I’m going out on a limb on this one, but since the whole universe includes separate branching “worldsâ€, and over time this means we have more worlds now than 1 second ago, and since the worlds can interact with each other, how does this not violate conservation of mass and energy?
The “number” of worlds increases, but each world is weighted by a complex number, such that when you add up all the squares of the complex numbers they sum up to 1. This effectively preserves mass and energy across all worlds, inside the universal wave function.
I agree that he didn’t show testable, but rather the possibility of it (and the formalization of it).
There’s a problem with choosing the language for Solomonoff/MML, so the index’s goodness can be debated. However, I think in general index is sound.
I don’t think he’s saying that theories fundamentally have probabilities. Rather, as a Bayesian, he gives some priors to each theory. As more evidences accumulate, the right theory will update and its probability approaches 1.
The reason human understanding can’t be part of the equations is, as EY says, shorter “programs” are more likely to govern the universe than longer “programs,” essentially because these “programs” are more likely to be written if you throw down some random bits to make a program that governs the universe.
So I don’t buy your arguments in the next section.
EY is comparing the angel explanation with the galaxies explanation; you are supposed to reject the angels and usher in the galaxies. In that case, the anticipations are truly the same. You can’t really prove whether there are angels.
What do you mean by “good”? Which one is “better” out of 2 models that give the same prediction? (By “model” I assume you mean “theory”)
You admit that Copenhagen is unsatisfactory but it is useful for education. I don’t see any reason not to teach MWI in the same vein.
If indeed the expectation value of observable V of mercury is X but we observe Y with Y not= X (that is to say that the variance of V is nonzero), then there isn’t a determinate formula for predict V exactly in your first Newton/random formula scenario. At the same time, someone who has the Copenhagen interpretation would have the same expectation value X, but instead of saying there’s another world he says there’s a wave function collapse. I still think that the parallel world is a deduced result from universal wave function, superposition, decoherence, and etc that Copenhagen also recognizes. So the Copenhagen view essentially say “actually, even though the equations say there’s another world, there is none, and on top of that we are gonna tell you how this collapsing business works”. This extra sentence is what causes the Razor to favor MWI.
Much of what you are arguing seems to stem from your dissatisfaction of the formalization of Occam’s Razor. Do you still feel that we should favor something like human understanding of a theory over the probability of a theory being true based on its length?