But the main (if not only) argument you make for many worlds in that post and the others is the ridiculousness of collapse postulates. Now I’m not disagreeing with you, collapses would defy a great deal of convention (causality, relativity, CPT-symmetry, etc) but even with 100% confidence in this (as a hypothetical), you still wouldn’t be justified in assigning 99+% confidence in many worlds. There exist single world interpretations without a collapse, against which you haven’t presented any arguments. Bohmian mechanics would seem to be the most plausible of these (given the LW census). Do you still assign <1% likelihood to this interpretation, and if so, why?
Obvious rationalizations of single-world theories have no more evidence in their favor, no more reason to be believed; it’s like Deism vs. Jehovah. Sure, the class ‘Deism’ is more probable but it’s still not credible in an absolute sense (and no, Matrix Lords are not deities, they were born at a particular time, have limited domains and are made of parts). You can’t start with a terrible idea and expect to find >1% rationalizations for it. There’s more than 100 possible terrible ideas. Single-world QM via collapse/Copenhagen/shut-up was originally a terrible idea and you shouldn’t expect terrible ideas to be resurrectable on average. Privileging the hypothesis.
(Specifically: Bohm has similar FTL problems and causality problems and introduces epiphenomenal pointers to a ‘real world’ and if the wavefunction still exists (which it must because it is causally affecting the epiphenomenal pointer, things must be real to be causes of real effects so far as we know) then it should still have sentient observers inside it. Relational quantum mechanics is more awful amateur epistemology from people who’d rather abandon the concept of objective reality, with no good formal replacement, than just give up already. But most of all, why are we even asking that question or considering these theories in the first place? And again, simulated physics wouldn’t count because then the apparent laws are false and the simulations would presumably be of an original universe that would almost certainly be multiplicitous by the same reasoning; also there’d presumably be branches within the sim, so not single-world which is what I specified.)
If you can assign <1% probability to deism (the generalized abstracted class containing Jehovahism) then there should be no problem with assigning <1% probability to all single-world theories.
Given that there’s some serious fundamental physics we don’t understand yet, I find it hard to persuade myself there’s less than a 1% chance that even the framing of single-world versus many-world interpretations is incoherent.
Minor points: the generalized abstracted class containing Jehovaism is general theism, not deism. Deism is the subset of deities which do not interfere with their creation, whereas personal theism is the subset of deities which do interfere.
Also—I myself stopped with this usage but it bears mentioning—there are “gods” which were born as mortals and ascended, apotheosis-like; there are gods that can kill each other, there’s Hermes and legions of minor gods, many of them “with parts”.
It’s not trivial to draw a line that allows for killable gods of ancient times (compare Ragnarök) and thus doesn’t contradict established mythology that has lots of trivial, minor gods, but doesn’t allow for Matrix Lords to be considered gods (if not in the contemporary “triple-O Abrahamic deity” parlance). Ontologically fundamental mental powers ain’t the classifying separator, and I’m sure you’d agree that a label shouldn’t depend simply on whether we understand a phenomenon. Laws of physics with an if-clause for a certain kind of “god”-matter would still be laws of physics, and just having that description (knowing the laws), lifting the curtain, shouldn’t be sufficient to remove a “god” label.
But the main (if not only) argument you make for many worlds in that post and the others is the ridiculousness of collapse postulates. Now I’m not disagreeing with you, collapses would defy a great deal of convention (causality, relativity, CPT-symmetry, etc) but even with 100% confidence in this (as a hypothetical), you still wouldn’t be justified in assigning 99+% confidence in many worlds. There exist single world interpretations without a collapse, against which you haven’t presented any arguments. Bohmian mechanics would seem to be the most plausible of these (given the LW census). Do you still assign <1% likelihood to this interpretation, and if so, why?
Obvious rationalizations of single-world theories have no more evidence in their favor, no more reason to be believed; it’s like Deism vs. Jehovah. Sure, the class ‘Deism’ is more probable but it’s still not credible in an absolute sense (and no, Matrix Lords are not deities, they were born at a particular time, have limited domains and are made of parts). You can’t start with a terrible idea and expect to find >1% rationalizations for it. There’s more than 100 possible terrible ideas. Single-world QM via collapse/Copenhagen/shut-up was originally a terrible idea and you shouldn’t expect terrible ideas to be resurrectable on average. Privileging the hypothesis.
(Specifically: Bohm has similar FTL problems and causality problems and introduces epiphenomenal pointers to a ‘real world’ and if the wavefunction still exists (which it must because it is causally affecting the epiphenomenal pointer, things must be real to be causes of real effects so far as we know) then it should still have sentient observers inside it. Relational quantum mechanics is more awful amateur epistemology from people who’d rather abandon the concept of objective reality, with no good formal replacement, than just give up already. But most of all, why are we even asking that question or considering these theories in the first place? And again, simulated physics wouldn’t count because then the apparent laws are false and the simulations would presumably be of an original universe that would almost certainly be multiplicitous by the same reasoning; also there’d presumably be branches within the sim, so not single-world which is what I specified.)
If you can assign <1% probability to deism (the generalized abstracted class containing Jehovahism) then there should be no problem with assigning <1% probability to all single-world theories.
Given that there’s some serious fundamental physics we don’t understand yet, I find it hard to persuade myself there’s less than a 1% chance that even the framing of single-world versus many-world interpretations is incoherent.
Minor points: the generalized abstracted class containing Jehovaism is general theism, not deism. Deism is the subset of deities which do not interfere with their creation, whereas personal theism is the subset of deities which do interfere.
Also—I myself stopped with this usage but it bears mentioning—there are “gods” which were born as mortals and ascended, apotheosis-like; there are gods that can kill each other, there’s Hermes and legions of minor gods, many of them “with parts”.
It’s not trivial to draw a line that allows for killable gods of ancient times (compare Ragnarök) and thus doesn’t contradict established mythology that has lots of trivial, minor gods, but doesn’t allow for Matrix Lords to be considered gods (if not in the contemporary “triple-O Abrahamic deity” parlance). Ontologically fundamental mental powers ain’t the classifying separator, and I’m sure you’d agree that a label shouldn’t depend simply on whether we understand a phenomenon. Laws of physics with an if-clause for a certain kind of “god”-matter would still be laws of physics, and just having that description (knowing the laws), lifting the curtain, shouldn’t be sufficient to remove a “god” label.