00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to the 24th episode of Topcast and today we're talking about chapter 11
00:00:11.440 at the beginning of infinity the multiverse. There's been two preamble chapters to this or two
00:00:16.560 preamble episodes to this to try and help you understand some of the evidence, some of the
00:00:23.200 experiments that come to bear on why it is that we endorse the multiverse as the best way of
00:00:30.320 understanding quantum theory. Although those of us who endorse the multiverse don't see a difference
00:00:35.120 between quantum theory and the multiverse, the multiverse is just realism, just taking literally
00:00:42.880 what the formalism in quantum theory says and what the experiments are telling us.
00:00:47.840 Now I'm trying a little experiment today. The previous episode was highly edited,
00:00:53.440 it contained lots of videos and bells and whistles and that kind of thing and it was difficult to
00:00:58.880 edit. It took a lot, far longer to edit than it took to shoot. Now some people have given me feedback,
00:01:04.560 very valuable feedback and I love the feedback. If you have any feedback about this one,
00:01:08.560 please comment in the YouTube video, tell me an email or contact me on Twitter. I'll certainly take it
00:01:14.160 on board because this time around I'm going to reduce the amount of editing. So it'll be a little
00:01:18.560 bit more conversational, a little bit more relaxed, I'll refer to notes far less. Well we are going
00:01:23.280 to actually read from the book this time. And also I've been advertising the donate button on my
00:01:30.720 website www.breadhall.org. If you're finding any of this valuable, the podcasts, the videos,
00:01:38.880 the website, please feel free to donate. I'd appreciate that very much. I have a Patreon account
00:01:44.560 and I have a PayPal account as well and my website has details about that. Thank you to all of
00:01:50.400 those who have contributed so far. It means the world to me. Okay, so I'm going to get straight
00:01:55.840 into reading from chapter 11 with some reflections along the way this time. A little bit more relaxed,
00:02:02.800 it's going to take a while to get through this chapter. We've already had, as I said two episodes,
00:02:08.240 this brings us up to the third. I can envisage probably two more after this as well. So it'll be
00:02:13.440 five altogether and trying to explain the multiverse. It is a powerful argument, as I've said before
00:02:20.080 in this chapter in the beginning of the infinity, but it takes some unpacking. Now as I said,
00:02:24.400 there'll be far less editing in this video, this audio. But some of the editing is
00:02:32.240 editing is unavoidable, simply because I either make complete matter mistakes or I just need a drink
00:02:37.760 of water and you don't need to hear that. Okay, so David writes right at the beginning of chapter 11,
00:02:44.720 quote, the idea of a doppelganger, a double of a person, is a frequent theme of science fiction.
00:02:50.160 For instance, the classical television series, Star Trek featured several types of doppelganger
00:02:55.360 story involving malfunctions of the transporter. The starships teleportation device normally
00:02:59.760 used for short range space travel. Since teleporting something is conceptually similar to making
00:03:05.120 a copy of it at a different location, one can imagine various ways in which the process could go
00:03:09.680 wrong, and somehow end up with two instances of each passenger, the original and the copy.
00:03:15.200 Sometimes a doppelganger is not copied from an original, but exists from the outset in a
00:03:20.080 parallel universe. In some stories, there is a rift between universes through which one can
00:03:25.120 communicate or even travel to meet one's doppelganger. In others, the universes remain
00:03:29.760 mutually imperceptible, in which case, the interest of the story or rather two stories is in
00:03:35.200 how events are affected by the differences between them. For instance, the movie sliding doors
00:03:41.120 interleaves two variants of a love story, following the fortunes of two instances of the same
00:03:45.680 couple and two universes which initially differ only in one small detail. In a related genre,
00:03:52.240 known as alternate history, one of the two stories need not be told explicitly because it is part
00:03:57.680 of our own history and is assumed to be known to the audience. For example, the novel Fatherland
00:04:02.560 by Robert Harris is about a universe in which Germany won the Second World War. Robert Silverg's
00:04:07.680 Roman returner is one about one in which the Roman Empire did not fall. I'll pause there
00:04:14.640 end quote. The man in the High Castle, that's a recent one, I think it was on Amazon Prime,
00:04:20.480 it went for two seasons, precisely about the alternative universe in which
00:04:25.440 Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan indeed won the Second World War and its society said in
00:04:34.000 it's not quite modern day, I don't think, but a society where those two were those two empires
00:04:41.440 basically took over the world. Importantly, I took over the United States and that was sort of
00:04:47.440 divided down the middle, one part run by Germany and one part run by Japan. Okay, let's keep going.
00:04:54.480 David Wright's quote. In another class of stories, the transporter malfunction accidentally
00:05:00.400 exiles the passengers to a phantom zone, where they are imperceptible to everyone in the ordinary
00:05:04.960 world, but can see and hear them and each other. So they have the distressing experience
00:05:09.760 of yelling into just accumulating and vain to their shipmates who are oblivious and walk right
00:05:14.880 through them. In some stories, it is only copies the travellers that are sent to a phantom zone,
00:05:19.760 unbeknown to the originals. Such a story may end with the exiles discovering that they can, after
00:05:24.400 all, have some effect on the ordinary world. They use that effect to signal their existence
00:05:30.240 and are rescued through a reversal the process that exiled them. Depending on the picture,
00:05:34.400 depending on the fictional science that has been supposed, they then may begin new lives as separate
00:05:39.440 people, although they may merge with their originals. The letter option violates the principle
00:05:43.440 of the conservation of mass among other laws of physics, but again, this is fiction.
00:05:46.640 Nevertheless, there is a certain category of rather pedantic science fiction enthusiasts,
00:05:51.520 myself included, who prefer the fictional science to make sense to consist of reasonably good
00:05:56.240 explanations. Imagining worlds with different laws of physics is one thing. Imagining worlds
00:06:00.960 that do not make sense in their own terms is quite another. For instance, we want to know
00:06:05.600 how it can be that the exiles can see and hear the ordinary world but not touch it.
00:06:09.440 Pause their end quote and I'm the same. For example, one of the first, I'm of an age where
00:06:18.160 one of the first great blockbuster movies that took my interest with Star Wars. I love Star Wars,
00:06:23.760 but I quickly realized that it was fantasy and not true science fiction. I was a
00:06:31.200 science nerd, I suppose, early on in life, loved astronomy, and I understood what a
00:06:35.600 parsec was. So when Han Solo said the Millennium Falcon, the spaceship, could make the
00:06:41.040 castle running less than 12 parsecs, that didn't make sense. And then in episode 1 of Star Wars,
00:06:49.920 in 1997-ish, when that was released, many of the Star Wars fans were utterly
00:06:58.080 the fuddled, confused, and disappointed that George Lucas tried to explain the scientific
00:07:03.600 basis of the force. To me, the force was just magic. It served the same role that Gandalf
00:07:11.440 staffed it in Lord of the Rings. There was nothing scientific about the force and nor should one
00:07:15.920 try and make something scientific about the force. But he did. He tried to explain it. There were
00:07:20.640 these little bacteria, these little life forms inside of every cell called midi-chlorines,
00:07:25.760 and these things somehow mediated the messages between the force and the user of the force like
00:07:31.760 the Jedi. Master Sir, I heard Yoda talking about midi-chlorines. I've been wondering, what are
00:07:40.640 midi-chlorines? Midi-chlorines are a microscopic life form that resides within all living sounds.
00:07:49.760 They live inside me. Inside yourself, yes. And we are symbions with them.
00:07:54.400 Symbions. Life forms living together for mutual advantage. Without the midi-chlorines,
00:08:01.680 life could not exist and be but of no knowledge of the force. They continually speak to us,
00:08:07.680 telling us the will of the force. When you learn to quiet your mind, you'll hear them speaking to you.
00:08:14.560 I don't understand. The time and training any in there.
00:08:19.120 You know, we should treat fantasy as fantasy. Treat it as a universe with completely
00:08:27.120 different laws of physics rather than try and show how the fantasy elements of things like
00:08:33.920 Star Wars can actually make sense. They need not make sense in that universe, okay? And we're
00:08:39.920 not told what kind of universe we're supposed to be in, namely a universe different from ours.
00:08:45.840 Then we won't be disappointed with the explanations. I've never needed an explanation
00:08:50.320 in the Star Wars universe as to why the laser bolts from the gun travel so slowly,
00:08:56.240 far slower than normal bullets. You can see them travel through the air. And moreover,
00:08:59.920 I've never been concerned about the fact there is sound in space in Star Wars. It's a different
00:09:04.640 fictional fantasy universe that doesn't worry me. But if it purports to be our universe,
00:09:11.040 obeying our laws, then yes, it's disappointing. So, for example, when Superman's cape flaps in
00:09:16.880 the wind on the moon when he's visiting the astronauts, that's intolerable. That shouldn't happen.
00:09:23.600 Nor should he be able to speak on the moon as well, but he does. Okay, let's keep going in this
00:09:30.480 pedantic vein. David Wright's quote, this attitude of ours was nicely parodied in an episode
00:09:37.600 of the television series, The Simpsons, in which fans of a fantasy series question its star.
00:09:43.520 Star. Next question. Fan. Yes, over here. In episode B F 12, you were battling barbarians
00:09:52.800 while riding a winged Apollusa. You know, in the very next scene, mighty, you are clearly a top,
00:09:58.080 a winged Arabian. Please to explain it. Star. Ah, yeah. Well, whatever you notice something like that,
00:10:07.200 a wizard did it. Fan. All right. Let's see. Yes. But in episode A. G. 4, star. Wizard.
00:10:16.400 Fan. Oh, for Glavin out loud. And Glavin is something that we don't understand the meaning of.
00:10:21.840 I'll continue. Because that is a parody, the fan is complaining not about the story itself,
00:10:27.840 but that there is a continuity error. Two horses we use at different times to play the role of
00:10:32.720 a single fictional horse. Nevertheless, there are such things as flawed stories. End quote,
00:10:40.160 just my reflection on that. I won't read the next part here. Basically, David's pointing out
00:10:45.440 that if you do have a flawed story, often it comes down to a wizard did it kind of thing.
00:10:51.120 And so you're not being given an explanation. You're being, you're having something explained
00:10:55.120 away told don't ask this question because it's magic. A wizard has done it. It's and very easy to
00:11:02.400 very explanation. And so even in terms of the fictional world itself, it can be a bad explanation.
00:11:09.120 So skipping a substantial part there and then David writes, in that spirit then, consider the
00:11:16.160 fictional doppelgangers in the phantom zone. What enables them to see the ordinary world?
00:11:21.760 Since they are structurally identical to their originals, their eyes work by absorbing life
00:11:25.760 and detecting the resulting chemical changes just as realized it. But if they absorb some of the
00:11:30.000 light coming from the ordinary world, then they must cast shadows at the places where that light
00:11:34.720 would otherwise have arrived. Also, if the exiles in the phantom zone can see each other,
00:11:40.480 what light are they seeing with? The phantom zone's own light? If so, where does it come from?
00:11:45.920 Pause their my reflection. Yeah, remember my father telling me about, I think it was a movie,
00:11:50.080 old movie, the invisible man. And he would always try and explain to me why the invisible man
00:11:55.680 would actually be blind because he's not absorbing any light. If you have a true invisible man,
00:12:00.480 wonder, in fact, I think there's a modern day version of the invisible man that's on right now,
00:12:05.120 showing right now in 2020. He should be blind. He or she should be blind if you're invisible,
00:12:12.400 if you're completely invisible, because your eyes will allow all the light to pass through them.
00:12:16.880 It's not capturing any light whatsoever. It's not doing what light should do. Namely,
00:12:21.760 be absorbed by the retina. And if it's not being absorbed by the retina because it's perfectly
00:12:25.440 transparent, then, indeed, the invisible man will be blind, and all people in the phantom zone
00:12:29.040 will be blind. And if they're not blind, then I must just be receiving light from somewhere,
00:12:32.720 and that must be phantom zone light as well, skipping a bit, and then David writes.
00:12:40.880 It seems that almost everything in these phantom zone stories that happens in the story,
00:12:46.320 not only conflicts with the real laws of physics, which is an exceptional infection,
00:12:50.080 but raises problems with the fictional explanation. If the doppelgangers can walk through people
00:12:55.840 in these stories, why do they not fall through the floor? In reality, a floor supports people
00:13:00.880 by bending slightly. But if it were to bend in the story, it would also vibrate with their steps,
00:13:06.880 and set off sound waves, which people in the ordinary world could hear. So there must be a separate
00:13:11.440 floor and walls, as well as an entire spaceship hole in the phantom zone. Even the space outside
00:13:17.200 cannot be ordinary space, because if one could get back into ordinary space by leaving the ship,
00:13:21.600 then the exiles could return by that route. But there is an entire phantom zone space,
00:13:26.480 but if there is an entire phantom zone space out there, a parallel universe,
00:13:31.040 how could a mere transport a malfunction have created that? We should not be surprised that good
00:13:35.920 fictional science is hard to invent. It is a variant of real science, and real scientific knowledge
00:13:40.800 is very hard to vary. Pause there, just skipping a substantial part, and getting straight into
00:13:48.560 more of the meat of the matter when it comes to quantum theory, because David is going to explain
00:13:53.360 quantum theory, a viral fictional story. And so there's some explanation about the tactic that
00:14:00.000 he's using here, and then he goes on to write. Quite quantum theory is the deepest explanation
00:14:07.200 known to science. It violates many of the assumptions of common sense, and all of previous
00:14:12.160 science, including some that no one suspected were being made at all until quantum theory came
00:14:17.360 along and contradicted them. And yet this seemingly alien territory is the reality of which we and
00:14:22.960 everything we experience are part. There is no other. So in setting a story there, perhaps what
00:14:28.160 I lose in terms of the familiar ingredients of drama, I shall gain in terms of opportunity to explain
00:14:33.200 something that is more astounding than any fiction, yet he's the purest and most basic fact
00:14:37.840 we know about the physical world. I'd better warn the reader that the count that I shall give
00:14:42.080 known as the many universes interpretation of quantum theory, rather inadequately since there is
00:14:47.280 much more to it than universes, remains at the time of writing a decidedly minority of your
00:14:51.920 among physicists. In the next chapter, I shall speculate why that is so despite the fact that many
00:14:56.960 well studied phenomena have no other known explanation for the moment. So if I said to say the very
00:15:02.080 idea of science as explanation, in the sense that I am advocating in this book, namely an account
00:15:06.480 of what is really out there, is itself still a minority view even among theoretical physicists,
00:15:13.600 paused their entire reflection. Firstly, notice how I just paused there, normally I would edit that
00:15:17.280 out and try and say that again. So this is one of the things that I'm asking people to give me
00:15:21.280 feedback on. Would you prefer I just reread that rather than stumbling out of my words?
00:15:26.560 David does say there that this idea of science as explanation is itself still a minority view even
00:15:36.400 among theoretical physicists. Yeah, it seems to me that it is primarily a problem among theoretical
00:15:41.440 physicists. It's the theoretical physicists that seem to deny that what physics in this particular
00:15:48.000 case is telling us about reality shouldn't be taken seriously, that we don't need to explain
00:15:53.040 what's actually happening and that we can just be therefore instrumentalists when it comes to
00:15:58.000 things like quantum theory. I mentioned this in the previous two episodes. It's not so much a problem
00:16:02.640 for ornithologists, people who study birds. They tend to be realists about the fact that birds
00:16:06.960 exist and birds evolve and have common ancestors with people. It's not really seemingly a problem
00:16:12.960 for geologists or people who want to try and find something like oil in the ground using
00:16:18.560 radar techniques or geometric analysis. These people are realists about where the oil is and the
00:16:26.240 fact that rocks exist and you have to bash through them. They're still scientists. It really is a
00:16:31.280 problem at the very edge of our understanding the most fundamental theories about science. It's
00:16:38.720 there it seems to me the philosophy somewhat changes in people's minds. They cease to be realists
00:16:45.680 about the things that they're studying when it comes to science. There's also of course a sense
00:16:50.400 in which there is this folk relativism as well that many people have when you ask them what they
00:16:59.840 really know exists. They deny really knowing that anything absolutely exists, especially educated
00:17:07.680 people. The more educated people become, the more skeptical they come about straightforward realism
00:17:13.920 and the fact that science explains reality. It doesn't have the final word but it explains aspects
00:17:19.440 of reality and you're entitled to say electrons really exist and people really exist and bird really
00:17:24.640 exist and so on. That's what realism is and that's what science's explanation is all about. If
00:17:29.840 something appears unavoidably in our best explanation then that entity exists. This is explained
00:17:37.360 very well in the fabric of reality by the way. So I'll say that again we know something exists. If it
00:17:44.480 appears in our best explanations. Now some people object to this they say well then if our best
00:17:51.040 explanation changes that means that what you said existed before now learning exists. Yes yes I find
00:17:57.120 that out of fairly mundane claim. Knowing something exists is not knowing something absolutely once
00:18:04.880 and for all finally exists and there can be no change in your knowledge about the existence of that
00:18:08.960 thing. Whether something exists in some final ultimate sense is not noble just like it's in some
00:18:16.560 final sense we cannot know the final laws of physics or the final ultimate knowledge about everything
00:18:23.360 we won't get there we're at the beginning of infinity. So instead we have to interpret the word
00:18:27.760 existence as being about the contents of our best current explanations. It's not an infallible criteria
00:18:36.400 when we're talking about existence. So that's going to remark on that and I think that
00:18:42.240 your typical scientist the further they get away from theoretical physics they tend to be
00:18:48.800 realists about their own field. I have a friend who is a marine biologist. I've never heard him
00:18:55.920 deny the fact that squid exists. He studies squid. He knows that the squid's exists and he's quite
00:19:02.800 happy to say I know that squid's exist. On the other hand the theoretical physicist does tend to
00:19:07.920 deny the reality of what things like the shredding of wave equation tell us about reality. Anyway
00:19:13.360 I digress and let me return to the book David writes. Let me begin with perhaps the simplest
00:19:19.840 possible parallel universe speculation. A phantom zone has existed all along ever since its own
00:19:25.760 Big Bang. Until our story begins it has been an exact doppelganger of the entire universe
00:19:30.240 atom for atom and event for event. All the flaws that I mentioned in the phantom zone stories
00:19:35.120 devot all the flaws that I mentioned in the phantom zone stories derived from the asymmetry
00:19:42.880 that things in the ordinary world affect things in the phantom zone but not vice versa.
00:19:47.360 So let me eliminate those flaws by imagining for a moment that the universes are completely
00:19:51.280 imperceptible to each other. Since we're heading towards real physics let me also retain the
00:19:56.480 speed of light limit on communication and let the laws of physics be universal and symmetrical
00:20:01.600 i.e. they make no distinction between the universes. Moreover they are deterministic nothing
00:20:07.760 random ever happens which is why the universe has remained alike so far. How can they ever become
00:20:13.920 different? This is a key question in the theory of the multiverse which I shall answer below.
00:20:18.800 All these basic properties of my fictional world can be thought of as conditions on the
00:20:24.640 flow of information. One cannot send a message to the other universe nor can one change anything
00:20:29.600 in one's own universe sooner than light could reach that thing. Nor can one bring new information
00:20:34.880 even random information into the world. Everything that happens is determined by the laws of
00:20:40.160 physics from what has gone before. However one can of course bring new knowledge into the world.
00:20:45.600 Knowledge consists of explanations and none of those conditions prevents the creation of new
00:20:49.600 explanations. All this is true of the real world to pause there end quote. Here is my controversial
00:20:59.120 take on that. It's not controversial to me but it's something some discussions I've been engaged in
00:21:04.560 recently. Discussions that go back some two decades about this particular thing.
00:21:09.200 All those things that David said they are quite true so for example everything that happens is
00:21:16.560 determined by the laws of physics from what has gone before. So determinism is real.
00:21:21.920 Every event is absolutely determined by the laws of physics but to assume that it is the
00:21:31.600 past that determines the future is just a bias because the laws of physics are symmetric in time.
00:21:36.960 One may as well say the future determines the past state as well so you can take any future state,
00:21:44.400 apply the laws of physics in reverse and end up with that past state. Everything is determined
00:21:53.360 doesn't privilege what thing in time determines what other thing in time because you can
00:21:59.680 reverse the laws of physics they are symmetric. The laws of motion are symmetric. The one thing
00:22:08.480 that can be brought into this world but new information can't be brought into this world however
00:22:16.000 new knowledge can be brought into this world by creative people and the essence of new knowledge
00:22:23.360 created by creative people that seem somewhat redundant and circular but it's true that people are
00:22:30.400 creative they create new knowledge is that that new knowledge is impossible to predict ahead of time.
00:22:39.600 Were it possible to predict what knowledge someone was going to create then that knowledge would
00:22:45.040 be had at the time of the prediction and thus it would not be a genuine creation of that knowledge.
00:22:50.560 But knowledge really is created and has a causal effect in the world and it cannot be predicted
00:22:58.960 not only because it's super complex although David is going to explain how that is one factor
00:23:05.920 but I would say we simply do not know the process by which knowledge creation occurs.
00:23:12.720 We have some ideas, popularing epistemology gives us some ideas that it is this process of
00:23:18.960 conjecture and refutation. But how new conjectures are arrived at? What the process is that goes
00:23:26.320 on inside the mind of a person in order to create this new explanatory knowledge, we don't know.
00:23:31.840 It's a black box for now. It could very well be, it could very well be, that it remains some kind
00:23:39.360 of black box, that there is some uncertainty principle that controls creativity. I'm just
00:23:46.240 conjecturing this. I'm just throwing this out there. I'm not saying that I believe it. I'm saying
00:23:50.720 it's a possibility that it will turn out to be inherently impossible to predict knowledge creation.
00:24:00.240 There will be some principle that prohibits us from predicting what knowledge a person will create.
00:24:06.400 It's inherently unpredictable and if it's inherently unpredictable then we have to
00:24:13.200 real it then, although it's determined by the laws of physics, everything is determined by the laws
00:24:17.360 of physics. This does not rule out free will because free will is intrinsically coupled to this idea
00:24:24.800 of creating new knowledge, that if you have a decision to make in your life, where apparently
00:24:30.400 you only have two choices, the human mind is such that it can create new options, options that
00:24:36.480 weren't there before and although you might be told you can have tea or coffee and this is the
00:24:42.080 classic free will thought experiment. Whether you have tea or coffee might have been determined prior
00:24:48.400 to you're making the choice about tea or coffee. But now, if you're someone like me who
00:24:53.760 endorses the idea of free will as a real thing, I would say you can't even say that it's a 50-50
00:24:59.680 chance. You can't even say that the person will choose tea or coffee. The person might not want
00:25:04.720 either. The person might choose to drink neither. The person might choose to mix them together.
00:25:09.920 The person might choose to invent a new drink altogether. All of these things, though consistent
00:25:15.360 with the laws of physics, cannot be predicted ahead of time. This is what free will is about.
00:25:20.880 It has something to do with creatively generating new options that weren't there previously.
00:25:30.320 I call this a emergent feature of reality. The fact that people are unique in this regard,
00:25:37.680 people are unique in this regard and cosmically important in large part for this reason,
00:25:43.680 that they bring new options into the world, that they can create new explanations and those new
00:25:49.760 explanations gives them a wider repertoire of ways in which to control the world they find themselves
00:25:55.760 in and control the environment that they find themselves in. So attempting to prophesy things
00:26:00.720 into the distant future is near impossible. We can have some crude estimates based upon current
00:26:07.440 knowledge about what's going to happen into the distant future, but invariably that will be wrong,
00:26:13.840 because we haven't been able to take account of human creativity. Is everything to determine
00:26:18.880 why the laws of physics? Absolutely. Do we know what all the laws of physics are and the most
00:26:24.240 fundamental laws of physics that exist? No. Will we ever? No. Could any of these laws of physics
00:26:30.880 have anything whatever to do with creative conjectures? Perhaps. And perhaps some of them will tell us
00:26:38.960 why it is that we can't predict ahead of time what is going to happen. If you can't predict
00:26:43.680 ahead of time what is going to happen when a person is involved, then that's what free will
00:26:48.560 basically amounts to. Although it's determined, it's not predictable. Say it again, although something
00:26:55.040 might be determined that has nothing to do with whether from the perspective of a single person
00:26:59.920 or an entire civilization, whether that thing is predictable. And if it's not predictable,
00:27:05.280 despite being determined, we have a form of compatibleism here. Unpredictability and
00:27:12.000 determinism. And when that situation arises, in the context of creative expression by people,
00:27:19.920 we have something that we may as well call free will, because it's serving all the functions that
00:27:24.560 classical free will serves. Now, I need to clarify something on that point about people being unique
00:27:31.040 in bringing knowledge into the world. And so the fact that they create knowledge means that
00:27:37.120 it's unpredictable what's going to happen into the distant future, because of the fact it's a
00:27:42.400 genuine act of creation. Despite the fact everything obeys the laws of physics,
00:27:47.120 the laws of physics are the thing that allow even mandate perhaps that this creative act of
00:27:54.240 knowledge production can actually occur in the minds of human beings. What I want to clarify is
00:28:02.080 explanatory knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge that can be brought into the universe.
00:28:06.720 There is another kind that we have mentioned here on top cast and that we have read about
00:28:11.920 from the beginning of infinity. That other kind of knowledge is of course evolutionary knowledge,
00:28:16.480 or genetic knowledge, knowledge that is in the DNA, knowledge that enables organisms to survive
00:28:22.480 in certain environments, in given environments. And in fact it's a nice parallel really. A
00:28:28.400 biologist would be able to explain how it is that we cannot predict what animals, what specific
00:28:35.920 species are going to evolve in particular niches. You can guess, you can have an approximate
00:28:41.680 understanding that well if you find a particular biological niche, then a certain kind of organism
00:28:47.600 might be expected to fill that niche in some way. I think Darwin himself, Charles Darwin,
00:28:54.160 made a kind of prediction given that there was a certain kind of awkward that existed,
00:28:58.960 which had a very long stem that was very difficult for any insect to actually reach down to get
00:29:04.160 the nectar from the bottom of that orchid. And so he postulated, there should be a moth out there
00:29:10.720 somewhere with a very long perbiscus, a very long kind of insect beak thing that could get down
00:29:16.000 into that orchid. And so he did indeed make a kind of evolutionary prediction, but it's not a
00:29:21.520 prediction in the same way that physics makes predictions. After all, evolution is blind and this
00:29:28.160 evolution is blind claim is quite true. That means we can't really predict what's going to happen
00:29:33.520 next because although there might be certain niches where we would expect the co-evolution of two
00:29:39.600 organisms, given any particular environment, it's going to be extremely difficult indeed
00:29:45.120 to try and figure out what kind of organisms might actually specifically arise in those environments.
00:29:50.800 If we were alien biologists and we tried to predict, for example, given no other information
00:29:56.160 other than what the physical environment of the continent of Australia was like and the physical
00:30:00.480 environment of what the continent of Africa is like, they're both quite similar, both hot,
00:30:05.200 rather dry places. It'd be very difficult to figure out that the kangaroos evolved in one place
00:30:10.320 and the lions evolved in another place. I don't think that biology is able to do that kind of
00:30:15.440 prediction and that's the way in which evolution is creative. It's able to bring these organisms
00:30:21.360 into being to fill niches. But what specific kind of organism fills a particular physical niche
00:30:27.200 that's unpredictable and it's a form of creativity. It's a form of knowledge creation
00:30:33.840 by evolution, equally determined by the laws of physics, but the laws of physics determine in the
00:30:40.320 sense that allow for evolution to occur. So evolution brings knowledge into existence. So to do
00:30:50.880 people, the difference is that people bring into existence explanatory type knowledge. And this
00:30:57.840 explanatory knowledge is inherently unpredictable and allows us to change the environment in which
00:31:03.360 we find ourselves, to understand the environment and to control it. So yeah, just a quick
00:31:09.520 clarification on that point. There are indeed two kinds of knowledge, explanatory and evolutionary.
00:31:15.520 Okay, let's keep on going. That was a massive diversion. And David writes, we can temporarily think
00:31:26.800 of the two universes as being literally parallel. So press the third dimension of space and think
00:31:31.200 of a universe as being two dimensional, like an infinitely flat television. Then place the second
00:31:35.920 such television parallel to it, showing exactly the same pictures symbolizing the objects in the
00:31:40.240 two universes. Now forget the material on which, now forget the material of which the televisions
00:31:45.040 are made, only the pictures exist. This is to stress that a universe is not a receptacle containing
00:31:49.840 physical objects. It is those objects. In real physics, even spaces a physical object capable of
00:31:55.680 warping and affecting matter and being affected by it. Now we have two perfectly parallel
00:32:00.880 identical universes, each including an instance of our Starship, its crew and its transporter,
00:32:06.080 and of the whole of space. Because of the symmetry between them, it is now misleading to call
00:32:10.320 one of them the ordinary universe and the other the phantom zone. So I should just call them the
00:32:15.040 multiverse. So I should just call them universes. The two of them together which comprise the whole
00:32:20.160 of physical reality in the story so far are the multiverse. Similarly, it is misleading to speak of
00:32:26.000 the original object and its doppelganger. They are two, they are simply the two instances of each
00:32:31.440 object. If our science fiction speculation were to stop there, the two universes would have to remain
00:32:36.320 identical forever. There is nothing logically impossible about that. You know what would make our
00:32:40.400 story fatally flawed, both as fiction and as scientific speculation, and for the same reason.
00:32:45.280 It is a story of two universes, but only one history. That is to say there is only one
00:32:50.080 script about what is really there in both universes. Consider this fiction therefore,
00:32:54.160 it is really a single universe story and a pointless disguise. Consider this scientific
00:32:58.800 explanation. Consider this scientific speculation, it describes a world that would not be
00:33:02.880 explicable to its inhabitants. For how could they ever argue that their history takes place in two
00:33:07.200 universes and not three or thirty. One or two today and thirty tomorrow. Moreover,
00:33:11.760 since their world has only one history or their good explanations about the nature would be about
00:33:16.320 that history. That single history would be what they meant by their world or universe.
00:33:22.000 Nothing of the underlying tuneness of their reality would be accessible to them. Nor would it
00:33:25.840 make any more sense of them as an explanation. Then would threeness or thirtyness. Yet they would
00:33:30.640 be factually mistaken. A remark about explanation. Although the story so far would be a bad
00:33:36.400 explanation for the inhabitants point of view, it is not necessarily bad from ours. Imagining
00:33:41.520 inexplicable worlds can help us to understand the nature of explicable. I have already
00:33:45.440 imagined some explicable worlds for that very reason in previous chapters, and I shall imagine
00:33:49.440 more in this chapter. But in the end, I want to tell of an explicable world, and it will be ours.
00:33:54.400 A remark about terminology. The world is the whole of physical reality. In classical,
00:34:00.160 pre-quantum physics, the world was thought to consist of one universe. Something like a whole
00:34:04.880 three-dimensional space for the whole of time and all its contents. According to quantum
00:34:09.520 physics, as I shall explain, the world is much larger and more complicated object.
00:34:13.840 The multiverse, which includes many such universes among other things, and history is a
00:34:18.000 sequence of events happening to objects and possibly their identical counterparts. So in my
00:34:22.400 story so far, the world is a multiverse that consists of two universes, but has only one single
00:34:27.040 history. So where two universes meant not stay identical? Something like a transporter malfunction
00:34:33.040 will have to make them different. Yet, as I said, that may seem to have been ruled out by those
00:34:37.920 restrictions on information flow. The laws of physics and the fictional multiverse are deterministic
00:34:42.800 and symmetrical. So what can the transporter possibly do that would make the two universes
00:34:48.000 differ? It may seem that whatever one instance of it does to one universe, its doppelganger must
00:34:52.320 be doing to the other so the universes can only remain the same. Surprisingly, that is not so.
00:34:58.240 It is consistent for two identical entities to become different under deterministic and
00:35:02.560 symmetrical laws. Pause there and, quote, for the moment, just a little reflection of mine.
00:35:07.600 This is just like the half-silvered mirror in the Mark Zender interferometer that we talked about
00:35:12.320 in the last episode. This is where, although the laws of physics are deterministic and symmetrical,
00:35:21.840 nonetheless, you could have a situation where a photon can strike a half-silvered mirror and
00:35:28.240 50% of the time it will go through and 50% of the time it will bounce off. In fact, in the real
00:35:34.000 multiverse, what we have is in that situation, 50% of all electrons that will all photon driver
00:35:42.480 that strike that half-silvered mirror will go through or fungible copies of this one electron
00:35:46.400 will go through and 50% will bounce off. And so although you have symmetrical deterministic laws,
00:35:52.320 there's two different possible outcomes. That causes the universes to become different.
00:35:56.960 When you have that capacity for differentiation, symmetrical deterministic laws can cause different
00:36:02.880 things to happen. And it really happens in real life. A voltage surge, for example,
00:36:08.160 such as David has in his fictional story, it could be something like, well, just by chance,
00:36:13.680 I say chance, but due to the laws of physics, an electron can have different energies,
00:36:20.160 as it orbits a nucleus. In fact, it could have so much energy at ionisors. And this effectively is
00:36:24.800 a spark on an atomic scale. Ionis means the electron leaves the atom. Now, as it leaves the
00:36:31.280 atom, it could strike other electrons and have a cascading effect in causing other
00:36:35.680 electrons to be ionis from their atoms. And then you do get a real life little spark. This could
00:36:40.400 be how the malfunctioner, the malfunction in the transporter works.
00:36:50.400 Okay, so I'll just continue for a little longer and then I'll stop here,
00:36:54.880 having not read too much, just as an experiment. Remember, I want people's feedback on whether
00:37:01.600 you think the lack of editing in this episode is a better or a worse thing. Okay, continuing,
00:37:09.280 quote, David writes, but for that to happen, they must initially be more than just exact images
00:37:14.960 of each other. They must be fungible by which I mean identical and literally every way,
00:37:19.920 except that there are two of them. The concept of fungibility is going to appear repeatedly in my
00:37:25.920 story. The term is borrowed from legal terminology, where it refers to the legal fiction that
00:37:30.560 deems certain entities to be identical for purposes, such as paying debts. For example,
00:37:35.360 dollar bills are fungible in law, which means that unless otherwise agreed,
00:37:38.800 borrowing a dollar does not require one to return the specific bank note that one borrowed,
00:37:42.800 barrels of oil that are given grade are fungible too. Horses are not, borrowing someone's horse
00:37:47.840 means that one has to return that specific horse, even its identical twin, will not do.
00:37:52.320 But the physical fungibility I'm referring to here is not about deeming. It means being
00:37:56.960 identical, and that is very different and a counterintuitive property. Leibniz and his doctrine of the
00:38:02.000 identity of disearnables went so far as to rule out its existence on principle, but he was mistaken.
00:38:08.160 Even aside from the physics of the multiverse, we now know that photons, and under some conditions
00:38:13.280 even atoms, can be fungible. This is achieved in lasers and in devices called atomic lasers,
00:38:18.560 respectively. The laterim it bursts of extremely cold, fungible atoms. For how this is possible
00:38:24.320 without causing transmutation explosions and so on, see below, end quote, just pause here.
00:38:30.400 I noticed there's a third meaning of fungible and people have been using this increasingly
00:38:34.640 more, especially in economics. And for audio only listeners, I'm just drawing your attention to
00:38:41.280 on the video version I'm showing you the third definition from the Merriam-Wibs-The-Dictionary,
00:38:47.600 which says that the definition of fungible is readily changeable to new situations.
00:38:57.040 It now seems to me to have been perverted to mean just similar or transferable.
00:39:04.880 I heard in a podcast, for example, recently, someone talking about how
00:39:08.000 car manufacturing recently was stopped in Australia, and there was some talk about
00:39:14.480 creating an industry of jet fighters and without getting into politics.
00:39:19.520 But the commentators were there were talking about how the skills of the car builders
00:39:27.120 may have been fungible for aircraft building. Now, they made it explicit that he didn't think
00:39:33.920 that this meant the skills were exactly the same, but rather just transferable, that you could move
00:39:39.280 the skills from building cars to building jets right or wrong in terms of the terminology
00:39:45.200 that's a weakening of this term of fungibility, where it just means similar, approximately the
00:39:50.560 same good enough. This is completely unlike what David's talking about, where it kind of means
00:39:55.680 more identical than identical, because it means identical copies in exactly the same places
00:40:00.640 doing exactly the same thing. Okay. Okay, I'll just read a little bit more
00:40:09.440 David writes, quote, you will not find the concept of fungibility discussed, or even mentioned
00:40:14.160 in many textbooks or research papers on quantum theory, even the small minority that endorsed
00:40:18.560 the many universes interpretation. Nevertheless, it is everywhere just beneath the conceptual
00:40:22.880 surface, and I believe that making it explicit helps to explain quantum phenomena without fudging.
00:40:27.200 As we'll become clear, it is even weirder and attribute than Leibniz guest, much weirder than
00:40:33.520 multiple universes, for instance, which are, after all, just common sense repeated. It allows
00:40:39.440 radically new types of motion and information flow, different from anything that was imagined before
00:40:44.400 quantum physics, and hence a radically different structure of the physical world,
00:40:49.280 pause there, end quote, and that's where I'll end the reading for today.
00:40:52.960 Yes, so we're getting a hint here now that the multiple universes aspect of quantum theory,
00:41:00.000 of the multiverse, it's not the most amazing thing. This concept of fungibility really is the most
00:41:06.080 one of the more amazing things. Not only are photons, electrons, and other subatomic particles
00:41:13.200 fungible, and there are fungible instances of quantum, according to quantum theory,
00:41:18.000 but you yourself, a person, contains many instances, fungible instances, right now,
00:41:28.480 perhaps uncountably infinite. What does it feel like to be uncountably infinite numbers of
00:41:33.920 fungible instances of a person? Exactly as it feels like to you right now. What does it feel
00:41:39.120 like to differentiate into two different copies? Exactly as it feels like now. Okay, we have to
00:41:46.800 understand reality as it is. Now, we don't know what it would feel like to split and then merge
00:41:52.800 again, although that might happen, because we don't have sense organs for that. But perhaps in
00:41:59.920 the episode next or the one after that, I'll explain the experiment that David has proposed
00:42:07.520 to differentiate between this multiverse conception of quantum theory, the realest conception,
00:42:13.360 versus other conceptions of quantum theory. The other conceptions of quantum theory are far
00:42:19.600 more to my mind, counterintuitive, illogical even. Those interpretations say that all of the
00:42:28.160 universes disappear except for one when being observed. In other words, the power of the human
00:42:35.760 mind of consciousness is what causes the collapse of the wave function. But we'll talk about that
00:42:41.440 in a future episode for now. Thank you for listening. And do let me know via whatever means.
00:42:50.000 If you prefer this style slightly more relaxed, more conversational,
00:42:54.800 mean not referring to notes very often, stumbling over my words in places, possibly not sounding
00:43:00.720 as refined as what I did in previous episodes. What do you prefer? Because moving forward, I'll
00:43:05.680 be taking people's ideas on board to some extent. Until then, bye.
