On Sunday, January 12, 2025 at 5:10:53 AM UTC+1 Brent Meeker wrote:
On 1/11/2025 6:13 AM, PGC wrote: That's something you keep assuming. I’m not here to defend Many-Worlds or any particular ontology. I defend nothing. Rather, I’m struck by the curious fact that insisting on “nothing extra” in quantum mechanics—like ordering one’s bourbon neat—can mean quietly negating a host of other flavors that were right there on the menu. Yes, the Born rule is a triumph, and I fully recognize its power for quantum computing, materials science, lasers, and more. Still, there’s a subtlety: that “neat” approach—while perfectly valid pragmatically—relegates all those wavefunction branches to the realm of “not real.” It looks minimal but actually demands a long list of invisible exclusions. In fact infinitely many that have already been preemptorily ruled out because they don't satisfy Schroedinger's equation. The reason this is called the "Everything List" is because the originators wanted to discuss theories like Max Tegmark's and Bruno Marchal's that *everything*, in some sense happens and each of us is only a thread of it. Both have argued that this is "simpler" because no additional assumptions are needed to exclude all the things we don't see, they are just on different threads. You can convince yourself of explaining the list's raison d'etre to me if it makes you feel better with the straw man because Many-Worlds never says “all conceivable worlds exist.” It says, rather, that all the outcomes allowed by the wavefunction’s unitary evolution (i.e., by Schrödinger’s equation) are realized in some branch. If you have a hypothetical “world” that doesn’t satisfy the equation, it’s simply not in the solution space that Many-Worlds applies to in the first place. Any scenario that fails to satisfy Schrödinger’s equation is not part of the legitimate solution space of quantum mechanics; such a “world” is never admitted in the first place, so it’s not something that gets “ruled out” by Many-Worlds mid-stream. It just doesn’t belong to the set of physically allowed states. Thus, the notion that “infinitely many invalid worlds must exist” misstates the core idea. Many-Worlds covers all valid solutions but does not grant reality to “worlds” inconsistent with the theory’s mathematical structure. So there’s no conflict in discarding any scenario that violates Schrödinger’s equation—those were never “on the table” to begin with. Tegmark remains unclear on many issues that Bruno's approach addresses. Particularly on the questions of multiplicities of perspectives. And in his PhD, he tackles the question of different flavors of UD, with some being more efficient than others and avoiding redundancy of computations; therefore being more effective, if you will. And if it's those theories we're discussing on this list, then we should discuss them and not split hairs on collapse vs non-collapse, as that horse is long dead; baring some resuscitation or contradiction novelty. That's almost off-topic, if we mean ensemble theories like Bruno's, that make no-ontological commitments, while everybody here is trying to peddle the truth of their own. I stand by my conviction that the list in unmoderated form is losing value. Folks pushing delusions of grandeur, pretense towards sophistication, gift horses, aimless politics, and just plain old cherry picking + taking cheap shots out of context without specifying clearly the approach that we're leaning towards is *everything but* the original intention you reference. Instrumentalism and over-focusing on domain-specific discussions is crude. Divorcing physics from metaphysics, as is sad common practice here these days by many posters, leads trivially to a collective psychology that prioritizes building the most advanced weapons for the richest opportunists, while being confused on fundamental questions surrounding our nature and the limits of the knowable. Your logic course must've missed Gödel. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/0a9fc800-a7ff-421d-9377-8e1eecd9e115n%40googlegroups.com.
