Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!feeder.news-service.com!94.75.214.39.MISMATCH!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "javax.swing.JSnarker" Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: The halting problem revisited Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:41:43 -0400 Organization: media lab? Lines: 54 Message-ID: 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> NNTP-Posting-Host: r8kns7XPh7q2z79975l9/A.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Forte Agent 2.0/32.652 X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:2580 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.