From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Thu May 27 2004 - 06:23:35 MDT
Eliezer wrote:
> > 1) I don't call quantum physics "non-mysterious physics"
>
> I do. Everett dispels the mystery completely. The answer
> has been known
> since 1957; it just isn't widely appreciated outside the theoretical
> physics community. As I should have suspected, back when I
> believed the
> people boasting about humanity's ignorance. There are mysterious
> questions. Never mysterious answers.
Well I'm quite familiar with MWI and do not consider it to dispel the
mystery completely.
Eliezer, you're a probabilist. Do you really find it so natural that
quantum events don't obey normal laws of probability theory?
Either Boolean logic breaks at the quantum level, yielding quantum
logic.
Or else you allow Boolean logic at the quantum level, and then
Kolmogorov axioms break, yielding Youssef's quantum probability theory
(in which probabilities are complex numbers rather than real numbers).
Either way, I think it's mysterious that microverse follows this
different formal system of logic/probability. I don't fully understand
it. And I don't think the MWI explains it so thoroughly.
You could have multiple branching universes without non-Boolean logic
and non-Kolmogorovian probability theory. Why does the universe display
this logical/probabilistic weirdness at the micro level?
Presumably because universes with this low-level logical/probabilistic
weirdness at the microlevel are better at giving rise to complex
reflexive structures like us at the macro level (i.e. the anthropic
principle?).
But then why is this the case?
This is a deep mathematical question about the self-organization of
universes with different logical/probabilistic laws.
It is the real mystery of quantum theory, and one that MWI certainly
does NOT explain.
-- Ben G
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