From stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Mon Mar 15 16:28:31 2004 Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 16:27:48 -0800 (PST) From: stapp@thsrv.lbl.gov Reply-To: hpstapp@lbl.gov To: matthew.donald@phy.cam.ac.uk Cc: Jeffrey M. Schwartz Subject: A comment on your work on my website. (re-revised) Dear Matthew, I just posted on my web site the following: ---------------------------------------------------------------- STAPP: I have looked over your 1999 paper and have some comments. I appreciate your "aim of providing a firm technical foundation for Everett's idea." and agree with you that "There should be no doubt that such a foundation is needed." I agree with you that "the difficulty of working out the details have been widely underestimated". I agree also that the solution should "try to describe the world in some particularly elegant fashion." But your effort to create a satisfactory foundation for a Many-Minds theory seems to be singularly inelegant: it is based on 44 highly technical hypotheses. You mention (p.9) that this long string of intricate assumption might be regarded as "ugly". and note that the issue of their suitability as the requisite "fundamental laws" is for the reader to decide. I strongly suspect that most readers, if they study your paper, or even just look at it, will draw the conclusion that if you are right that the foundation of many-minds theory depends on such an intricate set of assumptions/laws, then the Many-Minds idea is probably wrong. If constructing a rationally coherent and logically satisfactory many-minds theory requires, as your detailed and extensive study indicates, such a technically intense set of foundational laws then I think most readers will conclude that many-minds is not a reasonable alternative to the the more natural possibility that our sense experiences are parts of an objective reality that often give approximately valid information about the natural course macroscopic events within that reality. Your laudable attempt to place on a rational footing the contrary "many-minds" idea --- that each stream of consciousness is a mere individual branch of a tree diverging and contradictory streams of consciousness, all equally real in the large objective sense --- appears, in view of its intricate ad hoc nature, to be more like the death rattle of a collapsing radical idea than the foundation of a viable theory of natural reality. I would be hard pressed to find a stronger argument against the many-minds (or many-worlds) idea than would be provided by a perusal of your arduous and commendable many-paper effort to provide a rational foundation for that idea. You call the conventional theory "hopelessly inconsistent". I do not agree the idea of real collapses is hopelessly inconsistent. There is no inconsistency in von Neumann's model, only incompleteness as regards the mind-brain connection, the origins of our conscious choices, and the extension of that connection to non-humans. Incompleteness is not the equivalent to inconsistency. There is no good reason to demand, in this difficult and active area of research, that our current level of knowledge should be complete: mind-brain science has not yet reached its terminus. The one serious question that you raise, namely the compatibility with relativity theory and Bell's theorem, poses no real problem. I doubt that there is anyone more conversant with that nonlocality issue than I. (Indeed, I do believe that your present formulation is technically flawed at a point pertaining this nonlocality issues --- to the necessary instantaneousness of the collapse process, and your "breeding problem"--- but that is a minor point that I shall not enter into here, as it would divert attention away from the big problem) In addition to all of the technical machinery that you find you must introduce, there is, as you emphasize, the basic huge mystery of the meaing of probability in a many-minds universe where everything happens: what does 'the probability for someting to happen' mean in a reality where everything happens? You say (p.14) that: "this mystery can be left unexplained. The goal of physics is to tell us what the world is like. In this paper, I propose that, for us, the world is like a discrete stochastic process. However mysterious probability may ultimately be, we have no difficulty understanding what it is like to observe such a process. ... We all know what it means to 'know the odds'." So you are reduced to postulating that 'IT SEEMS as though we are observing a discrete stochastic process, even though the basic many-minds assumption is that there really is no such real discrete process'. But if, in order to make a sensible theory, you must assert, as a primitive rule, that *it seems to us* that we are observing "a discrete stochastic process", then the more natural assumption would be that there really is such a process, and that our experiences are both parts of that process and purveyors of information about it. The problem of relativistic invariance and Bell's Theorem is easily solved. So why on earth adopt such extremely complicate laws, as you effectively show to be necessary, in order to save what amounts to the claim that nature is tricking us into believing that there is a discrete natural physical process, into which our thoughts enter causally, and about which our thoughts inform us, when there really is no such process at all: it's all an elaborate hoax; an illusion. Your tour-de-force example of what is needed to provide a rational foundation for the many-world idea may be the clincher that eliminates that idea from rational contention, at least among serious-minded thinkers. [Ref;Matthew J. Donald http://arXiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9904001] ------------------------------------------------------------- Best regards, Henry P.S. If you would like to comment on my comment, I can include it or not on my website, if you wish. Or we can discuss my concerns more privately.