[ExI] QT and SR

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Sun Sep 7 02:42:01 UTC 2008


I just wrote stuff like "what is your hidden agenda here, you?"
to Damien's post in what I hoped many others (naturally Damien
saw through it), would see as a parody of the suspicion
that is sometimes provoked towards those who "innocently"
(and not so innocently) ask questions.

So, who gives a damn whether they're innocent or not? I don't!
Bring them on, says I, (and most of us).

I was just having some fun with the attitudes that some people
here seem to take, imitating their supposed paranoia or suspicious
turn of mind, and mocking their (apparent) reluctance (sometimes)
to answer questions put to them.

> suppose... that you posit the reality of veridical (if infrequent
> and stochastic) precognitive correlations.

Okay. "Suppose" means something quite similar to "If", and
since I know what they both mean...   :-)

> Could you account for those in a MWI way, without any superluminal
> or reversed-time connections?

Interesting challenge. I'll try to take a concrete example (you didn't
give any, probably because it's too easy). Let's say that a Russian
mother who deeply loves her son has a strange and horrible nightmare
about him at almost the exact same time that an accident occurs
on board his nuclear submarine (so far as I know, this is entirely
apocryphal, I'm making this up based on the Kursk tragedy).
Moreover, we suppose that classical effects (such as her sensing
some unusual uneasiness on his part before he left for his Final
Cruise) were ruled out. Could we have some kind of entanglement
between the events?

I would guess that some people have guessed that there are
entangled particle pairs all over the place, and all these accounts
I used to read about "the holographic universe" or "synchronicity"
---you know, the basically BS books popular in the 80s---try
to suggest that ESP type influences could be explained thereby.
Well, why not.  So, in this particular example we have:

A number of correlations between her son's brain and the
nuclear reactor aboard the submarine have formed over time,
and so have similar bonds between mother and son. When
certain measurements occur, copies of people tend more
often than mere chance to end up in the same universes
as distant events bearing a similar stamp. Then the rest of it
is up to evolution:  slowly over almost geologic time 
measurements occuring in human brains that are correlated
with distant events become symbolicallly or unconsciously
connected with verbally accessible regions. Then for millenia
the "I have a vision!" or "God spoke to me!" accounts are
discredited because far more often than not, these are really
the manifestations of wish fulfillment, unconscious hypotheses,
and other unrelable products of the mind's ceaseless conjecturing.
So such real effects, mainly because they are so rare and 
undependable, are driven into the unconscious, or into dreams,
where revelation of "just a dream" carries with it fewer or no
Darwinian penalties or discrimination.

We could also infer from this certain slightly "lucky" behavior
of many of the large brained higher animals, who really do
conjecture about, say, whether a certain tree or cave is safe
very much the way we do. And just as for them, most often
the true entangled variable effects that cause each copy to end
up in it's own slightly more favorable universe, are swamped
out by bad guesses, ignorance of certain ordinary causal signatures,
illogical thinking, and so on. Only in the case of humans, not only
does illogical thinking tend to overshadow the rarer correlations,
but logical thinking as well, in an age of scientific enlightenment.

> Bear in mind that by hypothesis these 
> effects are *larger than can be accounted for just by chance*.

Surely, because that wouldn't be at all interesting.

> I don't think it's sufficient to say, "Hey, in a MW metaverse, weird 
> shit happens all the time, but different weird shit in different universes."

I hope that my stab above doesn't quite fall into this category.
One even gets time travel rather effortlessly in MWI, but only
at the cost again of positing incredibly improbable events. It
doesn't lead anywhere, though I guess Deutsch's (in "The Fabric
of Reality") and Thorne's (in "Black Holes and Time Warps:
Einstein's Outrageous Legacy") are structurally interesting
and quite entertaining.

Lee




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