Hi, Phil,

Can I say that I always appreciate your carefully thought out posts!

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.
>

Did you mean Johnston?  I don't think Lawrence Johnston (who posted it) said
it overthrows ID claims.  I think perhaps you meant Koonin (the author of
the paper).

However, I'd question that it overthrows the claims of the ID movement, or
at least if it does then not in the way Koonin intended.  As I see it the
only sense in which the paper overthrows ID is by proposing an argument that
is equally specious to the ID claim and stating that this (false) argument
is just as reasonable as ID.  All it does is to substitute one
miracle-provider (God) with another miracle-provider (the multiverse), and
that in appealing to another miracle provider, he has given up on science.

This can only be said to challenge the ID argument in that you could say
that one silly argument is no worse than another one.  However, it's my
impression that Koonin wants his readers to take his argument seriously.  I
can't do that, for I feel that the only scientific way forward is to search
for an alternative model for the origin of life that doesn't come out with
such a low probability.  However, even here, there are questions to be asked
about whether one's commitment to one or the other is not just a
metaphysical position rather than a genuinely scientific one.  Confronted
with this seemingly miraculous event ( P < 10^(-1000) ) there are three
alternatives one could espouse:

(a)   God did it.     (Untestable)
(b)   Multiverse did it.  (Testability is debatable, but certainly not now)
(c)   Some bit of science we haven't discovered yet did it.  (Clearly
untestable because we don't even know what it is).


Now it seems to me that the only thing science can really offer is to go for
(c) and try to come up with a better theory.  But if one is COMMITTED to (c)
then that is a clear philosophical preference because you don't like
appealing to miracles.

It seems to me that although (c) is the only proper way for a scientist to
proceed, that commitment to (c), to the exclusion of (a) and (b) is
dangerous ground.

As an analogous example, there is a couple I know, of whom the wife suffers
from a condition called "Electrical Sensitivity".  She claims that
electromagnetic fields cause allergy-type symptoms - these are over a very
wide range of frequencies, from mains electricity, (50Hz) which she switches
off at night, to mobile phone emissions (900MHz) (she insists you switch off
your mobile phone if you go anywhere near her).  To me as a physicist this
makes absolutely no sense, that someone can be affected in the same way by
such widely different frequencies.  The overwhelming majority of medical
opinion is that the condition is psychosomatic.  However, my friends are
"true believers" in the condition (the husband started the Wikipedia entry
on it), and they will argue that in the future someone is bound to find a
physical connection - it's just a bit of physics that we don't know.  They
will not accept that the only way to proceed scientifically is to stick to
the evidence we have at the moment (and at the moment there is no evidence
from provocation studies that he effect is physical, and there is some
evidence that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can help sufferers).  Sufferers
from electrosensitivity get very annoyed when it is suggested that they take
a course of CBT because they would argue that appeal to "psychosomatic
causes" is a convenient way of explaining away something you haven't been
able to explain away in other ways.  If you are too committed to one
explanation, then God-of-the-Gaps,  MWI-of-the-gaps, and
"Psychosomatic-of-the-gaps" seem to be equivalent to me.

So to go back to my (a), (b) or (c) choice, I don't think one can rule out
any of them, and to do so (e.g. to rule out (a) ) is a clear statement of
belief ( atheists nowadays claim that atheism isn't a belief, it's an
absence of belief).






Functionally this fills the same role as God with the exception that it is
> not a Being
>

I think this sentence of yours sums up what I was trying to say very
succinctly. Though perhaps we should try praying to the multiverse and
seeing what happens!



>
> 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.
>


I think again we're in agreement.  Because the MWI can explain ANYTHING, it
actually explains NOTHING.  I believe I've heard Richard Dawkins use this
exact argument when talking about Intelligent Design.


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.
>


I think one of the weakest points of the Quantum Suicide thought experiment
is the assumption that "your" consciousness continues in the second
universe, (gun doesn't fire) and does in the first universe.  And the decay
of the atom and the event of the physicists death are separate events and
one doesn't follow from the other with probability 1.  He might
"miraculously" survive by all sorts of events of increasingly unlikeliness
:  gun fails to go off because of a wiring fault;  gun goes off but an
earthquake causes it to miss;  bullet passes instantaneously through the
physicist's head by quantum mechanical tunnelling.  This last was set as an
exercise in my undergrad QM classes - the probability of a football
tunnelling through a brick wall - it comes to something like 10^(-10^34) -
note the double exponent.  Not impossible & hence will happen in one of the
Many Universes.

But my point in introducing the devoutly religious wife into the equation is
that in the absence of any other evidence of the multiverse (and this is
proposed by cosmologists like Max Tegmark as a testability scenario, so I
guess there isn't any other evidence), is that there is now absolutely no
way to distinguish between (a) God did the miracle and (b) Multiverse
"selected" the miracle.  Next time the physicist had better make sure that
no one is going to pray for him, or ever has prayed for him - and that would
seem impossible, & hence there is no controlled environment - the
possibility that God intervenes can't be ruled out.


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.
>

Not sure if I agree here.  If there are 1000 reps then in 0.1% of the
universes she will measure a live husband if MWI is true.  But if Copenhagen
is true, then the chance of measuring a live husband is surely 2^(-1000).



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.
>

I think my take would be it would be impossible to distinguish between MWI
and God.

I think there may be a strong philosophical commitment among atheists to
MWI.  I've an acquaintance who works in the same field as me (neural
computation), though he is now a Prof. at Oxford.  It was noticeable to me
that he is both a strong atheist, and a strong believer in the MWI.  He once
stated that his long-term research goal was "to download my brain into a
computer so I don't have to die" (also a strong adherent to the "strong AI"
hypothesis as well).  I then asked him what would  happen if someone deleted
the file from the hard drive.  At what point would he be considered to have
"died"?  His response was that backups could be made of the data.  My next
question was what happened if someone ran his brain on two different
computers.  Which consciousness would be the "real" one?  He had to admit
that there were "philosophical problems" with his proposal.  The same kind
of philosophical problems beset the Quantum Suicide experiment & it is
surprising that atheists seem to clutch so desperately to such flimsy ideas.

Another major problem with Quantum Suicide is that it leads logically to the
conclusion that you never experience death.  (Quantum Immortality).  The
same argument applies, that a quantum event that leads to your death either
happens or doesn't happens, so you always survive in one universe.  This
seems to violate the very premise of the original experiment that your
consciousness is terminated when the gun goes off, so it's
self-contradictory.

Iain