Hi Iain,
I completely agree with Johnston that this paper overthrows the claims of the ID movement.? I've been saying this for many years, that the ID movement can never be correct the way it is formulated because it is impossible to prove intelligent design when all you have to work with is "cosmic improbability" (CI).? They should have called it the CI movement and made no claims about intelligence and then it would have been a defensible or at least scientifically meaningful position.
I also completely agree with you that appealing to MWI is equivalent to appealing to God, when we are dealing with the limited set of data contained in physics (i.e., leaving out revelation).? But note:? it is amazing to consider how far atheism has come toward the Biblical worldview.? Whereas once it claimed that nothing exists except the observable cosmos, which is purely random and has existed forever, now they agree that there must be something outside that cosmos, that is bigger than the cosmos, to explain the fine tuning and beginning of the cosmos.? Functionally this fills the same role as God with the exception that it is not a Being (it is not Intelligent) and so it must create infinite universes in order to get one good one.? Dealing with the question:? which is more plausible, this "stupid god" of MWI, or biblical God who is a person?? I like to note that consciousness certainly exists within the universe, so it does not seem implausible to me that whatever exists
outside the universe might also possess consciousness.? From there I think we have to leave science and embrace revelation, which the ID movement is unwilling to do and hence it must always remain a failure.
I also find this very interesting:? atheists claim that belief in God is a "science killer," since God can do anything and therefore if you profess belief in God you already have a sufficient explanation for everything.? They claim that will cause us to give up as scientists and stop looking for answers.? But notice that MWI is more effective than even God is, when it comes to being a sufficient explanation or everything.? God **can** do anything, but he **won't** do everything.? He can choose.? MWI on the other hand is unintelligent and cannot choose.? It cannot help but do everything.? Therefore, MWI is the ultimate science-killer.? Atheists are using a blatant double-standard when they claim that faith in God is a science killer.? I think this is the most important observation we can make about Johnston's and others views when they include?multiverses or MWI.
Finally, I just don't "get" these quantum suicide arguments.? The odds that the physicist will not be killed are the same in MWI as they are in any non-MWI interpretation of QM.? The physicist might amazingly survive even if MWI is not true, and since he knows that mathematically then his survival will not convince him that MWI is true.? He also knows that if he?plays the game again time then he will almost certainly be killed the second time, regardless whether MWI is true or not.
?
Also, the physicist's consciousness does not miraculously vanish in the universes where he is killed and then continue onward only in the rare universe where he survives.? To the contrary, in the vast number of cases where he is being killed, he will actually feel the pain of the bullet ripping into his body as he dies and he will know that he is dying.? It is only when WE (not he) choose to restrict our attention to the rare cases where he survives that the odds seem unusual to us.? But that is because we are choosing to ignore the most common outcomes and to focus only on the one where he survives.
We could play that game with any form of chance, not just with quantum suicide.? We could flip a coin 10 times in a row to see if we get heads every time.? In most universes we won't see that outcome, but in some rare universes we will.? We don't need to claim that our consciousness ends in the common universes in order to play this game.? The role of ending the physicist's consciousness in this game is just a trick to get us to focus on the unusual outcome, because we can't imagine the dead physicist measuring the ordinary case and so we think he can only measure the unusual case.? But consider his wife.? 99.999% of the time she will end up measuring a dead husband,?regardless of whether MWI is true or not.
So no matter how we look at it there is absolutely no way to distinguish between MWI or any other QM interpretation in these kinds of experiments, regardless of our faith or disbelief in God.
Phil
-----Original Message-----
From: Iain Strachan <igd.strachan@gmail.com>
To: AmericanScientificAffiliation <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Fri, 7 Sep 2007 3:26 pm
Subject: [asa] The Multiverse - Physics or Metaphysics?
Lawrence Johnston posted a link to a paper by Eugene Koonin about the transition from chance to biological evolution in the history of life:
http://www.biology-direct.com/content/2/1/15
These thoughts were prompted by reading this paper (and also having recently taken delivery of Martin Rees's book "Just six numbers" concerning the fine tuning of the universe).? Both Koonin's paper and Rees's book invoke the idea of a multiverse to sidestep the problems without recourse to an Intelligent Designer, or Creator.
The essence of Koonin's paper, as I understand it is that in order for biological evolution to get started, a primitive replication/translation system had to emerge by chance.? He performs some toy calculations to work out the probability that such a system could emerge by chance in our universe (given number of stars, planets, age of the universe, number of nucleotides needed for such a system etc).? He arrives at this vanishingly small number less than 10^(-1000).
His resolution to this paradox is to invoke the "Many Words from One" (MWO) hypothesis, which I think is essentially the same as the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.? This means that all possible Quantum outcomes actually occur in different universes at every instant in time, and so at each point, the universe splits into parallel versions, with the different outcomes happening in the different universes.
In the MWO hypothesis, even the most incredibly unlikely things are bound to happen in some, very rare universes, with probability 1.? A radioactive atom with a half life of 1 second can carry on undecayed indefinitely, because there will always be universes in which it did not decay. [ This also leads to the "Quantum Immortality" paradox that you never actually experience death, because the event that causes your death will not happen in some universes, and it is these universes in which your consciousness continues to exist].
Hence the emergence of the primitive replication/translation system is bound to occur in some versions of the universe, and those universes are the ones in which eventually people evolve to ask the question about how it all started up.? Koonin calls this "anthropic selection" - ie our universe is one where this incredibly unlikely event occurred because we are here (the anthropic principle).
The final sentence in Koonin's paper is telling:
A final comment on "irreducible complexity" and "intelligent design". By showing that highly complex systems, actually, can emerge by chance and, moreover, are inevitable, if extremely rare, in the universe, the present model sidesteps the issue of irreducibility and leaves no room whatsoever for any form of intelligent design.
It is my view that Koonin hasn't sidestepped the problem of intelligent design at all - in effect he has replaced one unprovable assumption (God) with another equally unprovable assumption (the multiverse).?
I wonder if people on the list would agree with me that "God did it" and "The multiverse did it" appear to be equivalent statements, and neither is satisfactory from a scientific viewpoint?
God is omnipotent and can do anything.? So when you can't explain something you could invoke God's intervention to explain something apparently miraculous.
But the multiverse - where anything can happen with a finite probability, is also omnipotent - and can also be invoked to explain something apparently miraculous (such as the appearance of Koonin's first replicator).
It seems to me that Koonin's paper suffers from precisely the same failing as Intelligent Design, namely that when you can't find a way of explaining something, you invoke something else that is omnipotent in order to explain it.? To do this is to give up doing science, it seems to me.
I'll finish with a humorous scenario that occurred to me.
One of the bizarre paradoxes of the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is the so-called "Quantum Suicide" thought experiment (look it up on Wikipedia).? It is proposed as a thought experiment that would distinguish between Many Worlds and the Copenhagen interpretations.? The experiment resembles Schrodinger's cat, except that the physicist himself replaces the cat.? A device measures the spin state of an electron, and fires a gun or not with 50% probability according to the result.? The experiment is then repeated a large number of times (say 1000).? At the end of this there will be 999 dead physicists whose consciousness is terminated when the gun went off, and one left alive in the universe where the spin state corresponded to "no fire" every time.? If the physicist emerges at the end of this conscious, then he "knows" that the MWI is true.
Or does he?? Suppose he now goes home to his devoutly religious wife, and says "Honey I'm home - guess what we're going to be famous because I've proved the Many Worlds Interpretation is true".? But his wife, who knows there is no chance she'll end up in the same universe as him has prayed to her God to intervene and save his life.? She will reply "No, I've just proved that God answers prayer".
What should the physicist do:
(a)? Divorce his religious nutter of a wife & go ahead and publish?
(b)? Start believing in the God his wife prayed to?
(c)? Go back and figure out what went wrong with the experimental apparatus?
I think it should be clear which one I think is the most sensible :-)
Iain
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Received on Fri Sep 7 17:42:29 2007
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