in certain ways. 




 


 



 

@philipthrift

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Philip Thrift

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On Wednesday, December 4, 2019 at 2:05:21 PM UTC-6, John Clark wrote:


we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.




I don't think mind (intelligence + consciousness) is a form of matter anymore than fast is a form of racing car, mind is what a form of matter does when it is organized in certain ways. 


The form that a racing car takes when it's going 120 m,p.h.: We say that form is fast. 

In any case, the contrary to what he said before this is mind-matter dualism.

@philipthrift

 

Brent Meeker

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On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog.  The same thing eventuates tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.

Hence Mechanism is false.

Brent

    

Bruce Kellett

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Dec 4, 2019, 7:22:46 PM12/4/19
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On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 9:33 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 3 Dec 2019, at 23:06, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 8:03 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:
My brain currently has only one state.
How do you know that? How could you know that.

It is a pretty good hypothesis.
Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?
We cannot prove the existence of a physical universe, and if we assume mechanism, we cannot see how a universe could choose one state against the infinitely many others which lead to the same consciousness.

The answer is simple. Do not assume mechanism. Then the physical universe is what it is,

In which theory of mind? Once you assume non-mechanism, you need to give your theory of mind, and explain how it allows a unique universe.

No I don't. It is only in your mind that such a thing is necessary. Science does not need to explain everything before it gets started. A theory of mind can develop in the normal course of science -- it is not an a priori requirement.

In fact, quantum mechanics has moved resolutely in the direction of eliminating any requirement of mind, measurement, or observers as fundamentals for the theory. Consequently mechanism, postulating that the physical universe arises out of the statistics over all consistent extensions of the computations underlying consciousness, is going in completely the wrong direction. By making consciousness central to your theory, you are destroying all possibility of an objective science. Putting the observer as a central element of the theory is what went wrong with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. The elimination of the personal, the mind, and the observer is central to modern physics.

Bruce

Bruce Kellett

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I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires "counterfactual correctness", by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if the inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must also change. This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this "counterfactuall correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to protect the movie graph argument. If we take the sequence of states through which a computation proceeds to give a particular conscious experience and reproduce exactly those states on a film or something similar, then running through those states will reproduce the same conscious experience. They want to avoid this conclusion, so they impose the restriction that the sequence of state must be "counterfactually correct", i.e., it must respond differently to different input -- which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.

That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about consciousness was shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument. One can restore counterfactual correctness by additional ad hoc additions to the graph, without altering the fact that the movie record still reproduces the conscious experience. The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case.

Bruce

Bruno Marchal

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Dec 5, 2019, 10:53:00 AM12/5/19
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I have no idea how consciousness, a knowledge oneself, would be a priori physical.

Assuming mechanism, the physical is an aspect of consciousness, and consciousness is an aspect of the self-referential abilities of the numbers and (importantly) their relation with truth.

I don’t claim this is true, but this is enforced by the YD + CT. In particular CT makes sense of a constructive version of everything, like the universal dovetailer, which is a “splashed” version of a universal machine.

And it is testable, and it predicts a many-histories with a quantum topology of a sort. It provides some different physical reality possible according to which of the quantum logics provided by the self-reference get closer to what we observe. In physics too, there is a debate about the relation between quantum logic and quantum computation, quantum dynamics, etc.

You need to understand that the mathematical reality kicks back. If CT is correct, all theories about digital machines are incomplete and incomplete-able, The arithmetical reality explores itself from inside through the number relations implementing variate sorts of universal machine and relations between those machines. Consciousness is the indubitable experiential knowledge of an indubitable but unprovable truth. The Robinsonian machine get it already in a sort of innocent way, but the Löbian machine, like Peano arithmetic or ZF, have all the means to understand the abyssal nature of their ignorance, and even to study its structure and build the tools to explore the thing.

The metaphysical/theological notion of primary matter is not something that we could see, and seeing is also not an evidence for an ontology. I say this because some people talk like if the ontological existence of a physical universe could not be doubted. 

Bruno








Bruno Marchal

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Dec 5, 2019, 11:16:35 AM12/5/19
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> On 4 Dec 2019, at 18:59, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On 12/4/2019 2:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>> I am a scientist, and I like Mechanism, not because I would think it is true, but because the mind-body problem becomes a mathematical problem (extracting physics from intensional arithmetic/computer science), and we can already test the proposition physics (and it fits rather well).
>
> But nothing has been extracted.

?

That is simply wrong. The propositional logic of all modes of self-reference, including the material one, have been extracted, either under the form of an axiomatic theory, or through their theorem prover.




> It's like saying you like the God theory because it explains everything, we just have to figure out why God did things the way He did.


But here God is given by something in between very elementary arithmetic and the standard model of arithmetic, and we get the explanation of where all computations comes from, and we can already ask the (Löbian) universal machine where the physical reality comes from, etc. that’s how I got the quantum logics.

You need to study Gödel’s 1931 paper. Despite he missed CT and the universal machine, he proved implicitly the Turing universality of his beweisbar predicate, and announce the fact that the machine itself (the system of Principia Mathematica in Gödel’s pet Löbian machine) can justify its own incompleteness conditionally to its consistency. Gôdel illustrate the embedding of the “theory of arithmetic” in the arithmetical reality, and more generally forever what Post already saw (during some period) which is the embedding of the universal machine in (any) universal machineries. That enforces an internal many-histories interpretation of arithmetic, in arithmetic.

So here the God is very simple, everyone already believe in it, assuming they believe in what is taught in primary school. And the explanation of how the rest emerges, with its psychological and physical modes, is easy once we do enough math to understand, let us say, Martin Davis’ chapter four of his Dover book “Computability and Unsolvability”, but of course the book of Boolos and others can show the progress made since.

You talk like you forget the second part of the SANE04 paper, that is the mathematical work, modest compared to the work already done by Gödel, Löb, Grzegorczyk, Boolos, Goldblatt, (and Kusnetsov and Muravitskii independently of them), up to Solovay G and G* theory.

Anyway, the main thing accessible even by non-expert in logic is that if we assume Digital Mechanism, that program is not a matter of choice, iphysics has to be reduce to machine’s psychology/theology if wa want to solve the mind-body problem. If this does not work, we get evidence that Digital Mechanism is false (and John Clark has to revise its contract and ask for some analog machine (and good luck to know which one).

Physics is a wonderful and very important science, but physicalism seems to me wrong, and is proved wrong when we assume YD + CT.

Bruno





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Bruno Marchal

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Dec 5, 2019, 11:23:42 AM12/5/19
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On 4 Dec 2019, at 21:04, John Clark <johnk...@gmail.com> wrote:



we do, after all, know something about the intrinsic nature of matter, over and above everything we know in knowing the equations of physics. Why? Because we know the intrinsic nature of consciousness and consciousness is a form of matter.

John K Clark

I don't think mind (intelligence + consciousness) is a form of matter anymore than fast is a form of racing car,


Very good point!


mind is what a form of matter does when it is organized in certain ways. 


OK; if you want to implement that mind relatively to you. 

And mind is not much what it does, as what it feels, although here we could decide to distinguish or not a first person mind (the one which feels) and a third person mind (which acts relatively to us, or to some machine).


More generally, mind is what any universal or particular machine do (and could feel to do) when given to any universal machinery or machine. “Matter is then explained as a first person plural stable and sharable realities” (usually very deep in Bennett sense).

If not, you need to explain more on what is matter, and how it makes some computations more real than some others. 

Bruno









 


 



 

@philipthrift

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Bruno Marchal

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On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog. 

In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)


The same thing eventuates tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.

You will need to elaborate this part. You lost me here.




Hence Mechanism is false.

?

Bruno





Brent

    


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Bruno Marchal

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Dec 5, 2019, 11:53:09 AM12/5/19
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On 5 Dec 2019, at 01:22, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Dec 4, 2019 at 9:33 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 3 Dec 2019, at 23:06, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 8:03 PM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 3 Dec 2019, at 03:18, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:
My brain currently has only one state.
How do you know that? How could you know that.

It is a pretty good hypothesis.
Other states may be consistent with my current conscious state, but these do not exist. The idea that I am a superposition of all brain states consistent with my consciousness is just idle speculation. How would you ever prove such a thing?
We cannot prove the existence of a physical universe, and if we assume mechanism, we cannot see how a universe could choose one state against the infinitely many others which lead to the same consciousness.

The answer is simple. Do not assume mechanism. Then the physical universe is what it is,

In which theory of mind? Once you assume non-mechanism, you need to give your theory of mind, and explain how it allows a unique universe.

No I don't. It is only in your mind that such a thing is necessary.

That is not true. To predict a physical events, and to be able to confirm it, if you look in detail, you need an identity brain-mind, which is OK FAPP, but when we assume Mechanism, it does no more work. And if you don’t assume Mechanism, you still need a theory of mind (if you want a theory of everything, which is the subject matter of this forum).



Science does not need to explain everything before it gets started.

It can always make simplifying assumption, but it has to be always aware that those are assumption, and must be able to see the incompatibility between some assumption. Mechanism is my working hypothesis in the philosophy of mind (aka cognitive science, theology, metaphysics, …).


A theory of mind can develop in the normal course of science -- it is not an a priori requirement.

Of course. The mind like matter develops well before theories of mind or theories of matter, but when we search a theory of everything, we have to get them all, and they have to be compatible and related in a coherent manner.




In fact, quantum mechanics has moved resolutely in the direction of eliminating any requirement of mind, measurement, or observers as fundamentals for the theory.

Quantum mechanics is mainly an extraordinary tools to predict and anticipate the result of number-measurement, interpreted in some ways by us, but there is simply no unanimity of what it means or represents, or even how to use it with gravitation.

You confuse physics and metaphysics here. You give that impression.

The advantage of the mechanist hypothesis is that it gives a reasonably easy theory of mind and consciousness, and it reduces the mind-body problem into a body problem, and the math explains why there is no explosion of white rabbits at it seems in first sight in arithmetic, etc.





Consequently mechanism, postulating that the physical universe arises out of the statistics over all consistent extensions of the computations underlying consciousness, is going in completely the wrong direction.

Why?

Proving this would refute Mechanism, and would be very interesting.




By making consciousness central to your theory,

I don’t make consciousness central. It is a consequence of the theory, which is not mine, but the one in which many materialist believe (where actually I explain why it is incompatible with materialism).




you are destroying all possibility of an objective science.

Of course not. Are you sure you have understood what I did? I show that mechanism and materialism are incompatible, and I show that physics is in the head of the machine, and how to derive it, so that we can compare. Then the result obtained so far fits with the observation, so mechanism is not yet refuted. Claiming that you believe in an ontological physical universe, irreducible to anything else is not an argument then we do science.



Putting the observer as a central element of the theory is what went wrong with the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics. The elimination of the personal, the mind, and the observer is central to modern physics.

Yes, in arithmetic too. The universal machine have to grasp what is independent on any particular universal machine relative representation, and physics becomes invariant for the ontological theories. It looks we share the same motivation to be skeptical of the Copenhagen interpretation. Now, you still need an observer, to predict what we can feel when we look around. It is not central indeed, but eventually the whole physical reality might not be central either. With mechanism the physical becomes a subbranch of the theological, which is the study of all the truth about the machines, as opposed to what they can always justify.

Bruno






Bruce

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Bruno Marchal

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Dec 5, 2019, 12:05:35 PM12/5/19
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On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 10:44 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog.  The same thing eventuates tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.

Hence Mechanism is false.

I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires "counterfactual correctness”,


Not just “consciousness”, also the simpler notion of computation requires or even define a notion of counterfactual correctness. It is not much more than a semantic for the “if A then B else C”. 



by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if the inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must also change.

… must also change (counterfactually). OK.


This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this "counterfactuall correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to protect the movie graph argument. If we take the sequence of states through which a computation proceeds to give a particular conscious experience and reproduce exactly those states on a film or something similar, then running through those states will reproduce the same conscious experience. They want to avoid this conclusion, so they impose the restriction that the sequence of state must be "counterfactually correct", i.e., it must respond differently to different input -- which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.

Who they? Not me, and Maudlin makes that move to get a reductio ad absurdum of having both mechanism and materialism. Then at the end he choses materialism, where I keep Mechanism, but both Maudlin and me showed that indeed it is absurd to believe in both mechanism and the idea that consciousness is related exclusively to some material events.



That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about consciousness was shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument.

That is weird. Maudlin, and men  did prove something about consciousness, mechanism and materialism.

We show that materialism -> non mechanism, or equivalently that mechanism -> non materialism. You can’t have them both. 


One can restore counterfactual correctness by additional ad hoc additions to the graph, without altering the fact that the movie record still reproduces the conscious experience.

But the added piece have no role in the actual computation, and so that would endow the movie with consciousnes, but also the movies with the holes, and all consciousness will supervene on anything, making the theory inconsistent. 

It is much simpler to study what is a computation, and understand that consciousness is in the computation, not in this or that implementation of the computation, except statistically below our substitution level.




The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case.


?

Bruno





Bruce

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Bruce Kellett

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Dec 5, 2019, 6:24:36 PM12/5/19
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On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 4:05 AM Bruno Marchal <mar...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case
?

Bruno

Sorry. Blame Google's autocorrect in the on-line email editor. Google makes a living out of attempting to render anything I type as incomprehensible garbage. One word that Google has never heard of is "decohered"! It has a wonderful time invariably changing this to "decreed" without even asking permission. Sometimes not even proof reading my email responses is sufficient........

I think in this case, I maybe typed "completion", but I can't be sure at this stage.......

Bruce

Brent Meeker

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Dec 5, 2019, 6:45:28 PM12/5/19
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On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog. 

In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)

So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".  You meant responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and maybe everything else) are different.

Brent



The same thing eventuates tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.

You will need to elaborate this part. You lost me here.




Hence Mechanism is false.

?

Bruno





Brent


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Brent Meeker

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On 12/5/2019 9:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 10:44 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog.  The same thing eventuates tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.

Hence Mechanism is false.

I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires "counterfactual correctness”,


Not just “consciousness”, also the simpler notion of computation requires or even define a notion of counterfactual correctness. It is not much more than a semantic for the “if A then B else C”. 



by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if the inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must also change.

… must also change (counterfactually). OK.


This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this "counterfactuall correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to protect the movie graph argument. If we take the sequence of states through which a computation proceeds to give a particular conscious experience and reproduce exactly those states on a film or something similar, then running through those states will reproduce the same conscious experience. They want to avoid this conclusion, so they impose the restriction that the sequence of state must be "counterfactually correct", i.e., it must respond differently to different input -- which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.

Who they? Not me, and Maudlin makes that move to get a reductio ad absurdum of having both mechanism and materialism. Then at the end he choses materialism, where I keep Mechanism, but both Maudlin and me showed that indeed it is absurd to believe in both mechanism and the idea that consciousness is related exclusively to some material events.



That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about consciousness was shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument.

That is weird. Maudlin, and men  did prove something about consciousness, mechanism and materialism.

We show that materialism -> non mechanism, or equivalently that mechanism -> non materialism. You can’t have them both.

But it assumes that computation exists in the abstract...simply because there's a thing we invented called the existential quantifier.  It's as weak as St Anslem's ontological proof; which tellingly Goedel thought he could make sound.

Brent



One can restore counterfactual correctness by additional ad hoc additions to the graph, without altering the fact that the movie record still reproduces the conscious experience.

But the added piece have no role in the actual computation, and so that would endow the movie with consciousnes, but also the movies with the holes, and all consciousness will supervene on anything, making the theory inconsistent. 

It is much simpler to study what is a computation, and understand that consciousness is in the computation, not in this or that implementation of the computation, except statistically below our substitution level.




The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case.


?

Bruno





Bruce

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Bruce Kellett

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On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 10:45 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog. 

In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)

So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".  You meant responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and maybe everything else) are different.

The whole question about counterfactuals relates back to philosophical questions about what counterfactuals can possible mean when the antecedent is manifestly false. I think it was Lewis who proposed an analysis of causation in terms of counterfactuals, giving them meaning through the concept of "possible worlds". Philosophy has moved on past this understanding of counterfactuals, but it seems that Bruno is attached to the idea of multiple worlds, so he thinks that consciousness depends on a "possible worlds" understanding of the response to counterfactual inputs.

Bruce

Brent Meeker

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Dec 5, 2019, 8:30:20 PM12/5/19
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Bruno is a logician, so he looks at in terms of Kripke's possible worlds modal logic.  But unlike a physicist who takes mathematics and logic to be rules of language intended to conserve the validity of inferences in the language, he takes them to be proscriptive of reality.  I'm bothered by his modal logic of "B" which seems to morph betweeen "believes" and "proves" (beweisbar) which he justifies by saying he's referring to perfect reasoner who therefore proves, and believes, everything provable.  But this not a model of human reasoning.  Factual doesn't enter into it, so how can counterfactual.

Brent

Bruno Marchal

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On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:45, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog. 

In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)

So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".  You meant responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and maybe everything else) are different.

That is modal realism, but I made precise I don’t use this here. That is why I said “relatively real or not”. Usually, the counterfactuals and their consequences are judged unreal, but in modal realist context, like with Everett and with Mechanism, they get real (with high or low relative measure).
The counterfactual reality are always as close as possible as the factual input. We can say, if Hitler was a nice guy there would not have been an holocaust (that is a common reasonable counterfactual). But we cannot say (to illustrate counterfactuals) “If Hitler was good, pigs would been able to fly”. That is not a counterfactual. It is at best a statement that Hitler (perhaps by definition of Hitler) is intrinsically bad, or something.

Similarly “if the alarm did not ring, the plane would have crashed” is a reasonable counterfactual statement. But “If the alarm did not ring chicken would have teeth”, would mean that it is absolutely impossible that the alarm could not ring.

Bruno




Brent



The same thing eventuates tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.

You will need to elaborate this part. You lost me here.




Hence Mechanism is false.

?

Bruno





Brent


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Bruno Marchal

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Dec 6, 2019, 9:34:32 AM12/6/19
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On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:53, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 12/5/2019 9:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 5 Dec 2019, at 02:12, Bruce Kellett <bhkel...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Dec 5, 2019 at 10:44 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog.  The same thing eventuates tomorrow.  Soon my neighbors report me to the authorites and when I explain this to the judge he mandates psychiatric care.

Hence Mechanism is false.

I think the point Bruno is making is that consciousness requires "counterfactual correctness”,


Not just “consciousness”, also the simpler notion of computation requires or even define a notion of counterfactual correctness. It is not much more than a semantic for the “if A then B else C”. 



by which he appears to mean that consciousness must be such that if the inputs are changed (counterfactually), then the output must also change.

… must also change (counterfactually). OK.


This hypothesis -- that consciousness requires this "counterfactuall correctness" -- was introduced ad hoc in order to protect the movie graph argument. If we take the sequence of states through which a computation proceeds to give a particular conscious experience and reproduce exactly those states on a film or something similar, then running through those states will reproduce the same conscious experience. They want to avoid this conclusion, so they impose the restriction that the sequence of state must be "counterfactually correct", i.e., it must respond differently to different input -- which the movie graph, being fixed, clearly cannot.

Who they? Not me, and Maudlin makes that move to get a reductio ad absurdum of having both mechanism and materialism. Then at the end he choses materialism, where I keep Mechanism, but both Maudlin and me showed that indeed it is absurd to believe in both mechanism and the idea that consciousness is related exclusively to some material events.



That this ad hoc manoeuvre does not prove anything about consciousness was shown by Maudlin in his "Olympia" argument.

That is weird. Maudlin, and men  did prove something about consciousness, mechanism and materialism.

We show that materialism -> non mechanism, or equivalently that mechanism -> non materialism. You can’t have them both.

But it assumes that computation exists in the abstract…

Abstract, may be for an Aristotelian who believe in a “concrete” physical reality.

Personally, only the natural numbers are concrete object to me, and computations are rather very concrete too, as they are as singular as the natural number, well defined, etc. 

2 is concrete. 2 apples is far more abstract. We are not aware of this because we use quasi unconsciously highly sophisticated measuring apparatus (eyes, the nose, …) and a very sophisticated computer (the nervous system, billions of neurons, etc.) to analyse quickly the observation, and to eat the apple, making us feeling that it is concrete, when it is actually very abstract, and even more so if we accept the current description of what could be an apple (a partial trace of a quantum wave in an Hilbert space?).




simply because there's a thing we invented called the existential quantifier. 

Prime numbers and computations existed in the arithmetical reality in a way which does not depend of time, space, or humans for that matter. And we don’t need to make existence into a notion of metaphysical existence. Computations exists like a solution to the equation x + 1 = 3 exists.




It's as weak as St Anslem's ontological proof; which tellingly Goedel thought he could make sound.


This has nothing to do with the existence of computation, which you can prove from Peano arithmetic once you accept the Church-Turing definition. That is not the case, neither for Gödel’s God, nor for any notion of ontological physical universe, which requires some faith. The only faith required for mechanism is the faith into surviving a special medical operation.

Bruno








Brent



One can restore counterfactual correctness by additional ad hoc additions to the graph, without altering the fact that the movie record still reproduces the conscious experience.

But the added piece have no role in the actual computation, and so that would endow the movie with consciousnes, but also the movies with the holes, and all consciousness will supervene on anything, making the theory inconsistent. 

It is much simpler to study what is a computation, and understand that consciousness is in the computation, not in this or that implementation of the computation, except statistically below our substitution level.




The "competition" is irrelevant to consciousness in this case.


?

Bruno





Bruce

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Bruno Marchal

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Dec 6, 2019, 9:49:44 AM12/6/19
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On 6 Dec 2019, at 02:30, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 12/5/2019 4:28 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 10:45 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog. 

In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)

So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".  You meant responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and maybe everything else) are different.

The whole question about counterfactuals relates back to philosophical questions about what counterfactuals can possible mean when the antecedent is manifestly false. I think it was Lewis who proposed an analysis of causation in terms of counterfactuals, giving them meaning through the concept of "possible worlds". Philosophy has moved on past this understanding of counterfactuals, but it seems that Bruno is attached to the idea of multiple worlds, so he thinks that consciousness depends on a "possible worlds" understanding of the response to counterfactual inputs.

Bruno is a logician, so he looks at in terms of Kripke's possible worlds modal logic. 

I started from biology. I discovered Mechanism in the work of Descartes and Darwin. I have just been lucky to discover Gödel’s theorem before deciding to study biology, and it makes me realise that what Descartes and Darwin described is realised in the number relations. I will still remain a bit skeptical on this until I eventually understood how solid the Church-Turing thesis is.



But unlike a physicist who takes mathematics and logic to be rules of language intended to conserve the validity of inferences in the language, he takes them to be proscriptive of reality. 

No less than any physicist who use mathematics. Not just the mathematical language, but also some mathematical truth.




I'm bothered by his modal logic of "B" which seems to morph betweeen "believes" and "proves" (beweisbar) which he justifies by saying he's referring to perfect reasoner who therefore proves, and believes, everything provable. 

That is the lesson of Gödel’s theorem: “provable” does not entail “true”, and “true” does not entail provable. And “provable” (beweisbar) obey to a logic of belief, not of knowledge. And yes, I use “perfect reasoner”, which simplifies a lot the derivation of physics. Interrogating machines which lies, or are deluded is not necessary for the solution of the metaphysical/theological mind-body problem.




But this not a model of human reasoning. 

Right, but using “human reasoning” would make the whole derivation of physics far more complex than necessary, especially that we want to show that *all* correct universal machine find the same physics.
You could criticise newton for simplifying the sun up to a point. That would be a poor critics of classical mechanics.


Factual doesn't enter into it, so how can counterfactual.


?  (If you can elaborate. With mechanism, factual is an indexical)

Bruno





Brent

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Brent Meeker

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Dec 6, 2019, 6:12:48 PM12/6/19
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On 12/6/2019 6:05 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 6 Dec 2019, at 00:45, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 12/5/2019 8:29 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 5 Dec 2019, at 00:44, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <everyth...@googlegroups.com> wrote:



On 12/3/2019 1:08 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
This absurd conclusion depends only on the single world assumption, it's a consequence of the non-existence of counterfactuals. Clearly actions as a response to counterfactual inputs must be relevant for consciousness, 
It's not clear to me.  How can there be a response to an input ("input" to what) that doesn't occur?  And why would such a response be anything but crazy?
Why necessarily crazy? If you can prove this, you refute Mechanism.

Wow, I didn't expect it to be so easy.  I have a dog.   If my dog died I'd get another dog.  My dog didn't die today.  The counterfact then is that my dog did die today.  So responding the counterfact I get another dog. 

In the counter situation, yes (relatively real or not, that is not relevant here, but it has to make sense)

So you didn't really mean "response to counterfactual inputs".  You meant responses in some different world, where the input and the response (and maybe everything else) are different.

That is modal realism, but I made precise I don’t use this here. That is why I said “relatively real or not”. Usually, the counterfactuals and their consequences are judged unreal, but in modal realist context, like with Everett and with Mechanism, they get real (with high or low relative measure).
The counterfactual reality are always as close as possible as the factual input. We can say, if Hitler was a nice guy there would not have been an holocaust (that is a common reasonable counterfactual). But we cannot say (to illustrate counterfactuals) “If Hitler was good, pigs would been able to fly”. That is not a counterfactual. It is at best a statement that Hitler (perhaps by definition of Hitler) is intrinsically bad, or something.

Similarly “if the alarm did not ring, the plane would have crashed” is a reasonable counterfactual statement. But “If the alarm did not ring chicken would have teeth”, would mean that it is absolutely impossible that the alarm could not ring.

You take extreme examples, but where is the line. How do you know that in the world where Hitler is a nice guy it is necessarily true that pigs fly?  You claim that all that is real is the same as the totality of computation.  So from you premise can you prove what you asserted...or is it just an assertion?

Brent

Brent Meeker

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Dec 6, 2019, 6:17:17 PM12/6/19
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Only in your topsy-turvy world where my apple is abstract and arithmetic is concrete.  Like Alice's caterpillar, your words mean whatever you want them to mean.






It's as weak as St Anslem's ontological proof; which tellingly Goedel thought he could make sound.


This has nothing to do with the existence of computation, which you can prove from Peano arithmetic once you accept the Church-Turing definition.

And once you accept that definitions can make things exist...which is what St Anselm relied on.

Brent

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