Speed of light limitation. Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. Even if someone debunks special relativity and finds you could go faster than light, you would be moving so fast relative to cosmic dust particles that it would destroy the ship. So, either way, you cannot practically go faster than the speed of light.

The only way we could have intergalactic travel is a one-way trip that humanity here on earth would be long gone by the time it reached its destination so we could never know if it succeeded or not.

Historically they often actually have the reverse effect.

Sanctions aren’t subtle, they aren’t some sneaky way of hurting a country and so the people blame the government and try to overthrow it. They are about as subtle as bombing a country then blaming the government. Everyone who lives there sees directly the impacts of the sanctions and knows the cause is the foreign power. When a foreign power is laying siege on a country, then it often has the effect of strengthening people’s support for the government. Even the government’s flaws can be overlooked because they can point to the foreign country’s actions to blame.

Indeed, North Korea is probably the most sanctioned country in history yet is also one of the most stable countries on the planet.

I thought it was a bit amusing when Russia seized Crimea and the western world’s brilliant response was to sanction Crimea as well as to shut down the water supply going to Crimea, which Russia responded by building one of the largest bridges in Europe to facilitate trade between Russia and Crimea as well as investing heavily into building out new water infrastructure.

If a foreign country is trying to starve you, and the other country is clearly investing a lot of money into trying to help you… who do you think you are winning the favor of with such a policy?

For some reason the western mind cannot comprehend this. They constantly insist that the western world needs to lay economic siege on all the countries not aligned with it and when someone points out that this is just making people of those countries hate the western world and want nothing to do with them and strengthening the resolve of their own governments, they just deflect by calling you some sort of “apologist” or whatever.

Indeed, during the Cuban Thaw when Obama lifted some sanctions, Obama became rather popular in Cuba, to the point that his approval ratings at times even surpassed that of Fidel, and Cuba started to implement reforms to allow for further economic cooperation with US government and US businesses. They were very happy to become an ally of the US, but then suddenly Democrats and Republicans decided to collectively do a 180 u-turn and abandon all of that and destroy all the good will that have built up.

But the people of Cuba are not going to capitulate because the government is actually popular, as US internal documents constantly admits to, and that popularity will only be furthered by the increased blockade. US is just going to create a North Korean style scenario off the coast of the US.

Basically no one believes in open borders, only some weird fringe anarchists who posts memes like the one above that are largely irrelevant in the real world. It’s always just been a straw man from the right or just weird online fringe anarchists who hold the position.

The reason communists are critical of the US/European hostility towards immigrants is not because we want open borders but because western countries bomb, sanction, coup these countries and cause a refugee crisis then turn around and cry about those immigrants coming to their country.

I am not denying a “standpoint or framing” but in fact am claiming the “standpoint or framing” is fundamental to the natural world. There are no trees in themselves, there are only trees in the context under which those trees are identified. If I point to something and say “look at that tree over there,” I am identifying the tree from the standpoint/framing of a conscious human being looking at the tree with my ape-like brain and ape-like eyes, on planet earth, in the 21st century, at a particular time of day, etc, etc.

There is always a context in which real things are identified, and nothing exists independently of the context of its identification. It is meaningless to speak of a “tree-in-itself,” a tree that exists conceptually independent of any context. That is just a purely metaphysical tree without ontic reality. As Wittgenstein would say, if you want to find the reality of a thing, “don’t think, look!” You won’t find it by arguing over the precise definitions or language or mathematical description of the reality of the metaphysical tree. You will find it by just looking, just experiencing the actual context under which the concept of “tree” is actually being employed to identify something in a real-world situation. That is the real tree.

A real dog is not what I find when I go to read Wikipedia, nor it is some big diagram of its biological processes, or some mathematical description of a dog given by physicists. One must not confuse the map for the territory. A real dog is Rusty who I cried when he past away and buried him in my backyard. These models given by encyclopedias or in science textbooks can be helpful as maps in understanding my real dog, but at the end of the day, they are only maps, the real dog is the one I can hold in my arms, feel his warmth, and rub my hands through his fur.

My dog, as I experienced him was from the context, the standpoint/framing, of myself, and thus depends as much on myself as it does the dog, but there is nothing fundamental about me in this description. Another person could do the same, and they would also describe the dog from their own framing/standpoint, from their own context. We can even talk about objects within contexts not tied to a conscious being at all. I can put a camera on a toy boat and let it float down the river, and later collect it and review its footage. I can apply the same theory of mind I do to other humans to explain what it recorded by considering that what it recorded was the real world from its own context, its own standpoint/framing, as it floated down the river.

Of course, I cannot ask the camera how it felt when it saw what it saw, but that is just because it doesn’t have a limbic system. Such a question would not even make much sense in that context.

What is fundamental to reality precisely is standpoint/framing, i.e. the context, under which we are talking about the reality of a thing. The mistake people make is to conflate the fundamentality of context with subjectivity. Subjectivity and context are not the same thing. If I am sitting on a bench watching a train go by, and you are in the train, we would both experience the train to be traveling at different velocities. Indeed, if we both held a radar gun and tried to measure its velocity, we would physically measure different velocities.

Does that make the velocity of the train subjective? Of course not. Velocity is a real, objective feature of the real world, and has real-world consequences. You, riding the train, are in its path yet are unharmed. If I stepped in the train’s path from the bench, I would die, and nobody would be confused as to how I died because “velocity is just subjective.” We all understand this difference in velocity to be an objective feature of the world. The velocity of the train really is different between observers, it really does depend upon your standpoint and frame of reference. It is not subjective.

Reality is deeply contextual. Only very, very few things remain consistent when you change reference frames, such as acceleration and invariable properties of particles, like intrinsic mass and charge. But most everything else is depend upon perspective, upon context. There are just barely enough things consistent between perspectives to give rise to the feeling of a shared reality.

At least llama.cpp doesn’t seem to do that by default. If it overruns the context window it just blorps.

This happened to me a lot when I tried to run big models with low context windows. It would effectively run out of memory so each new token wouldn’t actually be added to the context so it would just get stuck in an infinite loop repeating the previous token. It is possible that there was a memory issue on Google’s end.

Depends upon what you mean by realism. If you just mean belief in a physical reality independent of a conscious observer, I am not really of the opinion you need MWI to have a philosophically realist perspective.

For some reason, everyone intuitively accepts the relativity of time and space in special relativity as an ontological feature of the world, but when it comes to the relativity of the quantum state, people’s brains explode and they start treating it like it has to do with “consciousness” or “subjectivity” or something and that if you accept it then you’re somehow denying the existence of objective reality. I have seen this kind of mentality throughout the literature and it has never made sense to me.

Even Eugene Wigner did this, when he proposed the “Wigner’s friend” thought experiment, he points out how two different observers can come to describe the same system differently, and then concludes that proves quantum mechanics is deeply connected to “consciousness.” But we have known that two observers can describe the same system differently since Galileo first introduced the concept of relativity back in 1632. There is no reason to take it as having anything to do with consciousness or subjectivity or anything like that.

(You can also treat the wavefunction nomologically as well, and then the nomological behavior you’d expect from particles would be relative, but the ontological-nomological distinction is maybe getting too much into the weeds of philosophy here.)

I am partial to the way the physicist Francois-Igor Pris puts it. Reality exists as independently of the conscious observer, but not independently from context. You have to specify the context in which you are making an ontological claim for it to have physical meaning. This context can be that of the perspective of a conscious observer, but nothing about the observer is intrinsic here, what is intrinsic is the context, and that is just one of many possible contexts an ontological claim can be made. Two observers can describe the same train to be traveling at different velocities, not because they are conscious observers, but because they are describing the same train from different contexts.

The philosopher Jocelyn Benoist and the physicist Francois-Igor Pris have argued that the natural world does have a kind of an inherent observer-observed divide but that these terms are misleading being “subject” tends to imply a human subject and “observer” tends to imply a conscious observer, and that a lot of the confusion is cleared up once you figure out how to describe this divide in a more neutral, non-anthropomorphic way, which they settle on talking about the “reality” and the “context.” The reality of the velocity of the train will be different in different contexts. You don’t have to invoke “observer-dependence” to describe relativity. Hence, you can indeed describe quantum theory as a theory of physical reality independent of the observer.

MWI very specifically commits to the existence of a universal wavefunction. Everett’s original paper is literally titled “The Theory of the Universal Wavefunction.” If you instead only take relative states seriously, that position is much closer to relational quantum mechanics. In fact, Carlo Rovelli explicitly describes RQM as adopting Everett’s relative-state idea while rejecting the notion of a universal quantum state.

MWI claims there exists a universal quantum state, but quantum theory works perfectly well without this assumption if quantum states are taken to be fundamentally relative. Every quantum state is defined in relation to something else, which is made clear by the Wigner’s friend scenario where different observers legitimately assign different states to the same system. If states are fundamentally relative, then a “universal” quantum state makes about as much sense as a “universal velocity” in Galilean relativity.

You could arbitrarily choose a reference frame in Galilean relativity and declare it universal, but this requires an extra postulate, is unnecessary for the theory, and is completely arbitrary. Likewise, you could pick some observer’s perspective and call that the universal wavefunction, but there is no non-arbitrary reason to privilege it. That wavefunction would still be relative to that observer, just with special status assigned by fiat.

Worse, such a perspective could never truly be universal because it could not include itself. To do that you would need another external perspective, leading to infinite regress. You never obtain a quantum state that includes the entire universe. Any state you define is always relative to something within the universe, unless you define it relative to something outside of the universe, but at that point you are talking about God and not science.

The analogy to Galilean relativity actually is too kind. Galilean relativity relies on Euclidean space as a background, allowing an external viewpoint fixed to empty coordinates. Hilbert space is not a background space at all; it is always defined in terms of physical systems, what is known as a constructed space. You can transform perspectives in spacetime, but there is no transformation to a background perspective in Hilbert space because no such background exists. The closest that exists is a statistical transformation to different perspectives within Liouville space, but this only works for objects within the space; you cannot transform to the perspective of the background itself as it is not a background space.

One of the papers I linked also provides a no-go theorem as to why a universal quantum state cannot possibly exist in a way that would be consistent with relative perspectives. There are just so many conceptual and mathematical problems with a universal wavefunction. Even if you somehow resolve them all, your solution will be far more convoluted than just taking the relative states of quantum mechanics at face value. There is no need to “explain measurement” or introduce a many worlds or a universal wavefunction if you just accept the relative nature of the theory at face value and move on, rather than trying to escape it (for some reason).

But this is just one issue. The other elephant in the room is the fifth point that even if you construct a theory that is at least mathematically consistent, it still would contain no observables. MWI is a “theory” which lacks observables entirely.

1. Entanglement is just a mathematical property of the theory. If it is sufficient to explain measurement then there is not anything particularly unique about MWI since you can employ this explanation within anything. You also say I missed your point by repeating exactly what I said.
2. You’re the one giving this bullet point list as if you are debunking all of my points one-by-one. If you agree there is nothing especially “more local” about MWI than any other interpretation then why not just ignore that point and move on?
3. A relative state is not an entangled state. Again you need to read the papers I linked. We are talking about observer-dependence in the sense of how the velocity of a train in Galilean relativity can be said to have a different value simultaneously for two different observers. I drew the direct comparison here in order to explain that in my first comment. This isn’t about special relativity or general relativity, but about “relativity” in a more abstract sense of things which are only meaningfully defined as a relational property between systems. The quantum state observer A assigns to a system can be different from the quantum state observer B assigns to the system (see the Wigner’s friend thought experiment). The quantum state in quantum mechanics is clearly relative in this sense, and to claim there is a universal quantum state requires an additional leap which is never mathematically justified.
4. Please for the love of god just scroll up and read what I actually wrote in that first post and respond to it. Or don’t. You clearly seem to be entirely uninterested in a serious conversation. I assume you have an emotional attachment to MWI without even having read Everett’s papers and getting too defensive that you refuse to engage seriously in anything I say, so I am ending this conversation here. You don’t even know what a universal wavefunction is despite that being the title of Everett’s paper and are trying to lecture me about this subject without even reading a word I have written, claiming that the opinions of the cited academics here are “not even worth taken seriously.” This is just an enormous level of arrogance that isn’t worth engaging with.

1. Not sure what this first point means. To describe decoherence you need something like density matrix notation or Liouville notation which is mathematically much more complicated. For example, a qubit’s state vector grows by 2^N, but if you represent it in Liouville notation then the vector grows by 4^N. It is far more mathematically complicated as a description, but I don’t really see why that matters anyways as it’s not like I reject such notation. Your second point also agrees with me. We know the Born rule is real because we can observe real outcomes on measurement devices, something which MWI denies exists and something you will go on to deny in your point #4
2. This is also true in Copenhagen. Again, if that’s your criterion for locality then Copenhagen is also local.
3. I think you should read Everett’s papers “‘Relative State’ Formulation of Quantum Mechanics” and “The Theory of the Universal Wave Function” to see the difference between wavefunctions defined in a relative sense vs a universal sense. You will encounter this with any paper on the topic. I’m a bit surprised you genuinely have never heard of the concept of the universal wavefunction yet are defending MWI?
4. That quotation does not come one iota close to even having the air of giving the impression of loosely responding to what I wrote. You are not seriously engaging with what I wrote at all. You denying the physical existence of real-world discrete outcomes is exactly what I am criticizing, so just quoting yourself denying it is only confirming my point.

The Many Worlds interpretation is rather unconvincing to me for many reasons.

|1| It claims it is “simpler” just by dropping the Born rule, but it is mathematically impossible to derive the Born rule from the Schrodinger equation alone. You must include some additional assumption to derive it, and so it ends up necessarily having to introduce an additional postulate at some point to derive the Born rule from. Its number of assumptions thus always equal that of any other interpretation but with additional mathematical complexity caused by the derivation.

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17066

|2| It claims to be “local” because there is no nonlocal wavefunction collapse. But the EPR paper already proves it’s mathematically impossible for something to match the predictions of quantum theory and be causally local if there are no hidden variables. This is obscured by the fact that MWI proponents like to claim the Born rule probabilities are a subjective illusion and not physically real, but illusions still have a physical cause that need to be physically explained, and any explanation you give must reproduce Born rule probabilities, and thus must violate causal locality. Some MWI proponents try to get around this by redefining locality in terms of relativistic locality, but even Copenhagen is local in that sense, so you end up with no benefits over Copenhagen if you accept that redefinition.

• https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.2661v1
• https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07794

|3| It relies on belief that there exists an additional mathematical entity Ψ as opposed to just ψ, but there exists no mathematical definition or derivation of this entity. Even Everett agreed that all the little ψ we work with in quantum theory are relative states, but then he proposes that there exists an absolute universal Ψ, but to me this makes about as much sense as claiming there exists a universal velocity in Galilean relativity. There is no way to combine relative velocities to give you a universal velocity, they are just fundamentally relative. Similarly, wavefunctions in quantum mechanics are fundamentally relative. A universal wavefunction does not meaningfully exist.

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.05712
• https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.05533

|4| You describe MWI as kind of a copying of the world into different branches where different observers see different outcomes of the experiment, but that is not what MWI actually claims. MWI claims the Born rule is a subjective illusion and all that exists is the Schrodinger equation, but the Schrodinger equation never branches. If, for example, a photon hits a beam splitter with a 50% chance of passing through and a 50% chance of being reflected and you have a detector on either side, the Schrodinger equation will never evolve into a state that looks anything like it having past through or it having been reflected, nor will it ever evolve into a state that looks anything like it having past through and it having been reflected. The state it evolves into is entirely disconnected from the discrete states we actually observe except through the Born rule. Indeed, even those probabilities I gave you come from the Born rule.

This was something Einstein pointed out in relation to atomic decay, that no matter how long you evolve the Schrodinger equation, it never evolves into a state that looks anything like decay vs non-decay. You never get to a state that looks like either or, both, or neither. You end up with something entirely unrecognizable from what we would actually observe in an experiment, only connected back to the probabilities of decay vs non-decay by the Born rule. If the universe really is just the Schrodinger equation, you simply cannot say that it branches into two “worlds” where in one you see one outcome and in another you see a different outcome, because the Schrodinger equation never gives you that. You would have to claim that the entire world consists of a single evolving infinite-dimensional universal wavefunction that is nothing akin to anything we have ever observed before.

There is a good lecture below by Maudlin on this problem, that MWI presents a theory which has no connection to observable reality because nothing within the theory contains any observables.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us7gbWWPUsA

Rovelli also comments on it:

The gigantic, universal ψ wave that contains all the possible worlds is like Hegel’s dark night in which all cows are black: it does not account, per se, for the phenomenological reality that we actually observe. In order to describe the phenomena that we observe, other mathematical elements are needed besides ψ: the individual variables, like X and P, that we use to describe the world. The Many Worlds interpretation does not explain them clearly. It is not enough to know the ψ wave and Schrödinger’s equation in order to define and use quantum theory: we need to specify an algebra of observables, otherwise we cannot calculate anything and there is no relation with the phenomena of our experience. The role of this algebra of observables, which is extremely clear in other interpretations, is not at all clear in the Many Worlds interpretation.

— Carlo Rovelli, “Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution”

I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. I do not believe “subjectivity” or “consciousness” even exist, so the paper is incoherent to me.

It’s important to keep in mind that the contextual realism of Pris and Benoist rejects terms like “subjectivity” and “consciousness” as it is a direct realist philosophy. We do not take the treat realized before us as a “subjective” tree created by our “consciousness” but the real objective tree as it exists in the real world independently of the conscious observer, but dependent upon the context of its realization. It is important to be clear with the language in order to not slip into idealism.

There is a lot of confusion because physicists changed the meaning of “locality” since the EPR paper to refer to relativistic locality (sending information faster than light) which was not what Einstein was on about. Einstein’s locality is probably most succently summarized as such:

• ∀x(Var(Pr(S’|S))=Var(Pr(S’|S∪x))) where x∉S

In this case, assume a bunch of particles are interacting, and S is the state of a system of interacting particles prior to the interaction, and S’ is the state of the system of interacting particles after the interaction. We then want to look at the variance (statistical spread) of the probability distribution of S’ preconditioned on S, that is to say, a prediction of the state of the system after the interaction given complete knowledge of the state of the system prior to interaction, and then compare that to the variance of another prediction where we precondition both on S and x, where x is the state of something outside of the system of interacting particles.

If a theory is local, then the two should always be equal for any possible value of x. This is because the outcome of a local interaction should only be determined by everything participating in the local interaction, that is to say, S, so preconditioning on complete knowledge of the initial states of everything participating in the interaction should give you sufficient knowledge to predict the outcome of the interaction, that is to say, S’, to best that is physically possible.

If you can include something outside of the interaction, that is to say, x, and it can improve your prediction further, then it must be nonlocal because it contains irreducible dependence upon something not involved in the interaction.

The point about the EPR paper is that if you don’t assume hidden variables, then this definition of locality is broken. Two entangled particles are said to be ontologically in a superposition of states, meaning, having complete knowledge on their states prior to the measurement interaction can only predict them both with a distribution of 50%/50%, but if you precondition on knowledge of an observer’s measurement far away, then you can improve your prediction as to your measurement of your local particle to 100% certainty, which violates this locality condition.

This is still local in the classical case where the only reason you could improve your prediction is because you were ignorant of the initial state of the particle to begin with, so you never preconditioned on the complete initial state of the system to begin with. Hence, adding hidden variables would, supposedly, restore this notion of locality, which we can call causal locality as opposed to relativistic locality.

What Bell’s theorem proves is that adding hidden variables does not restore causal locality. This is because, as he proves, in quantum mechanics, the state of an individual particle in a collection of entangled particles can have dependence upon the configuration of a collection of measurement devices, even though it only ever interacts with an individual measurement device. That means this violation of causal locality is intrinsic to the mathematics of the theory and is not something that just arises due to a lack of hidden variables.

Even worse, as Bell says, adding hidden variables appears to make it “grossly nonlocal,” which by that he meant it violates relativistic locality as well. At least without introducing something like superdeterminism or retrocausality.

Microtubules are structural and exist throughout the whole body, not just in the brain. They are part of the scaffolding of cells. If you broke them up, you’d die, because your cells would fall apart. They also have not much to do with the actual information processing in the brain, as again their role is strictly structural.

The state vector grows by 2^N so 5 qubits is 2^5 = 32 continuous variables. I am not sure where you are getting a factorial from.

The mathematical description of a quantum computer is pretty much identical to that of a probabilistic computer (a kind of classical computer) with the only real difference being that real probabilities, which range from 0 to 1, are replaced with probability amplitudes, which are complex-valued, so they can be negative or even imaginary and only their square-magnitudes need to range from 0 to 1.

In a probabilistic computer, you describe the system with a vector that contains the real probabilities for every possible outcome, so if you have 3 bits, then the vector needs to be of size 2^3=8 since it needs to hold the probabilities for 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111. You then evolve the vector by multiplying Markov matrices by the vector, which represents how a logic gate affects the probabilities. A Markov matrix is nothing more than a probabilistic truth table.

Again, quantum information evolves exactly the same way except that the vector contains complex-valued probability amplitudes as opposed to real probabilities and that the Markov matrices are replaced by unitary matrices, which the only difference is that unitary matrices, again, contain probability amplitudes rather than real probabilities.

This is easiest to see through relational quantum mechanics, which holds that physical reality consists only of relations between systems. Instead of particles existing independently between events, reality is an unfolding sequence of discrete, probabilistic interactions. Interactions always involve more than one system, so the properties always exist relationally in terms of what they are interacting with, and never autonomously on their own.

This was close to Heisenberg’s original matrix mechanics. Schrödinger hated matrix mechanics, saying that he “cannot believe that an electron hops about like a flea,” and introduced wave mechanics instead. Both formalisms made identical predictions, showing that the wavefunction is not fundamental but optional.

Francois-Igor Pris has argued this should be taken further in a Machian direction. Mach rejected any absolute, godlike viewpoint and argued that reality consists only of relative perspectives. Even acceleration, he argued, can be explained relationally. When you accelerate in a car, what you actually observe is the rest of the universe “accelerating” in a particular way that violates conservation of momentum relative to you.

Newton accepted relativity for velocity but not for acceleration, treating the latter as merely apparent and requiring a hidden third-person frame. Mach rejected this move. Pris adopts a similar stance and applies it to quantum mechanics. Like relational quantum mechanics, his view is perspectival, but he drops the idea that interactions are fundamental.

An interaction requires two systems and can only be described from a third-person viewpoint. If no such absolute perspective exists, then interactions cannot be basic. If someone from a third-person perspective observes you looking at a tree, they can explain it by saying the light reflected from the tree interacts with your eyes. From a first-person perspective, you do not observe light interacting with your eyes, you simply observe the tree. The tree is realized or actualized for you on its own, without your eyeball being in the picture.

Pris’ thus argues that instead of invoking an imagined godlike third-party observer, you describe what everything else is doing within the given perspective. He calls the “context.” It’s sort of like, if you look at your computer screen, the “context” is not just the computer screen, but everything else in your perspective, everything around you, as well as the history of those things. The computer screen is realized or actualized in front of you, not in complete isolation, but in a particular real-world context.

Rather than describing physical reality in terms of an unfolding sequence of “interactions,” Pris thus argues you can describe reality in terms of an unfolding sequence of realizations or actualizations or happenings which are predictable based on context. The object you are observing is itself part of the context of your perspective, and these realizations are random, so the context changes randomly. This requires you to have to re-orient yourself when the context changes, kind of like taring a scale or re-centering a coordinate system.

That’s how the collapse of the wavefunction is understood by Pris. The Born rule gives you the probabilities for possible realizations or actualizations of the system within a particular perspective, usually the observer’s perspective, but the observer is not fundamental; Pris rejects the notion of “observer-dependence” for context-dependence). Thus, it tells you the possible contexts you might find yourself in, based on your current context, and then the collapse of the wavefunction is just kind of like a re-centering of your coordinate system after the context spontaneously changes.

The correlated quantum events are not autonomous, but they are determined in the context of their observation. Independently from the means of their identification, there are no events. The reduction of a wave function in the «process of measurement» is not a real physical process, requiring an explanation, but a move to a context of measurement of a concrete value of a physical quantity. Respectively, the measurement is not a physical interaction leading to a change in the state of a system, but the identification of a contextual physical reality. That is, in a sense, in measuring (always in a context), one identifies just the fragment of reality where the (quantum) correlation takes place. As the elements of reality, the correlated events do not arise; they are. Only their identifications do arise.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.10666

People don’t believe him because there is no reason to take his view on this issue seriously. Just because a person is smart in one area doesn’t mean they are a genius in all areas. There is an old essay from the 1800s called “Natural Science and the Spirit World” where the author takes note of a strange phenomena of otherwise brilliant scientists being very nutty in other areas, one example being Alfred Russel Wallace who codiscovered evolution by natural selection but also believed he could communicate with and photograph ghosts from dead people.

People don’t take Penrose’s theory on consciousness seriously because it is not based on any reasonable arguments at all. Penrose’s argument is so bizarre that it is amazing even Penrose takes it seriously. His argument is basically just:

(P1) There are certain problems that the answer cannot be computed. (P2) Humans can believe in an answer anyways. (C1) Therefore, humans can believe things that cannot be computed. (P3) The outcome of quantum experiments is fundamentally random. (C2) Therefore, the outcome of quantum experiments cannot be computed. (C3) Therefore, the human consciousness must be related to quantum mechanics.

He then goes out with this preconception to desperately search for any evidence that the brain is a quantum mechanical system, even though most physicists don’t take this seriously because quantum effects don’t scale up easily for massive objects, warm objects, and for objects not isolated from their environment, which all three of those things apply to the human brain.

In his desperate search to grasp onto anything, he has found very loose evidence that quantum effects might be scaled up a little bit inside of microtubules, and the one paper showing this maybe as a possibility which hasn’t even been repeated has been plastered everywhere by his team as proof they were right, but it ignores the obvious elephant in the room that microtubules are just structural and are found throughout the body and have little to do with information processing the in brain and thus little to do with consciousness.

The argument he presents that motivates the whole thing also just makes no sense. The fact humans can choose to believe in things that cannot be computed doesn’t prove human decisions cannot be computed. It just means humans are capable of believing things that they have no good reason to believe… I mean, that is literally a problem with LLMs, sometimes called “hallucinations,” that they seem to just make things up and say it with confidence sometimes.

The idea that it is impossible to have a computer reach conclusions that cannot be proven is silly, because the algorithm for it to settle on an answer to a question is not one that rigorously validates the truth of the answer but just activates a black box network of neurons and it settles on whatever answer the neural network outputs with the highest confidence level. If you ask an AI if the earth orbits the sun, and it says yes, it is not because it ran some complex proof at that moment and proved with certainty that the earth orbits the sun before it says it. That’s not how artificial intelligence works, so there is no reason to think that is how human intelligence would work either, and so there is no reason to expect that humans couldn’t believe things without absolute proof in the first place.

Many Worlds is a rather bizarre interpretation.

\1) Even the creator of MWI, Hugh Everett, agreed that wavefunction is relative and wrote a paper on that, but then he also claims there is a “universal” wavefunction. That makes about as much sense as saying there is a “universal velocity” in Galilean relativity. There is never a mathematical justification for how there can possibly be a universal wavefunction. It is just asserted that there is. It does not fall out of QM naturally, a theory which only deals with relative wavefunctions.

This paper shows some technical arguments for the impossibility of a universal wavefunction:

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.05712

\2) The EPR paper proves that the statistical predictions of QM violate causal locality (although not relativistic locality), and MWI proponents claim they can get around this by assuming that the statistical predictions, given by the Born rule, are just a subjective illusion. But this makes no sense. A subjective illusion still arises somehow, it still needs a physical explanation, and any attempt to give a physical explanation must necessarily reproduce Born rule probabilities, which as Einstein already proved, violate causal locality. Some try to redefine locality to be in terms of relativistic locality (no-communication), but even Copenhagen is local in that sense!

These papers show how interpretations like MWI simply cannot be compatible with causal locality:

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07794
• https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.2661v1

\3) MWI proponents also forget that nobody on earth has ever seen a wavefunction. The wavefunction is just a mathematical tool used to predict the behavior of particles with definite values. The Born rule wasn’t added for fun. Einstein had lamented at how if you evolve a radioactive atom according to the Schrodinger equation, it never at any point evolves into anything that looks like decay or no-decay. The evolved wavefunction is very different than anything we have actually ever observed, and you only can tie it back to what we observe with the Born rule, which then converts the wavefunction into a probability distribution of decay or no-decay.

If you throw out the Born rule, then you are thus left with a mathematical description of the universe which has no relationship to anything we ever observe or can ever observe. This lecture below explains this problem in more detail:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us7gbWWPUsA

It’s… literally the opposite. The giant AI models with trillions of parameters are not something you can run without spending many thousands of dollars, and quantum computers cost millions. These are definitely not services that are going to fall into the hands of everyday people. At best you get small AI models.