Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!news.tele.dk!feed118.news.tele.dk!news.tele.dk!small.news.tele.dk!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Dirk Bruere at NeoPax Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: The halting problem revisited Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2011 15:42:38 +0100 Organization: Dirk Bruere at Neopax Lines: 59 Message-ID: <8vgtqrFikcU4@mid.individual.net> References: <8v727mF46lU1@mid.individual.net> <8vbuiaFbm7U1@mid.individual.net> <8vd51lFlq1U1@mid.individual.net> <8ve17fFto9U1@mid.individual.net> <8vedndFt19U1@mid.individual.net> <8vef1uF8n9U1@mid.individual.net> <8ver27F5ouU1@mid.individual.net> Reply-To: dirk.bruere@gmail.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: individual.net qjhBgrsri8n7KEE/ARkN6gs8wNNY4/Vx6wStcP/rpLIeaFoqBs Cancel-Lock: sha1:Bejs4bqOKJepRzzMcDNpmW7daTo= User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Thunderbird/3.1.9 In-Reply-To: Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:2594 On 30/03/2011 09:41, javax.swing.JSnarker wrote: > On 30/03/2011 4:05 AM, Michal Kleczek wrote: >> javax.swing.JSnarker wrote: >>> Or we can posit that Wigner's friend is also a "material device", in >>> which case you realize that Wigner's friend just gets replicated into >>> parallel worlds, and so does Wigner, and so does everyone eventually. >> >> I'm not an expert in all this stuff at all but my thinking is: >> If existence of parallel Wigners cannot be disproved experimentally (by >> definition of "parallel") the whole idea is not really science anymore. >> Since Wigner is not able to verify existence of parallel Wigners then by >> applying Ockham's razor he should just ignore them (and try another >> explanation which would be more scientific). > > Ockham's Razor requires us to accept the *simpler hypothesis*. If we > assume only what's already proven about QM, e.g. the Schroedinger > wave-function evolution, then parallel Wigners fall out of that > naturally. We have to posit something *extra* (a collapse mechanism) to > get *rid* of them. > > Absent experimental evidence one way or the other we should prefer the > theory *without* a collapse postulate. > >> You cannot easily say "commonsense intuition is wrong" because then your >> sentences about real world become meaningless. > > Non sequitur. > >> It is not that easy to get rid of "the existence of some dude whose name >> rhymes with Todd" :) > > How about the observation that any phenomenon in the universe that has > no detectable effect at all has no practical significance and may as > well not exist; whereas if it has detectable effects, those effects can > be partially modeled, at least statistically. The model, if made as good > as possible, should end up as a mixture of structured behaviors, with > patterns to them, and a random noise source of some sort. > > The model of the structured behaviors, however, amounts to a > naturalistic explanation of those aspects of the phenomena more or less > by definition. And what's left over is unstructured noise! > > This leaves no room for the supernatural in *any* form. A sufficiently > good model crushes it between the parts explained naturalistically and > the parts that are just noise. In fact, MWI QM even gets rid of the > noise, simply making it a lengthy bit-string parameter that varies > across the many worlds; the noise we observe is then just a reflection > of our uncertainty as to which bit-string our particular universe has > (even after we've observed an arbitrarily long prefix of it). > Unless QM is nonlinear somewhere, in which case it might allow communications across parallel worlds. And that would mean a whole heap of "supernatural" style problems and phenomena -- Dirk http://www.neopax.com/technomage/ - My new book - Magick and Technology