(Gee, I turn my back for ten second and LW spawns a long comment thread about me!)
My answer to smk was intending to illustrate how “world counting” worked within the Many Worlds Interpretation, not to argue which of Many Worlds (Oxford or not) or others was the correct interpretation.
Just like you can answer questions about rolling balls within the framework of Newtonian Physics, without having to launch into a diatribe about how Relativity is a better model.
I wish your post made a clearer distinction between criticism of my explanation (I think you read way too much into what I wrote), criticism of the high regard for MWI in this community, and psychoanalysis as to how my thinking supposedly went so very wrong.
I might add a link to this thread, and to wedrifid & Tetronian’s, so a reader can immediately see your response. That way, you get the right of reply, and the original diatribe is preserved.
When I wrote the “psychoanalysis” (e.g. the “imperial egos”), I was thinking more of theoretical physicists and other purveyors of comprehensive, formally expressed ontologies. They are the prime movers here, the ideologists who put the pernicious memes into circulation. The true social-psychological explanation for how “Many Vague Worlds” has managed to achieve such popularity may be quite different to what I have proposed; the whole way I got the issue out there was somewhat crudely executed. But I do regard this as a serious matter; the miasma of illogic surrounding the Oxford school is at least as bad as that surrounding the Copenhagen interpretation, yet it is getting a free pass from a community of rationalists.
(Gee, I turn my back for ten second and LW spawns a long comment thread about me!)
My answer to smk was intending to illustrate how “world counting” worked within the Many Worlds Interpretation, not to argue which of Many Worlds (Oxford or not) or others was the correct interpretation.
Just like you can answer questions about rolling balls within the framework of Newtonian Physics, without having to launch into a diatribe about how Relativity is a better model.
I wish your post made a clearer distinction between criticism of my explanation (I think you read way too much into what I wrote), criticism of the high regard for MWI in this community, and psychoanalysis as to how my thinking supposedly went so very wrong.
I might add a link to this thread, and to wedrifid & Tetronian’s, so a reader can immediately see your response. That way, you get the right of reply, and the original diatribe is preserved.
When I wrote the “psychoanalysis” (e.g. the “imperial egos”), I was thinking more of theoretical physicists and other purveyors of comprehensive, formally expressed ontologies. They are the prime movers here, the ideologists who put the pernicious memes into circulation. The true social-psychological explanation for how “Many Vague Worlds” has managed to achieve such popularity may be quite different to what I have proposed; the whole way I got the issue out there was somewhat crudely executed. But I do regard this as a serious matter; the miasma of illogic surrounding the Oxford school is at least as bad as that surrounding the Copenhagen interpretation, yet it is getting a free pass from a community of rationalists.