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Re: The halting problem revisited

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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).

-- 
public final class JSnarker
extends JComponent
A JSnarker is an NNTP-aware component that asynchronously provides 
snarky output when the Ego.needsPuncturing() event is fired in cljp.

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Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-29 14:05 -0400
  Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-29 20:43 +0100
    Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-03-29 20:24 -0400
      Re: The halting problem revisited Michal Kleczek <kleku75@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 10:05 +0200
        Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-03-30 04:41 -0400
          Re: The halting problem revisited Michal Kleczek <kleku75@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 11:35 +0200
            Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-30 07:38 -0400
              Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:48 +0100
                Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <lew@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-30 10:35 -0700
                Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 19:46 +0100
                Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <lew@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-30 13:24 -0700
                Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-31 00:04 +0100
                Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-31 00:00 -0400
              Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-04-04 20:28 -0400
            Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:44 +0100
            Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-04-04 20:26 -0400
              Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-04-05 01:32 +0100
          Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:42 +0100
            Re: The halting problem revisited Lew <noone@lewscanon.com> - 2011-03-31 08:31 -0400
        Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:41 +0100
          Re: The halting problem revisited "javax.swing.JSnarker" <gharriman@boojum.mit.edu> - 2011-04-04 20:34 -0400
      Re: The halting problem revisited Dirk Bruere at NeoPax <dirk.bruere@gmail.com> - 2011-03-30 15:38 +0100

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