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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3978 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: On the topic of Quantum Suicide/Immortality...

    Partly, the many-worlds hypothesis is the only hypothesis that logically makes sense.

Nothing requires the universe to make logical sense. Water, for example, is one of a handful of chemical compounds that expands in phase transition from liquid to solid. Ice is less dense than water - a true anomaly in the physical world. If it didn't, every time a lake froze a layer of ice would descend downward to smother all life underneath. Life on earth would be confined to the tropics. Yet we have bizarre, irrational ice and as a consequence, fish live through the winter.

Occam's razor has been blunted many times on the conundrum that is quantum mechanics. Do not suppose that just because something "makes sense" it must therefore be true, particularly when one is discussing quarks.





b_b  ·  3977 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Nothing requires the universe to make logical sense.

This is a battle I get into over and over in my life. The universe obeys certain laws of interaction between particles and that's the end of it. Nothing that we think should happen matters. As David Hume pointed out, you can't get an 'ought' from an 'is'. Water is a great example of this, not only for the ice not sinking, but also because of its unreasonably high surface tension and boiling point. None of these qualities are predictable; we can only see them empirically. Life itself doesn't really make sense, but why should it? Logic is a construct of language, not of the universe itself. When we ascribe our version of 'logic' to science we get awesome things like eugenics.