The Probability of Grace

Yesterday, there was one of those delightful cascades of randomness that change the arc of an expected evening.

After dropping the little guy off at drums, I wandered over to Starbucks for my weekly three hour writing session.  Only, when I got there, a single individual sat in the corner I usually occupy.  It's the corner with the table and the plug.   She had a giant stack of cards, which she was comparing to a photocopied list of cashed checks, individually filling out, addressing, and prepping for mailing.  Thank you letters for donations of some sort, it seemed.  Good work.

But it was the work of hours.  That wouldn't have been an issue, but when I flipped open my laptop, I was looking at a 24% charge.  I could have asked her to move, but her setup was complex and space intensive.  She was there first.

And so my flow for the evening changed.

I cranked out emails until the laptop blorted out a cry for mercy, and then mucked about on my smartphone for a bit.  In that mucking about, I came across a tweet, which led me to a review of a book by University of Oxford philosopher/physicist David Wallace.

Along with David Deutsch, Wallace is one of the most articulate proponents of the Everett Many Worlds hypothesis.  He views it as resolving many of the conceptual challenges of quantum mechanics.  The review for his 480 page, seventy five dollar book was glowing, albeit somewhat on the dense side.

How dense?  Well, one of the most exciting sentences for me personally was this one:

The second pass invokes a Bayesian approach to inference: Wallace shows that Bayesian updating applies unproblematically in an Everettian context, in the sense that agents who conditionalize on the data will take that data to confirm EQM in branches with aggregate weight close to 1.

Just rolls right off the tongue.

What it's saying, and what the review articulates further as it explores that "second pass," is that probability theory is the best framework for understanding the decisionmaking processes of sentient beings in a multiverse.

Yeah, I know.  That doesn't really make it much easier.  But it's both cool and important.

If this idea is to gain any meaningful purchase with human beings, it's going to need to be said in ways that more people can understand.  Physics and philosophy may be awesome, but the language used is too distant from the common tongue.  To...um...deepen the probability of this spreading, translation will be required.

Still, this is exciting to see from someone who is Someone, because integrating Bayesian probability into Christian ethical and moral processes has been on my mind for much of the last year.

If creation is...as I believe it to be...a theistic multiverse...then we need to understand our choices not in terms of absolutes or certainties, but in terms of establishing probability.  The probability of what?

"The Probability of Grace."

Not a bad working title for the next book, think I.

Many Worlds and The Meteorite Conundrum

One of the things that I've found most interesting as I've delved into the scientific foundations of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory is the guy responsible for coming up with the concept in the first place.

Hugh Everett III was an interesting, complex human being.   He was a bright, fascinating Princeton physics Ph.D., a polymath with wide ranging interests.   He was also prone to indulging in food and drink, and died relatively young of a heart attack.   Although he was an atheist, he appeared to believe in something that he called "quantum immortality." This involved the belief that because the universe was, in fact, a multiverse, then one could never actually die.

If all probability is materially actualized, then death can never come.  At the last instant, something will happen that continues your consciousness.  Even if that thing is insanely, wildly, impossibly unlikely, it will occur.  Or so the idea in its most essential form goes.  

It made it a whole bunch easier to eat and drink yourself to death.

I've ruminated on related topics before, particularly at the miracle of identity cohesion in such a wildly churning universe.   Being of a somewhat contrarian bent, I find myself thinking about Everett's quantum immortality in the inverse.  Sure, some version of myself could continue infinitely in a multiverse.  But of equal likelihood within this cosmology is the extermination of myself at any instant.

Amid the functional infinity of universes, there is a "me," identical in every respect.  That me is so me it could be me.  I could not tell the difference.

Approaching the back of the head of that "me" at high subsonic speed is a meteor.  It's about four centimeters in diameter, what's left of it after a descent through the atmosphere.   It's mostly comprised of superheated heavy metals.   In a fraction of a second, it will punch through the roof of my little suburban house and down through ceiling of my study.   Splat, will go my head, rather messily.   End of my existence.

If the universe is the functional infinity that Everett, Deutsch, and others have suggested, then this would seem to by necessity happen to some variant of me at every instant of my life, and at every instant of every possible life that I might possibly live.   Taken together, those moments of my annihilation would be endless in and of themselves, a boundless splatter of skull shards and partially ionized grey matter.  

And yet I am s


















Kidding.    What strikes me (heh) about this is the remarkable miracle of my own continued existence.  I do not have to still be living in this moment.  And yet I am.  It is remarkable.  Cause for thanksgiving, even.  And for gratitude.

Quantum Immortality and Everett's Paradox

Yesterday, after a day of sociology and anthropology, I motored over to my in-laws on the SuperBee (what my little guy thinks I should call the Suzuki).

There, I chatted a bit with the mother-in-law about life and class.  Then, over a beer or two, I talked about waveform collapse and quantum mechanics with my physicist father in law.  It was a followon to a conversation with someone who kindly agreed to provide input to my writing, and it was...helpful.

Though temporarily sidetracked by writing and preparation for my D.Min. classes, the drafted manuscript for the Believer's Guide to the Multiverse continues to burble away happily on the back burner.   A few souls have read it so far, and feedback has been...well...the way feedback is when you put out that first draft of anything.

It's always a bit daunting, exposing the first tender shoots of a manuscript to outside inputs.   It's your baby, this tender delicate interweaving of ideas and hopes and concepts.  You've pored over it, loved it, struggled with it, and reached a point where you and your muse are almost content with it.

And then reality intrudes.  It's necessary.  It's a good thing.  A critical read over something is vital, and particularly a critical read from an expert eye.   For my little exploration of the implications of the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the expert eye needed was from someone with a Ph.D. in physics...and, being Presbyterian, finding such a soul in my congregation was achievable.  

The inputs were both significant and useful, and will strengthen the manuscript, once I've stopped quietly sobbing to myself.  One particularly helpful insight was that in plowing through the works of contemporary "popularized" physics that gave my layman's mind insight into the multiverse, I'd managed to truck right past the physicist who came up with the idea in the first place.  Not a mention.  Not a peep.   A good catch, that.

The physicist in question was Hugh Everett, whose 1957 dissertation provides much of the conceptual foundation for the Many Worlds hypothesis/interpretation in quantum theory.    Everett was an interesting fish on many fronts, and some more exploration of his thinking will be plugged into the manuscript once time allows.

Today I found myself ruminating on one of the more peculiar elements of Everett's personal thought: his belief in what was subsequently called "quantum immortality," which arises from an odd variant of the Shroedinger's Cat thought experiment, from the perspective of the cat.  The "quantum suicide" thought experiment involves a weapon pointed at a tester.  The weapon is triggered by a quantum event, which is essentially random.  If it occurs, the weapon goes off, and the tester dies.  If does not, the weapon does not discharge.   In the Many Worlds approach to quantum events, the tester...or some iteration of the tester...will always survive.  The termination of consciousness will never occur.   It's interesting to think about, but it got me going in another direction.

The obvious limitation of this thought experiment is that the Many Worlds interpretation does not suggest a binary set of options.  It suggests, instead, that from every moment arise a functionally infinite set of variant realities.

For some reason, this got me thinking of Zeno's Paradox.  That classical brain bender, if you recall, notes that in order to travel a distance, you must first travel half that distance.  As any distance can be halved, the number of "halves" you'd have to travel would be infinite...meaning, technically, you shouldn't ever be able to get anywhere.

If the multiverse is as Everett suggests...what is the self?  That's always a fuddler, of course, even in our linear time and space.  Where is the "I" that exists in the flow of time?

But what is self if quantum splits occur from instant to instant?  If from every instant comes not just one but infinite iterations of every possible variant of probability, which one of the umpty-bazillion variants of ourself that pours from the prior moment is the "real" one?

On the one hand, that's an easy one.  Why, we are, of course.

Yet it makes the reality of our being...that we are, that we cohere, that we somehow have integrity as selves...feel even more astounding.  Miraculous, even.