This page contains the entire discussion between Yury Semenov (yury@zipper.paco.net) and myself in the later part of June 2000 about the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Theory (MWI), its connection with P. D. Ouspensky and its relation to the On the Origin of Space study presented here.
Hi!
I am also interested in some philosophical consequences of MWI and studied history of such approach. I can add one more person into the list of predecessors of MWI. Russian occultist P. D. Ouspensky in his book Tertium Organum, SPB, 1911, p.189 (it was translated into English in 1920 and now reprint of this book is available on amazon.com, ISBN 0766104222) when he wrote about so called noumenal world or world of causes he said following (I read this book in Russian, so it is my own draft translation) :
"There are anything measured by years, days and hours. There is no before, now and later. Moments of different epochs partitioned by long time intervals exist contemporaneously and may osculate. At the same time all capacities of the moment even contrary and all their results until infinity must be fulfilled contemporary with given moment."
As it seems to me this citation describes something very close to the Many-Worlds concept...
Yury
Hi Yury,
I thank you very much for this citation. I agree on the face of it that Ouspensky can definitely be connected to the MWI philosophical trend. I have only read "In Search of the Miraculous" by Ouspensky, and I found that work difficult to read and to connect to our present (quantum) physical understanding. Chapters VIII and IX appear to be remotely relevant. Bruno was also difficult, and not because he was from the 15th century. I did not mention Ouspensky in my thesis as the particular work I read (above) did not seem to contain any connection with it, while Bruno's work had many. To this day Bruno's key understanding of wholeness (non-local make-up) in physical entities has been skipped over, even after the quantum nature of our reality became evident earlier in the 20th century.
My work is a blend of Bruno and Everett's approaches, wholeness and multiple realities, taking a heavy dose from the limits of mathematics after the works from Goedel and Chaitin. In my thesis, through both of its phases, I go into several technical aspects of MWI, ending up in the connection of the Mind's physical base with the multiple reality Everett envisioned for the world at large. From the citation you give Ouspensky appears to embrace Everett's general view. I do not share that view, which is still for me classical (in the sense of Classical Mechanics). They both want to ignore (or rather cannot explain) the fact that the world at large can create a single reality, the one we live with everyday. I conclude that this single reality is due to the existence of bounded nuclear monadic relations in atoms reflecting the higher dimensionality of the elemental monadic relations that must reduce our world to 3 dimensions in order to be wholly consistent in its continuously infinite relations. This consistency computation is uncomputable for finite computers as a statistician-physicist, Markov, found out in the 40s (as reported by Penrose for topological series).
Minds being solely the creation of a leptonic evolution would not have to deal with such bounds and thus would be able to maintain the multiple reality envisioned by Everett (and now Ouspensky in more vague terms). Minds would then need to interface the world at large, and its single reality, in order to produce a single reality within itself, what we perceive as a thought process, in order to act on and react to that reality. My second conclusion is that minds come from a physical effect which allowed Life itself to exist, an effect which is right under our eyes, in front of us, through the immediate observation of whole entities we call Living organisms and ourselves, in our laboratories through the study of the basic processes of Life, an effect we can't or refuse to grasp due to our centuries-old classical understanding of our world. This is very similar to electro-magnetic effects, which took centuries for Man to admit they existed and could be measured. Because of our refusal to see the main characters of the quantum as uncomputable, and thus throw out centuries of understanding, it will take a long time for us to go over this hurdle.
Best Regards,
Roger Gouin
Hi!
You wrote:
"I have only read 'In Search of the Miraculous' by Ouspensky, and I found that work difficult to read and to connect to our present (quantum) physical..."
He wrote "In Search of the Miraculous" later when he was deeply affected by Gurdjieff. In my opinion this acsendancy was very negative and Ouspensky in fact dropped his ideas of multiple realities. In contradistinction his (it seems) first book "Tertium Organum" I appreciate as more deep and interesting.
You wrote:
"They both want to ignore (or rather cannot explain) the fact that the world at large can create a single reality, the one we live with everyday."
But their point of view also is very close to mine... I am not sure that such "single reality" exists. Like tangent plane sometimes may be identical to base of tangent bundle (when base is plane) but in general case of curved base it is simply impossible. Yes as a result we'll have non idealistic, non materialistic and even non dualistic philosophy but a kind of super-materialistic solipsism :). By the way for now I can't see any strong alternatives...
Yury
Hi again!
You wrote:
"He [Ouspensky] wrote 'In Search of the Miraculous' later when he was deeply affected by Gurdjieff. In my opinion this acsendancy was very negative and Ouspensky in fact dropped his ideas of multiple realities. In contradistinction his (it seems) first book 'Tertium Organum' I appreciate as more deep and interesting."
Well, for me in "Search" he did identify closer to quantum features through the various descriptions of music and its "resonance" with Life in general. He appears to concentrate on what puts reality together. I like that part very much, but of course he can only describe his feelings about it. Bruno did identify sound as something that could be used as a metaphore for understanding the holistic aspect of our reality. (See below on my use here of the word "our".) Again, for my investigation this aspect is a key thread.
I wrote earlier:
"They both want to ignore (or rather cannot explain)
the fact that the world at large can create a single reality, the one we live
with everyday."
You replied:
"But their point of view also is very close to mine... I
am not sure that such "single reality" exists. Like tangent plane sometimes may
be identical to base of tangent bundle (when base is plane) but in general case
of curved base it is simply impossible. Yes as a result we'll have non
idealistic, non materialistic and even non dualistic philosophy but a kind of
super-materialistic solipsism :). By the way for now I can't see any strong
alternatives..."
Well, I do. (And maybe Ouspensky had bad feelings about his earlier views himself after all...) You are hitting here at the core of my thesis and its Raison d'etre, and I thank you again for pointing this out. I shall try to summarize here where I am at with respect to MWI. Please refer to my work for details.
We do need to find an alternative to MWI, for two reasons. First, now for 20 years (at least) we have attempted to use Everett's interpretation of Quantum Theory in a technical manner (Gell-Mann, Hartle, and many others) to see where it leads, and are constantly falling in the trap of the so-called Collapse of the Wave Function: We simply cannot explain this "collapse", we cannot explain the single reality facing us. The quantum by itself gives MWI of course, but how does the reality we are in gets separated from the others? That is the meaning of this collapse! Bohr, in desperation, most likely, said that there is nothing but classical things in our reality, and the quantum has no existence by itself, as it is only showing up in intermediate calculations! Indeed we can only *postulate* the collapse of the wave function.
Second, we also are hitting a wall when it comes to connecting the quantum with Relativity. This connection must be made, the quantum must yield the theory of space, time and the classical content we observe, and vice-versa. Again we now have spent decades on this (including Einstein, Wheeler, DeWitt, Penrose, etc.) DeWitt BTW was the one who dug up Everett in the early 70s to get to that connection, and only the Wheeler-DeWitt equation came out, in which time did not exist! The mystery was, and is then How does time get to exist?
| Now to How to go beyond MWI:
We have not resolved the matters above because, as I describe in my work, MWI can only be incomplete, coming exclusively from Quantum Theory. My thesis thus attempts to do an extension (or a restriction, if you want) of MWI by incorporating the holistic aspect of Relativity into the Quantum, through identifying the Quantum's own holistic character (which is BTW the subject of present experimental research in Austria and many other places), and identifying from where this common character may originate. My analysis itself hits a wall when it comes to using mathematics, because mathematics was developed with Classical Mechanics in the background (see the early parts of my work on this). I am forced to bring out a priori "elements of reality" (EOR), which are without time and space in their definition, only relations, monadic relations as I characterize them. When you (or Ouspensky) describe "osculating" planes and tangents of different realities I distinguish a basic unstated Classical understanding of the world we see ("our" world as a token of MWI for other possible worlds!), and for the following reasons: The Quantum is made out of undistinguishable and unseparable entities, the EORs I mentioned above. Mathematics must then reject the Axiom of Choice if such entities evolution has to be analyzed. But without this axiom the mathematician is lost. We cannot do mathematics without it. 70 years have passed to assert this proposition. Then the EORs must create the distinguishable, separable entities we see. How? This is where MWI comes in (and comes out): The multiple evolutions need a common reference in order for the various realities to have *consistent* evolutions. This common reference is our space manifold. Then from the possible 3 times 3-D evolution of monadic relations a 1 time 3-D spacetime must be there, constantly being created by the EORs through such monadic relations. This is where the classical notion of space as an arena goes out the window! Space is then constantly created by its content doing a MWI dance in the background maintaining it. Einstein, Leibniz and Bruno back me up in my conclusion: These multiple evolving realities are forced to maintain a common reference. This is the origin of the Wave Function Collapse as well as the origin of Time, and the answer to both problems identified earlier. But then, where can we observe the physical effects of this common reference constant creation to confirm my hypotheses? First it can be seen in the Hubble redshift observed since 1929. Photons spend energy maintaining space, thus the redshift. Constant bandaids are being invented to save the big bang theory (the most recent: "dark energy"). Second, in the way galaxies evolve. They follow neither Newton nor Einstein (the "dark matter" postulated by Sciama and Hawking to save both of their theories in the late 70s is without basis, and astronomers keep on telling us so for 20 years now). Third, the very existence of Life confirms my hypotheses! There you have to go into the details of the main processes that make Life, such as mitosis, and identify what is being glossed over by todays Microbiology, and my work goes into the details of how Life puts itself together. Todays labs have no idea about what is behind embryo development. They know each chemical component in exquisite details to the atom level, but have the foggiest idea how they develop and form a *whole*, what we call a "living entity". (Please read my work on the detailed discussion and experiments there.) Finally, the question of the existence of minds is naturally raised, being one of the most obvious consequences of my hypotheses by envisioning at last a pure MWI entity! As I mentioned in my previous message, only leptonic evolution appears to be involved, allowing large scale multiple realities *coexisting and interacting without a wave function collapse*. Of course in that field very little at the present time can be done in the way of physical experiments to confirm. We first must resolve the basis of Life above in a physical and experimental way. I provide a few items to experiment on there to at least start progressing out of the dark ages we still are in the 21st century! MWI has a key function in my work, but there it is no longer the set of *classical* realities originally envisioned by Everett and Ouspensky. |
I hope this long reply will have shed a few lights on the ultimate motivation of my work.
Best Regards,
Roger Gouin