Thanks for your kind words! I'll try to look at your essay later today.

Best,

Markus

13 days later

"Philosophers have long been arguing about how to best define the scientific method", how if they had some idea about it. ;-)

"The question of consciousness is deliberately ignored". Consciousness has been matter of scientific study since decades.

"the idea that "consciousness collapses the wave function" or the proliferation of the anthropic principle" aren't simply "pseudo-scientific" or at least "highly questionable", but the first is plain wrong and the second is fully unscientific.

Noncommutative space cannot represent "the sort of "quantum spacetime" that one expects to find in physics in the realm of quantum gravity." Space and time are different in quantum theory, so they cannot be unified on a "quantum spacetime". Moreover the geometrical model of gravity introduced by GR is only approximate; so the idea that quantum gravity requires a "quantum spacetime" is also incorrect. It is understandable that decades of work on this kind of ideas have proven to be useless.

Eternal inflation is like epicycles or the flying spaghetti monster. And Boltzman apparently never understood statistical mechanics or the second law of thermodynamics.

What is so special about the scientist running different simulations of brains in different computers? One could replace brains by molecules and one could still be asking probabilistic questions about the simulations. There is nothing of relevance here. Nothing questioning the "essence of physics".

Quantum mechanics is an ensemble theory, and the idea that it refutes a realistic picture of the world has been debunked since the very beginning of quantum theory. Stuff as Bell's theorem is often invoked as prohibiting realism; However, not only the theorem doesn't say what some pretend, but Bell himself was supporter of realism. Only people adhering to the old Copenhagen interpretation that still pretends that QM is about "what we see" instead about "what there is".

Bricmont reproduces some of the comedy behind the so-called "ortodox view" of quantum mechanics and the historical distortions

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.00294.pdf

So the subsequence reasoning about inverting the arrow and placing "first-person perspective" as fundamental and the physical world as "emergent" isn't valid. Not only this kind reasoning is based in incorrect quantum epistemologies/ontologies, but it is also ridiculous to believe that physical world "emerges" only when there are persons acting as observers. It is so ridiculous like when creationists insist that the fossil evidence was planted by Satan to deceive us. Wheeler's ideas about reality being created by observers are pure nonsense.

Postulate 1 seems to fail when x is a stationary state.

    You are posting extremely strong opinions about some topics without a clear idea what you are talking about, or what the people that you are criticizing are actually claiming.

    Neither Wheeler nor I would endorse an "everything goes" view -- the observer can NOT WILLINGLY create "whatever she likes". If you had read Wheeler you would understand this. That in some interpretations of quantum theory, some variables don't have a value before they are measured is not in the slightest comparable to, as you wrote, "creationists insist[ing] that the fossil evidence was planted by Satan to deceive us". This view has clear explanatory power for concrete situations in the laboratory, like the security of quantum cryptography (if some variables don't have a value then they cannot be held by an eavesdropper. Clearly this has to -- and can -- be made much more rigorous).

    I am a strong opponent of pseudoscience and modern relativism, and I in fact have here, on my table in front of me, a book by the very Bricmont that you are citing ("Fashionable nonsense"), and I agree strongly with almost everything he says. You are conflating several things that have nothing to do with each other: namely, scientific rejections of certain aspects of naive realism on the one hand (WITHOUT IN ANY WAY rejecting other aspects of realism or the scientific method), and total relativism on the other.

    You also write:

    "Postulate 1 seems to fail when x is a stationary state."

    x is simply a bit string; a bit string cannot be a "stationary state" (this notion is completely undefined in that context). Had you read the reference with the mathematical definition before shouting our your anger, you would have understood that.

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