RE: The Principle of Contingent Causation: The Impossibility of Infinite Regress.
August 13, 2023 at 8:21 am
(August 13, 2023 at 7:59 am)GrandizerII Wrote:(August 13, 2023 at 7:53 am)LinuxGal Wrote: Similar to the MWI is the epistemological access we have to supernatural things by agency of faith.
Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
That is, our emotion of assurance in the existence of angels and ghosts and heaven and Hubbard and shit is our evidence of those things.
In a way, MWI is evidence-based. According to some cosmologists/astrophysicists, it is the best explanation of the observations at hand. It's certainly not emotion-based.
You are conflating the multiverse with many worlds. I blame Marvel / Disney.
Many worlds simply asserts the universal wavefunction has components that evolve into non-overlapping regions of phase space (via decoherence), where, for example, Erwin's poor cat is dead and Erwin sees she's dead, and another trajectory where the cat is alive and Erwin sees she's alive.
Among many problems with that, the biggest one involves the conservation of energy. If both branches are real, then you've manufactured energy from the void.
The next biggest problem is how to recover the Born rule. Suppose the wavefunction yields a probability of 0.7 for spin up and 0.3 for spin down. In every measurement, the universe only splits into two branches. one for spin up and one for spin down. At the end of many such branchings the universe does contain an experimenter who concludes the probability is 0.7 vs. 0.3 but that case will be atypical, do you see? A random sampling of branches would be overwhelmingly populated with experimenters who concluded the probabilities were 0.5 and 0.5.
In any event, we have no access to these other branches to solve the energy problem or the probability problem so that's why I compared MWI to faith.
