don't we already know that the entire state of the universe is used to calculate the behavior of particles? for example, doesn't every body produce a gravitational field which acts, with some magntitude of force, at any distance, such that in order to calculate the trajectory of a particle to the nth decimal place, you would need to know about every other body in the universe?
The second version is much worse than the first. If you need to know the universe out a certain distance to calculate to the Nth place and a further distance to calculate to N+1-st place, that's not too bad. But if you need everything to calculate anything, that's terrible. I believe that the my version is true for GR (and some versions of quantum gravity), but the bad version is true for all other theories. People get around it by assumptions like constant density far away.
But the real way that they get away from it is by not thinking in terms of action at a distance from all the masses far away, but rather thinking in terms of gravitational potential field that exists and can be measured locally, but summarizes all information about far away objects.
if you need everything to calculate anything, that's terrible
why?
I recently stumbled upon the concept of "reflexive self-processing", which is Chris Langan's "Reality Theory".
I am not a physicist, so if I'm wrong or someone can better explain this, or if someone wants to break out the math here, that would be great.
The idea of reflexive self-processing is that in the double slit experiment for example, which path the photon takes is calculated by taking into account the entire state of the universe when it solves the wave function.
1. isn't this already implied by the math of how we know the wave function works? are there any alternate theories that are even consistent with the evidence?
2. don't we already know that the entire state of the universe is used to calculate the behavior of particles? for example, doesn't every body produce a gravitational field which acts, with some magntitude of force, at any distance, such that in order to calculate the trajectory of a particle to the nth decimal place, you would need to know about every other body in the universe?
This is, literally, infinitely more parsimonious than the many worlds theory, which posits that an infinite number of entire universes of complexity are created at the juncture of every little physical event where multiple paths are possible. Supporting MWI because of it's simplicity was always a really horrible argument for this reason, and it seems like we do have a sensible, consistent theory in this reflexive self-processing idea, which is infinitely simpler, and therefore should be infinitely preferred by a rationalist to MWI.