Serendipper wrote: ↑Wed Apr 04, 2018 9:59 pmThere aren't infinite possibilities. There may be other possibilities, but this is the possibility that survived. It is like a tree growing branches to reach sunlight: the branches do not presuppose where the sun is (for the most part, discounting gravity, heat, etc) so the branches head off in random directions and the one that receives the best light survives while the others slowly die off. So it was likely the same with the universe: some possibilities happened and the one that beat the others managed to survive leading to the next competition in the evolution of things.
Well there you have it, this is why I choose the MWI.
Your explanation is magical, you say that there is something magical going on behind the scenes, or something magical right now in this world, that MADE this possibility be chosen.
Not only is that a non-explanation, it also goes completely against genuine randomness.
So out of genuine randomness, this and only this universe comes to be. THAT is the most crazy idea to me.
I don't know how they derive that conceptualization knowing that space and time do not exist from the perspective of light, so there is no universe in which to have locality.
I guess looking at it from the perspective of light is also a new idea.
It's not that randomness is required for consciousness, but that I can't understand how I have a point of view, an experience, if I am merely the product of a dumb mechanical process such as dominoes falling. It's hard to articulate why. Additionally, there is nothing to select for this point of view that I have because it makes no difference to anything if I have it. I could function as a robot just the same. All my emotions and whatnot could be programmed in, if all that I am is a determined process. If that is so, then how did awareness of myself and a feeling of a point of view on the universe come to be if there is nothing selecting for it?
But if you say that something is selecting for it, then you are saying that there is another mechanism outside this universe that made things happen the way they did. And you have to explain that as well.
My take is that there is no other type of mechanism, just more of the same: which is indeed why I chose the MWI. And so there is only the illusion of selection. I find this to be the simplest extension.
Can you think of a way of having a universe without energy?
Sure, I think the net energy of the universe is zero.
Oh, well, it only applies to small things so you needn't worry.
See this thread briefly
http://ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=193940
There is a chance that you could spontaneously transfer to Mars if all your particles randomly decided to do so at once. There is a chance that heat can flow from cold to hot. But we don't see these events on this scale because the particles are too numerous making the chance much too small.
Everything is made of those little things so everything behaves randomly. But indeed the more we zoom out the more this behaviour seems to go away, the chances are too small, and also coherence occurs (for some not fully understood reasons).
And several leading physicists don't.
Advocates of MWI often cite a poll of 72 "leading cosmologists and other quantum field theorists" [88] conducted by the American political scientist David Raub in 1995 showing 58% agreement with "Yes, I think MWI is true".[89]
However, the poll is controversial. For example, Victor J. Stenger remarks that Murray Gell-Mann's published work explicitly rejects the existence of simultaneous parallel universes. Collaborating with James Hartle, Gell-Mann is working toward the development a more "palatable" post-Everett quantum mechanics. Stenger thinks it's fair to say that most physicists dismiss the many-world interpretation as too extreme, while noting it "has merit in finding a place for the observer inside the system being analyzed and doing away with the troublesome notion of wave function collapse".[90]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worl ... tion#Polls
It's silly because, as I said, each quantum event would have to be represented in a separate universe. If an event has 1000000 possible outcomes, then 1000000 universes would have to be constructed for each possibility. Then, in each universe, the same thing would happen: each quantum event would have 1000000 possibilities requiring that many more universes and so on and on and on. There would be at least 2 orders of infinity: temporal and spacial. It would be 1000000 x 1000000 x 1000000.... forever and forever in terms of time. This is THE most ridiculous thing I could conceive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worl ... objections
I see every possible history of our universe as being part of our universe (the universal wavefunction is real) but yeah, already here we may have infinite possibilities.
It's excessive, but imo it's the only explanation right now that doesn't use magic, so it's actually the simplest, least ridiculous explanation. I have yet to see a better one.
Because that's the theory: many worlds. Each quantum event happens in another universe.
Many-worlds implies that all possible alternate histories and futures are real, each representing an actual "world" (or "universe"). In layman's terms, the hypothesis states there is a very large—perhaps infinite[2]—number of universes, and everything that could possibly have happened in our past, but did not, has occurred in the past of some other universe or universes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worl ... rpretation
An infinite number of universes??? Each with no temporal end??? You don't see that as silly? Why not? What empirical observation has given you any clue that the infinite can exist or that all possibilities exist?
Well not quite, there seem to be several version of the MWI. In the non-layman's terms version, there is actually just the universal wavefunction assumed. But indeed some physicists take it to separate branching universes and that's crazy imo.
I also don't see why our universe couldn't have a temporal end, maybe time goes in circle in this universe.
As I said above, I don't know the connection of randomness to consciousness; I just know determinism can't explain it.
I think if there is a fundamental thing, then that thing cannot have something more fundamental determining its behavior; therefore randomness must exist unless there is no fundamental thing, which implies an infinite number of smaller things. But again, there is no starting point for an infinite series of causality so again there appears to be no cause that can be identified. Whether the cause of an event is due to an infinite number of factors or zero factors, it is the same.
Determinism can explain it, as I showed. And a fundamental thing can easily be deterministic.
Do you have substantiation?
The quantum measurement problem is imo the greatest unsolved mistery in physics and philosophy. No one could fully figure it out yet. But it's getting really old having to explain every time that the "mind causes the collapse" idea is just one of the many interpretations and while it may be partially true, it's fundamentally incorrect. That "mind" that causes the collapse is just another set of particles, that everything else is made of too. There's more and less to it.
If it would be so damn simple as you write then it had been solved long ago.
Doesn't work like what?
Of course not. Information, path information, knowledge is not extra "thing" here, but more like an abstraction, a metaphor. As I said it's not fully understood.
If a circle is not infinite, please write out PI in its entirety here for me.
That's a numerical represaentation of pi, which is an irrational number. Are you saying that every circle we draw or imagine is infinitely large?
What's the difference? If there are changes or no changes, then it's infinite regression. A simple illustration is to aim a camera at its monitor. Does the monitor change because of what the camera sees? Yes or no, it doesn't matter.
If there are no changes, then there are no changes.
That's not an infinite regression, your misconceptualization of it is an infinite regression.