[ExI] Free will was: Everett worlds

[John Clark]

On Wed, Aug 19, 2020 at 7:47 PM Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

*> "matter tells space-time how to curve; curved space-time tells matter
> how to move." with "shut up and calculate!" If that isn't an example of
> equations holding a stick over you, then what is?*


That is not a stick, that is an explanation of what's going on written in
the language of English. A more detailed and more accurate depiction of
what's going on could be provided by the language of mathematics and the
grammar of 4 dimensional tensors. But that wouldn't be a stick either, it
would just be a better description of what's going on said in a language
that is not English.

Some people don't like what Schrodinger's equation is telling us so they
add an extra term into it that gets rid of the many worlds that they have a
distaste for, the Ghirardi–Rimini spontaneous wave function theory does
this. It doesn't make any predictions of experimental results that are one
bit better than the unmodified Schrodinger equation, but it does stop it
from being deterministic; it says that most of the time a particle doesn't
have a specific location but every once in a while in a process that is
random in both space and time for no reason the wave function collapses and
the particle receives one and only one real specific location. In a blatant
violation of Occam's Razor, Ghirardi–Rimini mutilate Schrodinger's
equation, which is already very complicated and difficult to work with, and
make it even more complicated and even more difficult to work with. And the
only reason for doing any of this is to avoid a conclusion that they have a
personal distaste for. This is not progress.

John K Clark
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