Are there really multiple copies of you and me out there in the multiverse?

Last week, in my new paper in Springer journal,  https://rdcu.be/bxnjY, I explained why I am 50-50 undecided in the end whether to believe in "quantum realism,"as in the mainstream theory of Everett, Wheeler and Deutsch. That theory is the foundation of modern digital quantum computing, which harnesses the power of "Schrodinger cats" to work together "across universes."

But does that really apply to US?

I have done some rethinking of that question this week. Here is what I posted for the benefit of normal "experts" this week, followed by a link to a little bit of real stuff:


All of us need to re-examine and question our own beliefs from time to time. This morning, I have been asking myself (and my wife) what do I REALLY believe about macroscopic Schrodinger cats, and how should I update 

my beliefs? How certain am I that there are multiple copies of myself, with very different memories?

What I said to her initially this morning was: yes, I only assign 1/3 probability to each of Einsteinian realism, Fock space realism and ultraweirdism. (By the way, my new paper in Activitas -- thanks, Stan! -- states that clearly),

BUT I assign about 90% to the idea that WE -- we mundane human body/brain creatures -- are macroscopic Schrodinger cats. Whether you believe in Einstein, QM of ultraweirdism, in all three cases we need to face up to the experiments supporting quantum superposition, including the very important experiment led by Pan Jianwei proving that quantum superposition works at the distance between China and Austria. 

But how could we reconcile macroscopic Schrodinger cats with Einsteinian realism? If there inhabit only ONE 3+1-D universe, how could there be more than one of us? How sure are we of what is going on? What do we really know, from the viewpoint of Einstein realism (or lightly modified Einstein realism)?

 Before 2014, I held to what I called "the right-wing reactionary position on macroscopic Schrodinger cats" (as I discussed this with my wife this morning). (She has two PhDs to my one, so this is not like talking to the wall.) 

The reactionary position is that there can only be ONE of each of us, because there is only one 3+1-D reality, and that quantum superposition is basically a statistical illusion which only works at small scales. 

The Schrodinger equation which predicts branching must somehow break down, must actually be an approximation which breaks down, at a large enough scale. "the great mystery," they declare, "is what is the scale at which the Schrodinger equation breaks down, the dividing line between the quantum world and the classical world which we actually live in?" I have heard from poor vedantists who just parroted that question, as if the mainstream was asking it. But certainly, after experiments like those of Pan Jianwei, the mainstream view is that the Schrodinger equation which gives way to quantum superposition does NOT break down at large distances, and that we have no reason to believe that it ever breaks down. This morning, I pulled out my little tablet computer in the bedroom, went to scholar.google.com, and showed her the classic papers by Anthony Leggett on this subject.

Still, even within this mainstream (which I have 90% drifted into myself), there are left, right and middle sides of the stream. On the right, people say "This could not possibly ever apply to humans like me.  

It's all about statistics. Since I am complex, and decoherence is so pervasive, the probability distribution for versions of me must be very narrow. I am me, just me, just one me, it cannot be otherwise." Smolin's VERY important new book (which Jack ought to be quoiting more than he quotes Sutherland and Price, since Smolin is broader and closer in many ways to Jack in his beliefs) is actually more towards the middle of the stream, even though he supports Einstein more than I do. The middle of the stream CONSIDERS that the right stream might be right, but are not so sure. At one point, Smolin effectively asks: "OK, there might be more than one of me, but if we live in separate universes/streams, how could it be EFFECTIVELY true for me in this universe/stream? For all practical purposes..." But on the left part of this stream are David Deutsch and me, among others. Deutsch said "it IS important because we can integrate across streams and produce a new kind of technology, which I call the quantum universal computer." (It's really sad how the Oprah and fake news sets want to give credit to THEIR man, and thereby lose the whole foundation of the whole thing!) And I have drifted into the belief that I am a macroscopic Schrodinger cat in a real sense (war cry "Meow!"), for several reasons.

But what are the reasons, how sure am I, and how to reconcile with Einsteinian realism?

What happened to me in 2014 was just as jarring as the precognition experience of 1967 was, but this was not a psi kind of thing. As I worked out the equations for the CMRFp model of a photon going through polarized sunglasses  (See  Werbos, P.J.: Stochastic path model of polaroid polarizer for Bell’s Theorem and triphoton experiments. Int. J. Bifurc. Chaos 25(3), 1550046 (2015)), it struck me how the photon has THREE choices at each moment, according to my version of time-symmetric physics: (1) to conform to what the sunglasses "want," and thus be absorbed and never heard of again; (2) to become defiant, to jump to an orientation exactly perpendicular to what the sunglasses want, and thus be ejected and emitted with no further ado; or (3) to "stick out its tongue" (by changing its score on Z, a kind of destiny variable) and declare it doesn't want to be in this situation in the first place, in a way which changes the past by making it less likely that this scenario will actually become real.

At that time, I was in a weird and sudden polarizing situation in the US government, something as bad as Bannon's (and Jack's) worst nightmare. I found myself thinking: "Why do I have only the first two options? Am **I** less powerful than a lonely photon?" And then it hit me: maybe I AM as powerful as a photon! And just as much a CONFIGURATION within a larger cosmos. After all, the Schrodinger equation, whether statistical or not, still works at the macroscopic level, and our consciousness is all a matter of configuration.

How could one reconcile that with Einsteinian realism? First, it is a stretch. Immediately I reduced my subjective probability of Einstein realism from 90% to 1/3. But Fock space realism and ultraweirdism are also great stretches, and also require a bit of adjusting from the older versions. 

My immediate response was to say: "we" are analogous, in a way, to the conscious creatures which emerge in a computer-simulated world. (That's an important old idea, repeated in the movie the Matrix, in science fiction by Baxter, and even some musings by Elon Musk they say. And a great story in the anthology Far Futures.)  We are not the one true reality. reality exists, but we are not it. We are like the shadows in Plato's cave.

A great Eureka moment.

===========

But: is it true? More precisely, does it fit the math of Lagrange-Euler equations (the normal mainstream version of Einsteinian realism), or should we change the model a little? And again, are we really 90% sure of the left-stream version of macroscopic Schrodinger cats? 

"What is the 'ontology'?" Smolin uses the word "ontology" to refer to something meaningful to physicists: the specification of "beables" as in specifying the mathematical space and functions defined over that space which the Lagrange-Ruler equations are assumed to operate over. Philosophers seem to refer to something more "woo-woo" in nature, as in "which of these is really real?" Well, now, if "we" are just possible configurations of those "beable" fields, how real are WE? If we are not configurations of the ACTUAL final solution of the Lagrange-Euler equations, but of possibilities, are we assuming that ALL such possibilities are "real" to the same extent that we are? Not so simple.

For a mathematician (or a devotee of fuzzy logic ala Lotfi Zadeh), there is an obvious way to try to compromise here. We could imagine (an ontological theory??) the idea that "all these possible configurations of the beable fields across space-time are real, but to VARYING degrees or VARYING probability."

In fact, that is exactly what my 2015 paper (in a journal for applied mathematics) discusses in quantitative terms:

Werbos, P.J.: Stochastic path model of polaroid polarizer for Bell’s Theorem and triphoton experiments. Int. J. Bifurc. Chaos 25(3), 1550046 (2015)) 

But here is a zinger:

That ends up being more like the older Feynmann and the older Schwinger than like Einstein. All those discussions of quantum theory by philosophers like Jack tend to look UP to something like canonical quantum field theory, like what gave those guys the Nobel prize in the 1950s. But, like Wittgenstein or E.O. Wilson, those guys did not just ossify after their initial work. They proposed reformulating quantum field theory to be a thoery over 3+1-D space, like Einstein, but STOCHASTIC in a way. 

And so,if we say that we here are "REAL"but are macroscopic Schrodinger cats, that leads to a stochastic reformulation of the Einstein viewpoint which in many ways is more quantum than classical. the main difference in my version is that it is based on PROBABILITIES rather than PROBABILITY AMPLITUDES, which is frankly more coherent mathematically. And all of these are observer-free models. (I am tempted to mention other models of similar flavor, but this is  already far enough away from the philosopher's beat.) Is this still Einsteinian realism, even with "dice included"?  It's not your grandmother's Fock space. 

===========

But: how sure are we? And where are those dice anyway?

To allow as much as a 30% probability that true Einsteinian realism (without dice) could be true, logically I should not be 90% sure that we are really macroscopic Schrodinger cats. So am I really 90% sure? What is it based on?

In part, it is based on new designs which give a path to reduce decoherence and CREATE macroscopic Schrodinger cats. My main reason for not saying more is that I find more and more reason to be less trusting. 

But one simplified version.  Suppose we go ahead and implement a backwards time telegraph. Would it create branches and work naturally, or would it create a phenomenal "weirdness generator"? Until we do the experiment, we do not know.

Best of luck,   Paul 

P.S. Looking at the present state of this planet, I could not justify ruling out the"weirdness generator" hypothesis. 

http://vixra.org/abs/1904.0533

Consciousness, intelligent systems and Brexit

Last week (as appended far below) , I had some intense discussions with folks in UK and Ireland about Brexit, which is at a critical point of choice right now. here is what I sent them this morning, after some further meditation: 

Before, I noted that there is a fundamental flaw in the decision systems which led to the present debacle, and failed to give a better, creative understanding of the options and of what the public really wants.

This is really serious and fundamental. In Neural networks 2009  (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0893608009000501), I noted that the "mass action" learning rules of the human neocortex appear to be based on TWO measures of the quality of output of the cortex: (1) accuracy of the PREDICTIONS of the thalamo-cortico-thalamic System (TCT); and (2) value of the OPTIONS for decision and action which the cortex sends to the basal ganglia, a part of the brain whose higher-level importance has come to light in recent decades. The information system which feeds into Parliament clearly has not been optimizing (2). That is due in part to how the option creators did not have input form a cause-and-effect (predictive) understanding of what the public wants; The INTEGRATION of (1) and (2) is what makes mammals different from their ancestors; the folding together of two hree-level coftices into one six-layer cortex is the essence of the evolution of the mammal brain. Parliament has not yet reached that level.

Before I speculated that worries about immigration are one of the REAL concerns of the public; brexit was supported only as a means to that end, and a better way to serve that end could have been found (a better set of options, certainly to include more dialogue with Italy among others to better address this common problem). 

.

All of that still stands,  but I feel embarrassed that I failed to mentioned another hugely important  fundamental aspect here. Another reason for the public to vote for brexit is a growing MISTRUST of trade agreements all over the world. Whatever else you can say about Elizabeth Warren, she certainly has articulated that powerful current of public feeling; see the link posted at https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2278196938877377 . The public is not REALLY arguing against economists who say that trade is essential to the level of prosperity in our world. Rather, they feel that the actual AGREEMENTS which implement grade are rigged in a way which hurts people. that's how Trump got elected -- though I wish people had listed more to my Senator, Time Kaine of Virginia, who got a level closer to the truth in HIS speeches for the Vice President debates. There really is a deep problem of trust which is frankly well-justified. The challenge is to modify all trade agreements so that they not ONLY achieve the kind of Pareto optimality which economists study but ALSO meet some kind of standard of transparent fairness -- which also requires some kind of agreement or conscious mutual acquiescence to some concept of fairness, INCLUDING the kind of assurance Kaine talked about, that the theoretical agreements will not be subverted by faulty, biased or corrupt implementation machineries. Absent trust, exit. 

Many in Virginia feel it is a shame that Kaine himself does not seem to be a plausible candidate for 2020! 

But looking ahead: What if, in the future, trade agreements are enforced by IT systems, and if the dialogues which give input to Parliament are also implemented on IT? What if we might inject some intelligence, and even some level of consciousness and soul into such IT systems or to the human/computer aggregate system in which the IT provides the backbone? How do we ensure the fairness of such systems? How we devise transparent fundamental rules to be implemented in the IT backbones?

In discussing this informally with my wife this morning, I explained the core issues as follows. To survive, an organism needs BOTH a brain AND an immune system (and other stuff of course). The same goes for our entire species, and even our entire noosphere. The immune system include some relatively less intelligent rules across the board. In a way, the Ten Commandments could be seen as a Gen 1 attempt to create rules/social-contract to m ake more intelligence and growth possible, on a firm foundation. I view the Constitutoin of the US as kind of Gen 2 of the Ten Commandments (yes, more sacred to me than the Gen 1 version), a little longer, very carefully designed with a certain amount of authentic spiritual input (admittedly, some in an Irish bar in Philadelphia for which my family kept those bar bills, but some in Scottish rite lodges and so on). But now, in the age of IT, we need to move on to some kind of Gen 3, specifically in IT. It is not a simple task, and it worries me that today's IT and trading systems may be eroded away by termites, like an old wooden building,  before we have a more robust steel structure to replace it, a structure designed so that life and soul may thrive inside. 

This is no small matter. But even Brexit is not a small matter. If only the EU had had the kind of dialogue it needs to address these vital concerns more effectively, making brexit itself unnecessary and moot! Too many termites at work already, at risk of turning all of Europe into what termites leave behind. 

(By the way, I do have a couple of nice photos of termite nests in the seven albums of images and explanation which I put onto Facebook this past week. That post on the nature of afterlife was just one of seven, based on the Caribbean. Perhaps someday I will also post photos from Brazil, including the Amazon,  but the issues there were too complex for this kind of list or Facebook this month.)

================================================

i do hope that this would warm the heart of my old PhD thesis advisor, Karl Deutsch of Harvard, author of books which helped CREATE the EU, but also author of the Nerves of Government, which argued that neural network ways of thinking should be applied to understand how states and other organizations could actually work. 

The facebook posts I mentioned, which get very deep into actionable esoterica, are at:

Devil's island:

https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2347533225277081  

Barbados:

https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2347651638598573 

Curacao:

 https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2351826874847716

Aruba:

https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2352015344828869 

Bequia:

 https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2349266555103748

OOps re swimming with sharks (related to a previous HAL cruise):

https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2353317914698612 

And reflections on our fate which grew in my mind during the cruise:

 https://www.facebook.com/paul.werbos/posts/2353621754668228

===================

Just FYI: here was my earlier post to my friends on this subject:

A few months back, many professional psychiatrists were excited to see how many people, watching what unfolds on CNN these days, validated the importance of their profession in understanding what is really going on in the world. Are policies being warped in damaging ways by narcissistic and psychopathic personalities, fitting blatant textbook models of obsession with their organs or overuse of psychological mechanisms like denial (as described in the beautiful important work by Valliant in his longitudinal study of Harvard graduates). Even as I type this, they tell me that Rand Paul wants to start an investigation of Obama... and I react by saying there is a lot to investigate, not by lawyers, but by... other approaches. 

But now: Brexit offers us a truly rich case history today, this past week, combining four elements great for researcher: (1) the database of the past week is public enough and structured enough that comparative analysis is possible; (2)  the bottom line that things are going grossly dysfunctional seems relatively clear as such things go; (3) the dysfunction does involve a variety of important and general issues in systems theory, management, free will, rationality and so on; and (4) if folks don't find a way to get out of the box, fast, the damage could be very great indeed. Unlike some of the more intractable case examples I see in the US and China, the dysfunction seems mainly a matter of well-educated, well-meaning and relatively sane people somehow not being able to make things work. But psychiatry does also have something to contribute, to any realistic integrated holistic understanding.

The indicative votes held yesterday  really imptessed me emotionally, a bit like a kind of Greek tragedy without the clarity of a Sophocles play (but certainly with a few fatal flaws in play). The leadership of Commons really tried hard to work at a systems level, not dictating the outcome (as tyrants try to do), hoping that a workable way forward would emerge. But people could not agree. In discussions of a second referendum, social psychologists were equally baffled, seeing no way to phrase the questions in a way which would lead to clarity; that is a major part of why the idea of a second referendum did not win an indicative vote, even though it came closest of anything.

My naive knee-jerk reaction was "Haven't any of these folks read Ken Arrow, Thomas Jefferson, Locke or Schelling, let alone Raiffa or Von Neumann? Isn't this a case where stronger systems theory and understanding of intelligent systems might have shown them a way to escape from the swamp?"

More precisely.. Thomas Jefferson wrote many things. One was something called "the Jefferson Manual," a book of parliamentary procedures intended to allow an institution like Congress or Parliament to actually work. It was a foundation stone of a major serious intellectual effort to address the kind of value or utility aggregation challenge discussed at lenth by Ken Arrow (Arrow voting paradoxes) in the real world. When people do not agree, how can we build a system which nonetheless avoids the worst, and which improves the chances of attaining some kind of Pareto optimal outcome (an issue which Von Neumann and Raiffa explained far more clearly than older writers who neglected the basic fact of human uncertainty and limited knowledge, a fact which is central to neural network mathematics and statistics). 

Knee-jerk reaction...

I remembered three-way elections in scientific societies, where no one candidate or program could get a majority. There is a reasonable, well-known practical way forward, "n choice" voting. The cleanest version is to ask each identify his or her first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on if there are more choices.  Then the lowest choices are removed and votes reallocated from first choice and so on. It may not be metaphysically or ontologically perfect, but its simplicity is already hugely important, as Schelling's book Strategy of Conflict, should allow people to understand. So I wondered: don't the parliamentarians in the House of Commons know about that? Don't they know how to structure votes designed to get SOMETHING passed? US Congressional leaders in years past have not done exactly that, but they have known at times how to structure procedural motions which then had a similar effect. (But again there are other problems at work leading to dysfunction in the area where I live.) 

But beyond the knee-jerk reaction:

Systems level thinking, looking for workable procedures, trying to fashion institutions and rules of the road which themselves are like intelligent systems, is not a complete silver bullet... or at least, not when it focuses on higher level decision systems without getting "down and dirty" to analyze the systems which give input to the decision systems, and which engage with concrete reality testing. Brexit is a great illustration of that complexity as well. In fact, one could get very down and very dirty in any honest realistic discussion of brexit politics, but for now, just a couple of aspects... after a general comment at the systems level.

People are often confused by the issue of "following the right procedure" versus "doing what is right concretely." This challenge is very similar to the challenge of putting together a higher-level econometric model which does not specific the narrow technical facts on the ground, but is able to capture a wide variety of possibilities. I described in detail how to do that, based on successful first hand experience, in  Werbos, Paul J. "Econometric techniques: Theory versus practice." Energy 15.3-4 (1990): 213-236./EIAeconometrics.pdf. In a way, the job of the parliamentarian is to concoct a procedural bill very much in the way I constructed econometric models, not getting so down and dirty, but AFTER a very intensive effort to scope out the range of possibilities for concrete facts at the down and dirty level. ("The weeds.") This requires parallel efforts to scope out what those folks call "the weeds." This reminds me of how the power of the mammal brain over its immediate ancestors is the circuitry to map out the SPACE OF POSSIBILITIES.

The issue of how to design a second referendum is a very serious intellectual issue, a key part of mapping out the space of possibilities more completely and intelligently.  It was just as much a source of dysfunction here as parliamentary procedures themselves. The approach used by normal professional pollsters suggested a lot of sheer incoherence,  craziness and randomness out there in the public. But perhaps a professional psychiatrist or a decision analyst like Riaffa could have helped in providing a richer mechanism for getting input from the public, through questions intended to explore a variety of choices and uncover what really matters to people in the end.

Here I have my own speculation, my own thought about ONE of the possibilities which should be considered in the map. Could it be that the mainstream people in the middle did not want out of Europe so much as they wanted out of Merkel's glowing but risky policies on immigration? Did they really want Mexit, exit from merkel's immigration policies? Would they have been happy to stay in the EU if changes in policies for immigration from outside the EU (and policies for determining citizenship) were tightened up, in a wide variety of possible ways? Could a deep understanding of the concerns of the British public show some points of commonality with voters in OTHER EU nations, which might allow a balance of forces far better for UK and EU than the crazy trainwreck now in progress? 

But a proper second referendum would include this kind of issue as just ONE of the issues to be probed. And perhaps it could be done as a step towards creating a more real time online dialogue, which Macron has advocated for France but does not know how to create from a technical point of view. In the end, god help us, sustainability might depend on making room for even deeper "weeds," such an unbreakable operating systems to support fair systems of constructive online dialogue, a serious issue in intelligent systems design, way beyond what facebook now even imagines doing. 

Best of luck. We need it, here and now and in the long-term both.