Meaning in a Multiverse

[Dillinger4]

Do one, Jesus.

 

[Demosthenes]

one what. ?

 

[Demosthenes]

Rhetorical comment?

 

[CNT36]

This is all an episode from the first series of Star Trek. Spock is the captain, and the Vulcans are these warlike marauders. Actually, so is Sulu. And Kirk has only one hour, minus commercial time, to solve the problem.

As for your thing about killing yourself, it will matter, because this iteration of 'you', lives in this universe, and will in fact die. The fact that some other version of you continues elsewhere, is irrelevant.

Actually in this universe it was in the second series of Star Trek. Kirk was still the captain just a baddie one who was replaced by the goodie Kirk due to a transporter accident. Spock actually plays a role in saving the day. Your universe seems disturbing to me no wonder you moved here.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Its a shame you don't get it then.

I do. I just think that you're engaging in intellectual masturbation.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

On this thread, the chances are pretty slim, as I wrote the OP.

The point is it is a way of conceptualizing Quantum possibility, but you and johnny cannuck cannot take it to that level of abstraction and just think about your own lives.

Think all you want; the existence of some other you, in some other universe, matters not jack shit in this one.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

It doesn't matter. But really in the grand scheme of things, we don't matter. The universe is indifferent.

I matter a whole bunch, to me.

 

[Dillinger4]

Think all you want; the existence of some other you, in some other universe, matters not jack shit in this one.

Whoosh.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Whoosh.

You're generally not a bad guy, but you have an overinflated opinion of your own intelligence.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I know that university philosophy classes are full of new and exciting ideas, but they are not the be all and end all of learning and knowledge.

 

[Dillinger4]

This isn't about philosophy it is about theoretical physics.

 

[Dillinger4]

And the implications of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

 

[Dillinger4]

Why don't you have a little old read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

 

[i-am-your-idea]

I know that university philosophy classes are full of new and exciting ideas, but they are not the be all and end all of learning and knowledge.

knowledge eh? can i play the why game?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

knowledge eh? can i play the why game?

Why not?

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

Why don't you have a little old read.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

Many-worlds then explains the subjective appearance of wavefunction collapse with the mechanism of quantum decoherence.

So many big words: it must be important and meaningful!

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I like that; because they can't explain the co existence of apparently non determined quantum events along with the existence of linear quantum mechanics, they come up with something like this.

In any event, I'll still be going to work on Monday, even if the reverse-me, existing in a universe spawned by the multitude of possibilities created by non determined quantum events, gets to sleep in, in a penthouse, between satin sheets.

Dillinger, the sooner you learn not to be impressed by obfuscatory jargon, the better it will be for you.

 

[Johnny Canuck3]

I remember back in university, the people who always seemed to go for this stuff, were people who got middling grades in high school, but made it into uni, and felt that with all the hard intellectual work they were doing, they needed to be learning something sufficiently abstruse as to be useful in bludgeoning their somewhat less educated, and more credulous, childhood friends.

"Look at me, how edjickated I've become!"

 

[teuchter]

I do. I just think that you're engaging in intellectual masturbation.

There was an article in the New Scientist a little while back, on this subject...kind of.

(Forgive the c&p; the whole article isn't readable on the website unless you're a subscriber)

Comment: Is Big Physics peddling science pornography?


IF SOME Russian mathematicians are right, then 2008 will be a year to remember. Extraordinary as it sounds, this could be when humanity unwittingly creates its first time machine and we receive our first visitors from the future - presumably wearing, as future-fashion dictates, silver jumpsuits and driving flying cars.

These theorists speculate that at the much-delayed opening of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on the French-Swiss border, the assembled scientists and dignitaries may be treated to a big surprise. The LHC could, thanks to some mooted possibilities crashing around on the wilder shores of physics, become a time machine - specifically, the end of a "closed timelike curve" connected to the future (see "The accidental time machine").

This is not the first time we have been told that the LHC could change, or rather end, life as we know it. A few years ago someone calculated that the collider might create a mini black hole which would promptly set about eating the planet, starting with Switzerland. Or worse, create a weird subatomic particle called a strangelet that could devour the entire universe. Physics and cosmology stories are like this these days. Once it was all hard sums and red-shifted galaxies; awesome enough one would have thought. Now it's time machines and universe-eating particles.

Does any of this bear any relation to reality? Or is Big Physics guilty of some serious sexing-up, drifting away from the realm of hard data and into the softer universe of science pornography?

As well as accidental time machines we are told of cosmic strings - gigantic filaments of super-stuff that warp and tear space-time like ladders in a pair of celestial stockings - and crashing branes, titanic slabs of maths that give rise to the big bang in the exotically lovely ekpyrotic universe of Neil Turok.

Not crazy enough for you? What about the multiverse? One of the biggest sell-out lectures at last year's Hay-on-Wye festival in Wales starred the UK's astronomer royal, Martin Rees, who entertained his audience with a discussion of the possibility, indeed the probability, of multiple worlds - endless parallel realities existing in a gargantuan super-reality that makes what we think of as the universe as insignificant as a gnat on an elephant's backside. Or there's the simulation argument, philosopher Nick Bostrom's delicious idea that since it should be possible to replicate an entire universe in a computer, and that this could be done countless times, statistical cleverness proves that we are not the real McCoy but the figments of some electronic entity's imagination.

Don't get me wrong, I love parallel universes. I love the idea that, 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 100 light years away is an identical me, sitting down at his computer writing this very same article in a world exactly the same as mine except that the gear stick on the Honda Accord is a slightly different shade of grey. And I love the idea that every time a subatomic particle goes hither or thither, a whole new creation is invoked; forget half-dead cats in boxes, we are talking worlds in which Hitler won the second world war, or where there was no Hitler, and no second world war and no Honda Accords at all.

It is fun to know that serious scientists believe the fabulous alternate realities of the Philip Pullman novels could be accurate descriptions of reality (for in a multiverse of infinite size and scope there will, somewhere and somewhen, be a world where a little girl called Lyra befriends a talking polar bear and where people's souls take the form of animal familiars).

Fun yes, but is it harmless? Scientists, and people like me who stick up for science, are happy to pour scorn on astrologers, homeopaths, UFO-nutters, crop-circlers and indeed the Adam-and-Eve brigade, who all happily believe in six impossible things before breakfast with no evidence at all. Show us the data, we say to these deluded souls. Where are your trials? What about Occam's razor - the principle that any explanation should be as simple as possible? The garden is surely beautiful enough, we say, without having to populate it with fairies.

The danger is that on the wilder shores of physics these standards are often not met either. There is as yet no observational evidence for cosmic strings. It's hard to test for a multiverse. In this sense, some of these ideas are not so far, conceptually, from UFOs and homeopathy. If we are prepared to dismiss ghosts, say, as ludicrous on the grounds that firstly we have no proper observational evidence for them and secondly that their existence would force us to rethink everything, doesn't the same argument apply to simulated universes and time machines? Are we not guilty of prejudice against some kinds of very unlikely ideas in favour of others?

Believing in ghosts takes a different mindset to advocating parallel worlds or cosmic strings. But do we really believe that we are all the creations of a computer sitting in some higher-dimensional adolescent's bedroom, or that time travellers will land at the LHC? Or are we, too, seeing fairies at the bottom of the garden?

 

[Dillinger4]

*sigh*



Things like 'wavefunction collapse' or whatever might be obfuscatory jargon to you johnny, but to other people it is actually worth a discussion.

But now, because I have pointed out that you don't understand it, instead of discussing anything, you have started to attack me personally, and I don't think that is right.

 

[Dillinger4]

This thread isn't about you or reverse you's. It is about stuff like wave function collapse and its consequences.

It is in philosophy because it is about educated stuff.

I mean for fucks sake. Am I not allowed to talk about anything you don't understand?

 

[Kizmet]

I think what he's getting at is that it's probably better if you talked about things you understand...

 

[Dillinger4]

ffs.



Fuck it.

 

[Kizmet]

You're such a prima-donna!

 

[Dillinger4]

All I wanna do is discuss what I do know, it is not really that much to ask.

I would rather do that than read posts talking about me.

 

[Kizmet]

That seems to be the issue here, mate. You only seem to want to discuss what you know.

 

[Dillinger4]

Oh. I was just trying to keep the thread on topic as outlined by the OP.

 

[Kizmet]

Looked more like you were having a little intellectual hissy-fit because people weren't saying what you wanted. But whatever.

It's an interesting topic... I particularly thought that MysteryGuests contribution was very incisive.

 

[teuchter]

Finding out about the possibility of an infinite amount of parallel worlds, has presented me with a problem.

Imagine it is possible to travel between all possible worlds, where every single time line is different. There will be some worlds where it is hugely different. Worlds that are ruled by a Nazi Empire, or destroyed by nuclear war.

Then there will be some worlds that are only marginally different. The person traveling between worlds will find it almost the same as the world he came from, except with one slight difference. In these worlds, no matter what they do, anything can happen. He could find himself living out his most fantastic dreams or the worst nightmares. No matter what they do, all possible decisions are made, there are an infinite number of copies living the opposite of said decision.

And herein lies the problem. In a universe where anything is possible, nothing can make any moral sense. Whatever decisions we make, the outcome does not matter.

Even if we went to kill ourselves out of despair, there would be an infinite number of universes in which the gun misfires, goes through the ceiling above you and say, kills a child.

Can you explain a bit more what exactly you think the "problem" is?

Or, to put it slightly differently, why should it change anything about the way we go about our lives, or the way we make decisions, if we know there are these parallel universes?

Given that they are inaccessible to us, and we have no power to change anything in them, why would they be of any concern to us (from a "moral" point of view)?

These questions become more relavent when one thinks of the problem of Human Cloning. Would an exact replica of yourself have a soul? Would we be responsible for our clones actions? In a quantum universe we would have an infinite number of quantum clones. Since some of these may (or must) perform acts of evil, are we responsible for their actions?

And this bit doesn't make any sense to me at all. I don't see how multiple universes are any more or less relevant to human cloning than they are to having a child, or any other method of making a new life.

It doesn't make sense (and as far as I can see it's totally irrelevant to any questions of multiple universes) to suggest that you would be "responsible" for the actions of a clone of yourself. Unless perhaps you had been the one who had decided to make the clone, therefore creating a new person with the potential to do bad things. But that would apply equally to you having a child by natural processes.

And what exactly are you talking about when you say "quantum clones"? You need to explain that a bit more, and especially how, whatever they are, we are supposed to be "responsible" for their actions. The notion of being responsible for something relies on you having had some control over it happening in the first place, doesn't it?

 

[Kizmet]

The notion of being responsible for something relies on you having had some control over it happening in the first place, doesn't it?

It's like Heaven. You're suffering here, but you can console yourself with the thought that there is a Better Place.

This thread in a nutshell. ^