Philosophical Realism's Mind-Independence is Absurd

[Darkneos]

At the time you're making the decision to interfere, those other versions of you are actually the same you fundamentally. They only become different versions of you afterward. Nothing is spontaneously happening to any version of you that that version of you didn't consent to happening, if that's what you're thinking.

According to MWI they are not you but their own persons so they aren't the same you. They become different versions of you with each branching decision you make, but no none of them consented to whatever another version of them is planning.

Hence it is unethical and a bad idea to try to contact these other worlds, assuming they exist.

Contact? I don't know how that got brought in. I think you've possibly made some assumptions about what the quantum lottery means, assumptions I don't share.

I mostly just care about that 10 billion years line, not the existence of other me(s).

[Flannel Jesus]

I mostly just care about that 10 billion years line, not the existence of other me(s).

Well in that case, you've already posted the best explanation for what's going on there, in my estimation. The 10 billion years line was about the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, and you and I both agree that the results of that experiment do not necessitate retro causality, and I believe Atla has also confirmed that he thinks the same (please correct me if I'm wrong). You posted the Sean Carroll writeup which has gone further into clarifying what's actually going on in that experiment than any other explanation I've seen. I appreciate that. I should bookmark that.

[Darkneos]

I mostly just care about that 10 billion years line, not the existence of other me(s).

Well in that case, you've already posted the best explanation for what's going on there, in my estimation. The 10 billion years line was about the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment, and you and I both agree that the results of that experiment do not necessitate retro causality, and I believe Atla has also confirmed that he thinks the same (please correct me if I'm wrong). You posted the Sean Carroll writeup which has gone further into clarifying what's actually going on in that experiment than any other explanation I've seen. I appreciate that. I should bookmark that.

I don't think they ever said that, they just said that they didn't say that but the quote clearly shows such.

Like, here it is again:

I think this issue was firmly resolved by nonlocality. You "bring it into existence" or how I would rather view it, its "eigenstate-ness correlates with your/our eigenstate-ness" 10 years ago. So it happens "retroactively" or how I would rather view it, spacetime may be a weakly emergent property, time is an illusion on this level.

If the light was emitted 10 billion years ago, this still works all the same. It can appear from our everyday perspective that we can choose from a limited set of possibilites, what happened 10 billion years ago.

Which is absolutely mindblowing of course, if more people understood this new picture of reality, philosophy forums would be on fire.

But when I asked around what I got was that what the math behind QM does is say little about what is actually going on. That what the interpretations are is mostly just what we believe and not what the math is actually saying.

I just want to know whether any of this is something I should worry about or not, hence why the notion of everything having already happened 10 billion years ago isn't doing me any favors. I'm on the spectrum so stuff has to be spelled out for me explicitly and not just implied, and when I read this stuff I struggle to make heads or tails of any of it. So when people make claims like that I'm not smart enough to fact check it and have to rely on others more versed in it.

But then comes the issue of me not being able to understand their explanations because I don't really understand this stuff. Too many terms that I can't put together and too many wild things I'm not sure I understand what they mean by.

To give another example:

https://www.mdpi.com/2624-960X/4/3/18

"The MWI is a deterministic theory, but the determinism is manifested
on the level of all worlds together. This is the level of a
mathematically rigorous physical theory. We live (or more precisely,
lived) in one world with random probabilistic events (results of
quantum measurements). Indeed, the complete knowledge of the wave
function of our world, prior to a quantum measurement, does not
specify a particular outcome."

Like...what am I supposed to make of that? "lived"? What does that even mean? I don't understand it and it scares me.

[Flannel Jesus]

I just want to know whether any of this is something I should worry about or not...

Like...what am I supposed to make of that? "lived"? What does that even mean? I don't understand it and it scares me.

I don't think any of this stuff warrants worry, or anxiety, or fear. Physics is just us poking and prodding and probing into reality, to find out what we can about it. Whether physics works one way, or another way, doesn't matter in the sense that it seems to matter to you.

But, let me take a step back and just ask you, what would you be worried about? What scares you? Is it just the fact that you don't understand it that scares you, or is there some way physics might work that you think would be very undesirable for some reason?

[Atla]

I'm of course in the MWI camp, and had been for like a decade now. But I proceeded to experiment with my own extradimensional interpretations: stripping the MWI of its nonsensical parts (like the inherent time asymmetry where branches no longer touch ever again), merging it with multi-layered / multi-dimensional Copenhagen-like observer-dependent mechanics, and also acknowledging MWI's (imo) inherent nonlocality. Carroll is one of my favourite physicists I really love that guy, but imo the standard MWI doesn't even do what it claims to do, it doesn't even solve the measurement problem. I think Penrose also pointed this out, not sure. I consider Carroll to be a decoherence-evasionist. But he's doing God's work by popularizing the MWI.

So in short no, I don't believe in retrocausality. But again, as Carroll very correctly said:

But a number of serious researchers in quantum foundations really do take the delayed-choice quantum eraser and analogous experiments (which have been successfully performed, by the way) as evidence of retrocausality in nature — signals traveling backwards in time to influence the past.

If we don't go with the extra dimension of the MWI, then retrocausality becomes much harder to argue against I think.

[Flannel Jesus]

The MWI imo was the first, rather inept attempt at an extradimensional interpretation, but it's often associated with nonsense like splitting universes and locality.

I'm of course in the MWI camp, and had been for like a decade now.

This got my head spinning.

[Atla]

The MWI imo was the first, rather inept attempt at an extradimensional interpretation, but it's often associated with nonsense like splitting universes and locality.

I'm of course in the MWI camp, and had been for like a decade now.

This got my head spinning.

In my reading, MWI = the Many Worlds of the universal wavefunction (the superposition of all the possible states of the universe we live in).

For example it is often associated with BS like splitting universes, but what it's actually saying is that all the universes have been there all along as part of the universal wavefunction. Carroll mentions this a few times too.

And it's usually claimed to be local, because it appears to be local from our perspective. But that doesn't mean that it's local overall. There is the kind of nonlocality that all the branches of the universal wavefunction must "fit" together. And there is the kind of nonlocality which was simply shown in experiments. Maybe these two kinds of nonlocalities are even the same, but let's not get into this.

[Flannel Jesus]

For example it is often associated with BS like splitting universes, but what it's actually saying is that all the universes have been there all along as part of the universal wavefunction. Carroll mentions this a few times too.

Splitting Vs the view that all the universe are already there seems like a "6 of one, half dozen of the other" type of situation. I'm not sure there's a difference at all, it's just a matter of how someone phrases it.

MWI maintains locality because in MWI, the measurements of entangled particles only have to correlate with each other at the speed of causality. If you have collapse and a single universe, then Entangled particles getting measured sort of have to communicate faster than light in order to maintain their correlation. Idk why you think locality is nonsense, locality is considered to be a very beautiful feature of physical theories.

After all, non locality in QM sort of stands at odds with relativity. If an interpretation gives us a way to maintain locality, that's good news for the relationship between relativity and qm, which is what we want, given both things are experimentally supported.

[Atla]

For example it is often associated with BS like splitting universes, but what it's actually saying is that all the universes have been there all along as part of the universal wavefunction. Carroll mentions this a few times too.

Splitting Vs the view that all the universe are already there seems like a "6 of one, half dozen of the other" type of situation. I'm not sure there's a difference at all, it's just a matter of how someone phrases it.

MWI maintains locality because in MWI, the measurements of entangled particles only have to correlate with each other at the speed of causality. If you have collapse and a single universe, then Entangled particles getting measured sort of have to communicate faster than light in order to maintain their correlation. Idk why you think locality is nonsense, locality is considered to be a very beautiful feature of physical theories.

After all, non locality in QM sort of stands at odds with relativity. If an interpretation gives us a way to maintain locality, that's good news for the relationship between relativity and qm, which is what we want, given both things are experimentally supported.

I'm not sure which issue we are discussing. The problem to me seems to be that after the measurement, although our universe can now be seen as local, it will have to be correlated with the other universes, but we are simply ignoring that part.

[Flannel Jesus]

I'm not sure which issue we are discussing. The problem to me seems to be that after the measurement, although our universe can now be seen as local, it will have to be correlated with the other universes, but we are simply ignoring that part.

We're not ignoring it, that's the crux of it. This very thing you're thinking of is not being ignored, it's the entire reason why MWI is considered local.

In single-world views, when these two particles are measured, their measurements have to be correlated immediately, no matter how far apart they are.

In many worlds, they actually don't. When one particle gets measured, and becomes then entangled with the surrounding particles, it creates what I like to visualise as a "sphere of causality", so to speak. Each particle creates it's own sphere of causality, and the measurements of the two particles only have to correlate once those spheres of causality meet up again later. It can happen at light speed or slower. Only local interactions are necessary.

Btw I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm just trying to explain an alternative approach. I don't have any need for you to agree with me, I just think you might want to know about these ideas. I don't want my tone to come across as combative, because that's not how I'm feeling when I'm writing this

[Atla]

I'm not sure which issue we are discussing. The problem to me seems to be that after the measurement, although our universe can now be seen as local, it will have to be correlated with the other universes, but we are simply ignoring that part.

We're not ignoring it, that's the crux of it. This very thing you're thinking of is not being ignored, it's the entire reason why MWI is considered local.

In single-world views, when these two particles are measured, their measurements have to be correlated immediately, no matter how far apart they are.

In many worlds, they actually don't. When one particle gets measured, and becomes then entangled with the surrounding particles, it creates what I like to visualise as a "sphere of causality", so to speak. Each particle creates it's own sphere of causality, and the measurements of the two particles only have to correlate once those spheres of causality meet up again later. It can happen at light speed or slower. Only local interactions are necessary.

Btw I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm just trying to explain an alternative approach. I don't have any need for you to agree with me, I just think you might want to know about these ideas. I don't want my tone to come across as combative, because that's not how I'm feeling when I'm writing this

Maybe I misunderstand, but how can both particles know how to expand their "spheres of causality" exactly in a way that, when they do meet, they end up being correlated?

[Darkneos]

I just want to know whether any of this is something I should worry about or not...

Like...what am I supposed to make of that? "lived"? What does that even mean? I don't understand it and it scares me.

I don't think any of this stuff warrants worry, or anxiety, or fear. Physics is just us poking and prodding and probing into reality, to find out what we can about it. Whether physics works one way, or another way, doesn't matter in the sense that it seems to matter to you.

But, let me take a step back and just ask you, what would you be worried about? What scares you? Is it just the fact that you don't understand it that scares you, or is there some way physics might work that you think would be very undesirable for some reason?

I'm scared that there might be something about reality and other people not existing, and that would mean that if I care about other people it would be pointless because they are not real. Which means there would be no point in trying to help other people out either through volunteering, medical stuff, things like that, I can't make the world better or help others because it's not real.

Or if everything has already happened already then there would be no choice to be made because it's already happened and the world is just playing out like a movie and there's nothing you can do about it.

Or if there is no free will then that would mean I can't do anything about stuff because it's all based on factors that I have no control over.

The list goes on but suffice to say it would impact how I feel about other people and how I would treat them, and I don't want to go down the line of thinking others aren't real and being monstrous to them. I won't.

[Darkneos]

I'm of course in the MWI camp, and had been for like a decade now. But I proceeded to experiment with my own extradimensional interpretations: stripping the MWI of its nonsensical parts (like the inherent time asymmetry where branches no longer touch ever again), merging it with multi-layered / multi-dimensional Copenhagen-like observer-dependent mechanics, and also acknowledging MWI's (imo) inherent nonlocality. Carroll is one of my favourite physicists I really love that guy, but imo the standard MWI doesn't even do what it claims to do, it doesn't even solve the measurement problem. I think Penrose also pointed this out, not sure. I consider Carroll to be a decoherence-evasionist. But he's doing God's work by popularizing the MWI.

So in short no, I don't believe in retrocausality. But again, as Carroll very correctly said:

But a number of serious researchers in quantum foundations really do take the delayed-choice quantum eraser and analogous experiments (which have been successfully performed, by the way) as evidence of retrocausality in nature — signals traveling backwards in time to influence the past.

If we don't go with the extra dimension of the MWI, then retrocausality becomes much harder to argue against I think.

I think that was meant more as a jab at those researchers in the sense that there are serious people who actually believe in some kinda time warp. It sounded like sarcasm to me.

[Flannel Jesus]

"how" is a question I don't have the answer to. In the case of single universe interpretations, "how" do the particles know that they're supposed to be correlated? How do they call each other from across space and time, defying relativity?

I don't know how these entanglement spheres work, but I do think they seem like a candidate for an explanation of what's really happening.

[Flannel Jesus]

I just want to know whether any of this is something I should worry about or not...

Like...what am I supposed to make of that? "lived"? What does that even mean? I don't understand it and it scares me.

I don't think any of this stuff warrants worry, or anxiety, or fear. Physics is just us poking and prodding and probing into reality, to find out what we can about it. Whether physics works one way, or another way, doesn't matter in the sense that it seems to matter to you.

But, let me take a step back and just ask you, what would you be worried about? What scares you? Is it just the fact that you don't understand it that scares you, or is there some way physics might work that you think would be very undesirable for some reason?

I'm scared that there might be something about reality and other people not existing, and that would mean that if I care about other people it would be pointless because they are not real. Which means there would be no point in trying to help other people out either through volunteering, medical stuff, things like that, I can't make the world better or help others because it's not real.

Or if everything has already happened already then there would be no choice to be made because it's already happened and the world is just playing out like a movie and there's nothing you can do about it.

Or if there is no free will then that would mean I can't do anything about stuff because it's all based on factors that I have no control over.

The list goes on but suffice to say it would impact how I feel about other people and how I would treat them, and I don't want to go down the line of thinking others aren't real and being monstrous to them. I won't.

The first paragraph isn't anything qm , or any other physics, is saying.

The other stuff, however, is up for debate about what the reality of the situation is, but I have some patterns of thought with which I deal with questions of determinism. I don't think that, if you found out tomorrow that you live in a deterministic universe, that that should make you sad or disappointed or anything (especially not the many worlds variety of determinism, which has a little sneaky kind of randomness to it). Determinism isn't more constraining of our will than randomness would be. I can go into detail if that's desired.