My Philosophy

[Philosofer123]

If you sincerely explain to the judge the regress argument, I agree that this should help the insanity plea.

You have failed to answer my question. The question is designed to show that society holds people responsible only to the degree that they are capable of action that is based on rational deliberation. According to your conception of "free" action, one's choices have no explanation and are therefore non-rational. As a result, it makes no sense to hold one responsible for one's choices, and the conclusion of the regress argument stands.

[stymontgomery]

I enjoyed reading your philosophy and plan on re-reading it. It is a very thorough and accurate for everything it claims to be; one man’s understanding of his surroundings based on his experiences, emotions, perceptions, etc. which were all built by him, occasionally using blocks from others but nonetheless molded completely to himself and his immediate wants and desires.

One more thing, I love you.

[Philosofer123]

I enjoyed reading your philosophy and plan on re-reading it. It is a very thorough and accurate for everything it claims to be; one man’s understanding of his surroundings based on his experiences, emotions, perceptions, etc. which were all built by him, occasionally using blocks from others but nonetheless molded completely to himself and his immediate wants and desires.

One more thing, I love you.

Thank you for your kind words, stymontgomery. I am glad that you enjoyed reading the document.

Should you have any additional feedback, please do not hesitate to share.

[YesNo]

You have failed to answer my question. The question is designed to show that society holds people responsible only to the degree that they are capable of action that is based on rational deliberation. According to your conception of "free" action, one's choices have no explanation and are therefore non-rational. As a result, it makes no sense to hold one responsible for one's choices, and the conclusion of the regress argument stands.

Does society let most people off because of an insanity plea?

The individual's intention could be one explanation for the choice that individual made. Now that the choice has an explanation, although not a deterministic explanation, it is "rational". The regress argument fails again.

[YesNo]

Exactly, so they are experimentally indistinguishable.

MW claims that it gets every result. Because of that, it doesn't need the Schrodinger equation to get any particular result the way CI does. However, it makes an assumption, that is unacknowledged, that this splitting actually avoids uncertainty. MW supporters just hope it does.

Why should one doubt that uncertainty is removed in a MW metaphysics? It is highly unlikelihood that we should find ourselves in a universe where the probabilities obtained by CI are not uniform unless the probabilities in all the other worlds are not uniform either. But then all those other worlds are uncertain like ours, and the MW program fails to deliver on its promise of restoring determinism.

Actually, it's the reverse; MW is quite easy to falsify and CI is near impossible to falsify. MW's key assumption that QM works all the way down is falsifiable if we find any split between he micro and macro world predicted by CI's collapse. However, there's nothing you can "find" to falsify CI, although finding said split would prove it.

MW is too vague to falsify, because there is no result that can happen that it would not claim to be one of those it covers.

[MorpheusSandman]

MW claims that it gets every result. Because of that, it doesn't need the Schrodinger equation to get any particular result the way CI does. However, it makes an assumption, that is unacknowledged, that this splitting actually avoids uncertainty. MW supporters just hope it does.

I have no idea what you're saying here. The "every result" MW gets is determined by Schrodinger (SWE). SWE describes what the WF does; MW says it does it by decoherence across worlds. Without SWE MW wouldn't be interpreting anything, so I don't know what you can possibly mean by "MW doesn't need SWE;" that's nonsensical.

Also don't know what you mean by an assumption that "this splitting avoids uncertainty." The only "splitting" happens in CI, not MW. Decoherence is not the split/collapse.

Why should one doubt that uncertainty is removed in a MW metaphysics?

I've explained this about a billion times; uncertainty can be had on the subjective level, ie what we experience, because the only way to experience the determinism of the SWE would be to be outside all of the worlds themselves. As Hanson says, it may be possible to derive Born, thus explaining why the probabilities aren't uniform, by finite world-counting. Whether this is possible to experimentally do is another matter entirely.

MW is too vague to falsify

What's vague about "the wavefunction is real and everything is in superposition?" That's not vague in the least, and it's falsifiable by finding a level of organization in which groups of particles are not in superposition. CI's collapse if far more vague; what is it? What causes it? How does it cause it? At what size-point does it happen? None of these questions can be (or at least has been) answered experimentally.

there is no result that can happen that it would not claim to be one of those it covers.

Absolutely false. If any result shows that a group of particles are not in superposition, that would falsify MW.

[Philosofer123]

Does society let most people off because of an insanity plea?

Irrelevant.

The individual's intention could be one explanation for the choice that individual made. Now that the choice has an explanation, although not a deterministic explanation, it is "rational".

A mere intention in no way implies a rational thought process. Insane people have intentions, but are not rational.

The regress argument stands.

[Dono]

A flea is born and struggles to survive in a harsh and brutal world. Somehow in its struggle it finds its way to the back of a passing dog and begins its flea destiny of feeding and procreation. In short order there are thousands of fleas on dog, each with their own views on existence and the nature of the dog on which they exist.

The flea who found his way to the dog after a struggle is forever grateful for what dog provides: shelter, sustenance, protection from the evils of a dog less world.

The fleas born on dog have never known life away from Dog and therefore take Him for granted, even questioning whether dog still has meaning to them.

Those fleas at the base of dog's neck and muzzle, protected alike from the elements and from dog's own movements, love Dog and see him as benevolent.

Those at Dog's *** who are frequently bitten, kicked at and shat on by Dog fear his wrath and live by his whim and the luck of capricious fate. But they do not doubt his presence.

Dog, if he thinks of fleas at all, sees them as an annoyance and an irritant, something he'd just as soon be rid of. Occasionally they annoy him enough to bite at them and given time they bleed him to the point of illness; but mostly dog has no thoughts on the existence of fleas.

And herein lies the deep flaw in your philosophy on the nature and existence of God. It presupposes that any such being capable of omnipotence would still somehow be answerable to the ethics, mores and questions of us fleas.

It is extremely unlikely that a god would require or notice our belief in him/them/it. It is even more unlikely given the nature of man that we are the pinnacle life form in this universe. A God made in the image and ego of man does not likely exist. But a god beyond our Ken and understanding almost certainly must.

[Philosofer123]

And herein lies the deep flaw in your philosophy on the nature and existence of God. It presupposes that any such being capable of omnipotence would still somehow be answerable to the ethics, mores and questions of us fleas.

It is extremely unlikely that a god would require or notice our belief in him/them/it. It is even more unlikely given the nature of man that we are the pinnacle life form in this universe. A God made in the image and ego of man does not likely exist. But a god beyond our Ken and understanding almost certainly must.

So you agree that it is highly unlikely that the God of classical theism exists.

But then you claim that "a god beyond our ken and understanding almost certainly must" exist. How do you support that claim?

[Dono]

I said your philosophy is flawed in a number of ways, foremost that your own prejudice of what a god ought to be and do is reason enough for discounting its existence. You spend an awful lot of time quoting "isms" and various texts, all of whom are perfectly good reads and yet none of whom are any more or less valid than the texts which support theism (of any kind). Therefore, your philosophy is incomplete and only accepts data that agrees with the notion you brought into it: that God doesn't exist. You don't actually prove anything. You just cite sources that support your thesis. And in the process ignore entire bodies of work to the contrary view. In order to include or discount a specific work as a reference I'd like to know what criteria you used. Certainly Buddha is no more or less relevant than the hearsay teachings of the apostles?
My assertion is that logic dictates in an infinite universe all things must be possible. In our immediate universe there is strong evidence to support likely tampering with our own evolutionary process. My claim is merely that antiquated writing, bad translations and fanciful opinionated church leaders have obscured the being of God into something not actually described in ancient texts.

[Philosofer123]

I said your philosophy is flawed in a number of ways, foremost that your own prejudice of what a god ought to be and do is reason enough for discounting its existence. You spend an awful lot of time quoting "isms" and various texts, all of whom are perfectly good reads and yet none of whom are any more or less valid than the texts which support theism (of any kind). Therefore, your philosophy is incomplete and only accepts data that agrees with the notion you brought into it: that God doesn't exist. You don't actually prove anything. You just cite sources that support your thesis. And in the process ignore entire bodies of work to the contrary view. In order to include or discount a specific work as a reference I'd like to know what criteria you used. Certainly Buddha is no more or less relevant than the hearsay teachings of the apostles?
My assertion is that logic dictates in an infinite universe all things must be possible. In our immediate universe there is strong evidence to support likely tampering with our own evolutionary process. My claim is merely that antiquated writing, bad translations and fanciful opinionated church leaders have obscured the being of God into something not actually described in ancient texts.

I have considered a very wide range of viewpoints in formulating my philosophy. And I have found some viewpoints that I feel are strongly supported by the arguments and evidence.

Nothing in your posts refute anything in my philosophy.

Unless you can provide persuasive arguments and/or evidence that supports positions that are not consistent with my own, I see no reason to continue this discussion.

You mention "evidence to support likely tampering with our own evolutionary process", but you fail to elaborate.

[MorpheusSandman]

My assertion is that logic dictates in an infinite universe all things must be possible. In our immediate universe there is strong evidence to support likely tampering with our own evolutionary process.

What do you mean by "infinite universe?" The closest thing we get in modern science is a multi-verse or many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. Our own universe is not infinite. Even in a multi-verse or many worlds all things that are possible will happen; this doesn't mean everything is possible. One still has to consider that entropy is likely something you can't get away from anywhere, and it's impossible to reconcile entropy with any classical conception of God. I have no idea what you mean by there being evidence of tampering with our evolutionary process because there is no such thing.

But a god beyond our Ken and understanding almost certainly must.

Why "almost certainly must" exist? FWIW, I agree with this if one is willing to consider quantum fields a god.

[ladderandbucket]

An infinite universe, or an infinite amount of time, does not mean that all things are inevitable.
Firstly, impossible things will never happen. Secondly, there is no law that says possible things have to happen eventually. The universe might be infinite, but it could just repeat itself infinitely, without anything interesting happening. I daresay a lot of very unlikely things will happen in the course of eternity, but they don't have to.

If there is an infinite amount of possible worlds/moments (and if the possible is as valid as the actual), then every possible thing does exist. But we couldn't say anything about God's influence on us. Only the moment (your moment) would meaningfully exist, and it would have some possible reasons, histories and futures which required a God, and some which didn't. This is assuming that God is also subject to the law of infinite possibilities, but then if he wasn't, and if all possible worlds exist, then he would be a spectacularly impotent God, hardly worth of the name.

[YesNo]

I have no idea what you're saying here. The "every result" MW gets is determined by Schrodinger (SWE). SWE describes what the WF does; MW says it does it by decoherence across worlds. Without SWE MW wouldn't be interpreting anything, so I don't know what you can possibly mean by "MW doesn't need SWE;" that's nonsensical.

Many worlds, even with Hanson's conjectures, is not able to compute the probability amplitudes that form part of the Schrodinger wave equation (SWE) since they are not a uniform distribution. So MW does not have the SWE. Does it need it? Here I am trying to cut MW as much slack as possible. I don't think it actually does need it because every event occurs in MW.

However, that raises the question of why QM can get the answers right in the single world we are in now. There are multiple problems:

1) Why do we continue to experience ourselves in one world? We should experience ourselves in multiple worlds.
2) Why are the Born probabilities not uniform in the world we experience ourselves to be in? If chance is driving these probabilities they should be a uniform distribution as Hanson explains.
3) Why do we experience any "superpositions" at all in a single world? After decoherence, the superpositions should stop.

I've explained this about a billion times; uncertainty can be had on the subjective level, ie what we experience, because the only way to experience the determinism of the SWE would be to be outside all of the worlds themselves. As Hanson says, it may be possible to derive Born, thus explaining why the probabilities aren't uniform, by finite world-counting. Whether this is possible to experimentally do is another matter entirely.

Hanson did not get Born's results, as I recall. It was only a close approximation to them and required additional assumptions. Maggie McKee, in her article (http://hanson.gmu.edu/press/NewScientist-2-23-06.htm) cited by Hanson, states the problem clearly that Hanson is trying to solve:

"And this idea, called the "many worlds" interpretation, raises other problems. Some theorists say it suggests that physicists doing a quantum experiment would find themselves in a random world, such that they would have an equal chance of seeing the bell ring or not ring. But this does not match the well-tested Born rule, which may predict that the bell should ring 70% of the time, for example."

I don't see how one can practically do finite "world counting" without taking a supernatural position outside the universe of many worlds.

What's vague about "the wavefunction is real and everything is in superposition?" That's not vague in the least, and it's falsifiable by finding a level of organization in which groups of particles are not in superposition. CI's collapse if far more vague; what is it? What causes it? How does it cause it? At what size-point does it happen? None of these questions can be (or at least has been) answered experimentally.

Absolutely false. If any result shows that a group of particles are not in superposition, that would falsify MW.

What I don't understand, given many worlds, is why we can experience the superpositions of anything today in a single world. Those superpositions should have been resolved into many worlds at the beginning of the universe.

[MorpheusSandman]

Many worlds, even with Hanson's conjectures, is not able to compute the probability amplitudes that form part of the Schrodinger wave equation (SWE) since they are not a uniform distribution.

But, again, there's a difference between deriving/explaining SWE and using SWE. Go back to my examples of aliens modeling how a car works VS explaining how it works. SWE models how the wavefunction behaves; MW interprets what SWE says, it just doesn't explain it as Born does. So you should rephrase your "MW doesn't need SWE" to "MW doesn't need TO EXPLAIN SWE." There's a difference. MW needs SWE since that's what it's interpreting.

1) Why do we continue to experience ourselves in one world? We should experience ourselves in multiple worlds.
2) Why are the Born probabilities not uniform in the world we experience ourselves to be in? If chance is driving these probabilities they should be a uniform distribution as Hanson explains.
3) Why do we experience any "superpositions" at all in a single world? After decoherence, the superpositions should stop.

Of these, only 2. is an actual problem. Hanson's "mangled words" MAY explain why the probabilities in the world we experience isn't uniform, but, again, we have no way to currently test it experimentally. It's just a possibility (one amongst many).

1) Because we are a quantum system ourselves; we decohere along with whatever other system we become entangled with. When we decohere, we subjectively find ourselves in one world. In a sense, one can look at our uncertainty prior to decisions/results as a kind of metaphorical superposition (they made a joke about this on The Big Bang Theory not too long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOE__N6v4o). Anyway, asking why we wouldn't experience multiple worlds is a bit asking why we can't be in two places at the same time. It's a similar principle. If one world goes left and another goes right, we can't very well can't go right and left simultaneously, can we? The closest we can get is pondering whether to go right or left before we go left in one world and right in another.

3) Our "single world" is constantly decohering. Even if a single particle decoheres and becomes fixed in one world that doesn't meant there aren't countless others still in superposition, or even that that particle can't be in superposition again. For particles to stop being in superposition and stop decohering would essentially be for them to stop existing at all. They only seem to stop being in superposition and stop decohering when we observe them because we've become entangled with them. That's two quantum systems entangling out of a near infinity of possible quantum systems that can become entangled.

Hanson did not get Born's results, as I recall.

No, and I didn't claim he did; the point is that he's presenting one possible way of getting Born, though.

What I don't understand, given many worlds, is why we can experience the superpositions of anything today in a single world. Those superpositions should have been resolved into many worlds at the beginning of the universe.

I don't see why you think the superpositions should've resolved themselves at the beginning of the universe for... Let's assume the beginning of the universe gave rise to 1,000,000^1,000,000 particles, and that may be conservative; assuming these things are decohering temporally by interacting with each other, why do you think they'd be done at the start of the universe?