It is certainly true that many, many failures/delays in the LHC could be caused by something other than an anthropic effect. The probability of all of those events would be increased with the observation of successive failures. What exactly would the other options be? I can think of two: fraud and anti-science conspiracy. Both of these could be independently investigated and we could find good reasons to think that neither had happened. What alternative explanations would we be left with?
I don’t know how relevant this part is but:
Likewise, when you perform your LHC experiments, you’ve made a proximate observation, but you have not observed the actual cause.
What I mean is that, from your set of experiments, you couldn’t make the distinction between the MWI and, for sake of argument, God (If you don’t like God then insert another unobservable possibility).
While I understand that the two aren’t directly interchangeable (MWI has more empirical support than any deity) the point remains that you are not observing any of the potential many worlds in this scenario any more than you are observing God.
This makes the gravity analogy a poor one because, when it comes to gravity, we can directly observe that mass is related somehow to gravity and therefore is the probable source (via confirmation or whatever).
But where ’s the “mass” in our anthropic explanation of the LHC thought experiments? It’s some [currently] unobservable cosmological phenomenon.
The probability of all of those events would be increased with the observation of successive failures.
Lets go with the assumption that we’ve observed an appropriate number of successive LHC failures and have ruled out tampering.
Going on our observations we are left with very little information. I’m going to pull another Popperian move and ask, is there any way we can rule out all other explanations of the phenomenon and be left with exclusively the MWI? In other words, is the MWI interpretation falsifiable using our LHC experiments?
Obviously we reject the supernatural because its simply not falsifiable, but is there enough evidence that a) MWI is undeniably correct in all other contexts (QM, etc) and b) there are no other falsifiable explanations for the LHC phenomenon (understanding that there is always a limit to current human knowledge).
Perhaps MWI has more empirical support than I am aware of, but as far as I know we haven’t made any empirical, testable and falsifiable observations of the many worlds, other than as a mathematical idea. Now I innocently ask, is that enough to rule out other potential (even supernatural) phenomenon in favor of MW?
I’m going to pull another Popperian move and ask, is there any way we can rule out all other explanations of the phenomenon and be left with exclusively the MWI?
There has never been and never will be a way to rule out all other explanations of any phenomenon and be left with only one hypothesis. What we can do is run experiments that show us that all the best competitors of our hypothesis are less probable than our hypothesis such that we can assign a very high probability to our hypothesis. I think we do that when once we rule out fraud and tampering. I can’t think of another explanation that is nearly as probable as MW+Anthropics(*). The supernatural explanations are vastly more improbable.
In other words, is the MWI interpretation falsifiable using our LHC experiments?
Maybe there was a typo but this isn’t a paraphrase of the previous question. Quantum immortality/MW is not falsifiable in the sense that to get really good evidence against it you’d have to die. But the major alternative can be falsified—you can continue living forever, so it isn’t like something supernatural at all.
I still don’t know what you mean by direct observation of the cause versus proximate observation.
Perhaps some helpful context: I think some kind of MW interpretation is probably true, QI less likely to be true, and the LHC destroying us if it runs very, very improbable.
(*) I should have noted earlier that I’m not positive quantum immortality follows from MW.
It is certainly true that many, many failures/delays in the LHC could be caused by something other than an anthropic effect. The probability of all of those events would be increased with the observation of successive failures. What exactly would the other options be? I can think of two: fraud and anti-science conspiracy. Both of these could be independently investigated and we could find good reasons to think that neither had happened. What alternative explanations would we be left with?
I don’t know how relevant this part is but:
Explain this distinction.
What I mean is that, from your set of experiments, you couldn’t make the distinction between the MWI and, for sake of argument, God (If you don’t like God then insert another unobservable possibility).
While I understand that the two aren’t directly interchangeable (MWI has more empirical support than any deity) the point remains that you are not observing any of the potential many worlds in this scenario any more than you are observing God.
This makes the gravity analogy a poor one because, when it comes to gravity, we can directly observe that mass is related somehow to gravity and therefore is the probable source (via confirmation or whatever).
But where ’s the “mass” in our anthropic explanation of the LHC thought experiments? It’s some [currently] unobservable cosmological phenomenon.
Lets go with the assumption that we’ve observed an appropriate number of successive LHC failures and have ruled out tampering.
Going on our observations we are left with very little information. I’m going to pull another Popperian move and ask, is there any way we can rule out all other explanations of the phenomenon and be left with exclusively the MWI? In other words, is the MWI interpretation falsifiable using our LHC experiments?
Obviously we reject the supernatural because its simply not falsifiable, but is there enough evidence that a) MWI is undeniably correct in all other contexts (QM, etc) and b) there are no other falsifiable explanations for the LHC phenomenon (understanding that there is always a limit to current human knowledge).
Perhaps MWI has more empirical support than I am aware of, but as far as I know we haven’t made any empirical, testable and falsifiable observations of the many worlds, other than as a mathematical idea. Now I innocently ask, is that enough to rule out other potential (even supernatural) phenomenon in favor of MW?
There has never been and never will be a way to rule out all other explanations of any phenomenon and be left with only one hypothesis. What we can do is run experiments that show us that all the best competitors of our hypothesis are less probable than our hypothesis such that we can assign a very high probability to our hypothesis. I think we do that when once we rule out fraud and tampering. I can’t think of another explanation that is nearly as probable as MW+Anthropics(*). The supernatural explanations are vastly more improbable.
Maybe there was a typo but this isn’t a paraphrase of the previous question. Quantum immortality/MW is not falsifiable in the sense that to get really good evidence against it you’d have to die. But the major alternative can be falsified—you can continue living forever, so it isn’t like something supernatural at all.
I still don’t know what you mean by direct observation of the cause versus proximate observation.
Perhaps some helpful context: I think some kind of MW interpretation is probably true, QI less likely to be true, and the LHC destroying us if it runs very, very improbable.
(*) I should have noted earlier that I’m not positive quantum immortality follows from MW.