Schrödinger's Cat vs Occam's Razor

Do you have or need a doppelgänger?

I'm proud to announce that this paper has won a Nobel Peace Prize and I have been invited to be on The Oprah Show the morning after I return from Oslo where I'll accept the prestigious award. I'm pretty sure that given the opportunity, Oprah will want to talk about my longtime friendship with baseball's rookie star, Plato. Plato was batting .667 with runners in scoring position for the Hiroshima Toyo Carp until his season ending injury. Plato was struck last month by an errant pitch hurled by the great south-paw Socrates (a two seam fast-ball). Running from the dugout, the Carp's bat boy Aristotle was first to the plate where was heard saying, "oh." It was reported that the redness on Plato's shoulder caused Aristotle to postulate the Aristotelian universals.

When the above narrative is interpreted within the constraints of our own personal experiences, we know this to be the ramblings of a strange mind. Because in the universe where I live, everyone knows that I'll never win a Nobel Peace Prize and Plato could never hit a curveball, thus limiting the probability of him having anything higher than a .285 OBP. But if we are to believe the most popular cosmological models today, the aforementioned reality may be plausible.

Many of the worlds top cosmologists and physicists, theorize the existence of parallel universes or multiverses. The multiverse concept emerged as ripples in the diverse fabric of mathematics that has also brought us string theory. String theory is theoretical physics attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity.

While Science hoped that string theory could be the holy-grail (the theory of 'EVERYTHING') by describing the connection between the incredibly small and enormously huge, but that hope is waning. The concepts behind parallel universes vary in their existence, makeup and location, these "copies" of universes come in four basic flavors.

Level I: (Open multiverse) A generic prediction of cosmic inflation is an infinite ergodic universe, which, being infinite, must contain Hubble volumes realizing all initial conditions.

Level II: (Andrei Linde's bubble theory) In chaotic inflation, other thermalized regions may have different effective physical constants, dimensionality and particle content. (Surprisingly, this level includes Wheeler's oscillating universe theory as well.)

Level III: Each quantum possibility corresponds to a universe. Suppose a die is thrown that contains 6 sides. When the die fall, one could ask why the outcome is the way it is. The answer is: All 6 possible ways the die can fall is actually actualized in 6 different universes. Or may actualize in more than 6 if the initial parameters are also changed. But of those, the initial circumstances for the initial parameters may also spawn even more possibilities. And so forth, and so forth.

Level IV: (The Ultimate ensemble theory of Tegmark) Other mathematical structures give different fundamental equations of physics. This level considers "real" any hypothetical universe based on one of these structures. Since this subsumes all other possible ensembles, it brings closure to the hierarchy of multiverses: there cannot be a Level V. Jürgen Schmidhuber, however, says the "set of mathematical structures" is not even well-defined, and admits only universe representations describable by constructive mathematics, that is, computer programs. He explicitly includes universe representations describable by non-halting programs whose output bits converge after finite time, although the convergence time itself may not be predictable by a halting program, due to Kurt Gödel's limitations. He also explicitly discusses the more restricted ensemble of quickly computable universes.

When Thought Experiments Collide

"Imagine if you will," a Level III multiverse. This bazaar theory would need to consist of infinite parallel universes, to maintain a system where all possibilities are played out. For that reason, I feel the dice analogy seems too simplistic because it creates the notion that there are only six universes representing the six possible outcomes. It was Erwin Schrödinger, a Austrian theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933, but is perhaps best known for the thought experiment Schrödinger's cat.

A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If a Geiger counter detects radiation then the flask is shattered, releasing the poison which kills the cat. Quantum mechanics suggests that after a while the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.

Roughly stated, Schrödinger's cat proposes that quantum superposition is the combination of all the possible states of a system. All quantum combinations possible? Truly, that's infinite complexity squared.

Let's hold Schrödinger's cat infinite complexity up to Occam's Razor

The 14th-century English logician and Franciscan friar, William of Ockham's principle states that the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory. Expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae (law of parsimony) "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem", is roughly translated as "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity".

All things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. In other words, when multiple competing theories are equal in other respects, the principle recommends selecting the theory that introduces the fewest assumptions and postulates the fewest entities. It is in this sense that Occam's razor is usually understood. This is, however, incorrect. Occam's razor is not concerned with the simplicity or complexity of a good explanation as such, it only demands that the explanation be free of elements that have nothing to do with the phenomenon (and the explanation). Also known as the "the Rube Goldberg antithesis".

Originally a tenet of the reductionist philosophy of nominalism, it is more often taken today as an heuristic maxim (rule of thumb) that advises economy, parsimony, or simplicity, often or especially in scientific theories. Here the same caveat applies to confounding topicality with mere simplicity. (A superficially simple phenomenon may have a complex mechanism behind it. A simple explanation would be simplistic if it failed to capture all the essential and relevant parts.)

Perhaps the conflict between infinite complexity and a simplistic explanation will never be reconciled. While Schrödinger's cat and Occam's Razor are each the product of conjecture, they both break down when subjected to substantiated fact. When the box is opened, the quantum superposition collapses and is replaced by fact. This is also true with Occam's Razor. When a specific phenomenon is pinned-down, the possible/probable explanations give way to procedure. Faith collapses when presented with fact.

Now, I'm not here to argue if the multiverses do or do not exist, what interests me is how these prosaic type parallel universes would alter what we know as the "free will paradigm." This thinking started when Scientific American included a special report titled "Parallel Universes" with their monthly magazine. The report is very well written and understandable. On page 11 the report contained a sentence that finally said what I have been contemplating since first reading about parallel universes. The sentence is as follows, "If there are indeed identical copies of you, the traditional notion of determinism evaporates." I wish the writer Max Tegmark would have expanded on the statement. I'm not sure if he does or does not believe in determinism.

Determinism is a philosophical premise that every event, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences, and is sometimes illustrated by the thought experiment of Laplace's demon.

Quotation from the introduction to the Essai:

"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

Imagine an entity that knows all facts about the past and the present, and knows all natural laws that govern the universe. Such an entity might, under certain circumstances, be able to use this knowledge to foresee the future, down to the smallest detail.

John Polkinghorne argues strongly as a physicist that nature is cloud-like rather than clock-like and points out that, apart from any other problems, uncertainty about the exact position of an electron on the other side of the universe would be sufficient to invalidate a calculation about the position of an O2 molecule in air after 50 collisions with its neighbours (i.e. in about 0.1 ns), even if they were solely influenced by Newton's laws.

There are quite a few determinism varieties such as Theological determinism. Theological determinism is the thesis that there is a God who determines all that humans will do, either by knowing their actions in advance, via some form of omniscience or by decreeing their actions in advance. The problem of free will, in this context, is the problem of how our actions can be free, if there is a being who has determined them for us ahead of time.

Since the early twentieth century when astronomer Edwin Hubble first hypothesized that redshift shows the universe is expanding, prevailing scientific opinion has been that the current state of the universe is the result of a process described by the Big Bang. Many theists and deists claim that it therefore has a finite age, pointing out that something cannot come from nothing. The big bang does not describe from where the compressed universe came; instead it leaves the question open.

Personally, I believe in the cause-and-effect, where God created the universe from nothing. Adam and Eve were given choice, and that my choices are exclusive to the universe where we all reside. The theological and philosophical ramifications of having doppelgängers would change everything that I value as good. If there was a universe where I was not dyslexic, ADD, OCD, did not suffer from chronic spinal cord pain, and I had no loving God, I would NEVER want to be there if I had to forsake my God to rid myself of my problems. I know that God has a plan for me, and He has faith that I will submit to fulfilling His plan.

Could finding Level III parallel universes to be true, mean that there are places where Richard Dawkins believes in God and has accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior?

God bless,
Dennis