More Ranting Regarding the Many-Worlds Interpretation

(The following was posted @ the Quantum Activist forum yesterday)

Back to the Many-Worlds fiasco. There are three things (at least) that are at work here, and the way I see it, the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is a symptom of a deeper, underlying illness, and it’s the materialist malaise. And materialism itself is a symptom of something even deeper, but I won’t get into that here.

So, MWI. First thing: At the heart of it is the fundamental delusion (or even a fundamentalism of sorts), the hackneyed, antiquated thinking that Matter is the ground of being (Amit Goswami: ”upward causation”), that science and conscious Subject don’t mix – – – no, shouldn’t mix. So deep is the bias that when the double-slit measurement puzzle occurs, its attribution is sought in interference waves that are ”indirectly observed,” and a mathematical model is literally invented to accommodate the existence of parallel-universe interfering waves; as Ri Stewart noted, the (orthonormal) trajectories of probability waves keep going and going ad infinitum, hence, the MWI needs to ”keep adding dimensions” to make it work. Talk about a mind-boggling inflation of ontology; what happens to entropy in a scheme like that? But never mind all that, so to speak. The lengths people go to toss wave-function collapse out the quantum window!

Second thing: (Neo-)Platonism in my opinion is, though seemingly dualistic, a kind of materialism. Form is given unchanging status, it never evolves nor devolves, it is eternal, and hence Form (not consciousness) is the foundation of being. Granted, Agathon was posited by Plato as the ground of Forms, but is it conscious (vis-a-vis Plato)? But I want to mention the platonic ”theology” of Numbers, the Pythagorean paradigm of the mystical eternality of Numbers-as-such and geometric forms. Hence, another materialistic, mechanistic bias ramifies, viz., that if an elegant (or even clunky) mathematical argument can be concocted, then it must correspond to an aspect of absolute reality. Hence the MWIs, for starters.

Third and not least: The existential dimension: Isn’t our current dimension, our current existence here and now what truly matters (As A. Goswami says (Ri Stewart))? The materialist bias externalizes, it’s a constant move away from the Subject, away from consciousness, away from introspection, internalization, and involution. Things happen, in other words, and that’s that, end of story. Infinite, gajillion universes will populate before a wave function would ever collapse, before anything as ”occult” as a measuring consciousness would ever be admitted into the domain of scientific discourse.