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Comment by kashunstva | Hacker News Reader

As awe-inspiring as the imagery from the JWST is, along with what we stand to gain in understanding about the universe, I don’t see that causing any fundamental shift in human philosophical perspectives. We’ve had our “pale blue dot” moment several times, beginning with the Apollo missions. Then practically every subsequent probe has turned around and photographed Earth from increasing distances. Yet here we are, still largely consumed by trivial matters. Any meaningful effects that I think the author is touching on would require the sort collective shift in perspectives that I’m not sure the species is capable of. But perhaps I’m reading it wrong; I’m impatient with this sort of circumlocution.

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Because these trivial matters aren't trivial. Putting food in the table isn't trivial, finding jobs isn't trivial either. Once life becomes guaranteed, our outlook will change.

Still, all the fuss about maximum individualism, petty politics and celebrities feels so utterly irrelevant, it’s frustrating for me sometimes. Here we sit, apes with a giant brain, the most complex structure in the known universe, and we use it to haggle commodities, shift borders a bit and stare at short videos on people’s opinion on other people?

Don’t you ever get that sad revelation that we’re all just moving in a spinning wheel, a dead end? The Fermi paradox being nothing but stagnation after a convenience threshold?

You need to cut us a bit of slack. We’ve only just barely developed the very beginnings of a technological society. By definition, we have the absolute lowest level of sentience necessary to achieve that, otherwise we’d have done it earlier.

On a scale of general Intelligence necessary for civilisation from the minimum of 1 to hundreds, or thousands, or even more we score a 1. And that’s at best, arguably the general population are riding on the coat tails of the few geniuses that actually develop our technology. So most of us are actualy below that.

Certain aspects of modernity do seem to support that conclusion but it also seems to have very far reaching implications.

That’s a good perspective, thank you.

When I realized my partner was (mostly) both able and willing to support me through what turned out to be a prolonged mental health crisis that few would've had sympathy for, it completely changed my life. The amount of suicidal ideation I experienced plummeted. I was no longer crippled by fear that I'll be abandoned and imprisoned/homeless if I can't always live up to some externally imposed standard of output. I eventually became more able and willing myself again to 'give back', but with a new & improved perspective.

Unfortunately, far too many have nothing like this. I am extraordinarily privileged and have to continually process the guilt which comes along with that fact.

None of us asked to be born. In any truly forward thinking culture, the option to receive the basic essentials of life without being overly marginalized for not always having anything substantial to offer in return should 100% be a requirement. I believe many if not most 'deaths of despair' would be obliterated by such an approach, and that a large number of people who would've otherwise died could ultimately give back to their communities in enough ways to make the long term costs justifiable to even the most cynical economist.

We’re already there. The US alone makes more than enough food to feed billions of people year round. That humans aren’t ensuring basic needs for all humans is a choice-the resources exist but people aren’t able to access them. (This isn’t saying everyone who wants to eat steak is going to be able to eat steak. It’s assuming basic caloric needs.)

Then there’s the inefficient allocations of resources that could boost production. The building water infrastructure where needed, etc. It’s all doable but not done.

Not sure if JWST is capable of that but I believe next step in furthering our insignificance will be concluding (due to looking closer and closer to the Big Bang and finding contradicting evidence like huge, very old galaxies) that Big Bang was not a creation event just a "small", "local" annihilation of "some" amount of matter and anti-matter that kinetically blew remaining stuff apart sort of dragging the deformed space-time along. So we can't have any hopes of seeing any evidence of actual beginning of the universe or even any proof that it wasn't eternal.

Indeed. It seems there's some mounting research that the universe may have always existed, and this awareness calls into question our physical and philosophical notions of nothingness (or lack of absolute nothing in the universe).

> I believe next step in furthering our insignificance

The next step seems to be coming from the computer science department rather than astronomy or biology, with the growing demonstrations that intelligence can emerge from simple mechanical operations.

This seems to be the current step rather than next one.

If Everettian interpretation of QM is right we may face another pale blue dot universe scale realization.

Can you please elaborate? I don't understand.

They are referring to many worlds interpretations of quantum mechanics that argues that the quantum wave function is as real as anything. As real as say electromagnetic fields. If this is true then the mathematics say that the universe branches or splits at each quantum event.

Here’s a very very good explanation of this:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nOgalPdfHxM

Curious though, how does this relate to the JWST?

It was implied that we would see another Earth. But that is a science fiction trope.

Right, I’m not sure whether this refers to finding another earth-like planet with JWST (interesting and plausible though not related to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum), or seeing another version of the Earth with JWST that followed a different path in possible many-worlds quantum outcomes (seemingly impossible!).

To the best of my knowledge there's no way for branched universes to ever interact with each other again, so why would a layman even care that they exist, let alone be profoundly changed by that fact?

I don’t know the science of this possibility, but you should check out the short story Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom by Ted Chiang. He writes directly about a future where we have a tool to communicate between branches universes.

Why should I check it out? Is it illuminating, or just a good story, or what?

Sorry I didn’t clarify. It is fiction, but I think it describes a plausible reaction of the general public (the layman of the comment I replied to) to this hypothesis if it was discovered to be true. Don’t want to spoil the good part of the story beyond that!

Ok, and appreciated! Will dig it up, thanks.

Literally everything written by Ted Chiang is worth reading because he is a hell of a story teller.

That's science fiction, though. The Everettian Many Worlds Interpretation is just that: An interpretation of a set of equations. And pretty much by definition the worlds cannot interact in any way. Even if there were some obscure way to differentiate between MWI and, say, the Copenhagen interpretation, I wouldn't expect it to become feasible anytime soon. But as far as I know there cannot be any experiments differentiating between the two (or other interpretations), because they're simply different interpretations of the same equations. They predict the same experimental outcomes.

Well, they interact (that's how you get the double-slit interference — or quantum computing) but probably in very limited ways.

Do branches ever “unsplit”? I mean, if U1 splits into U2 and U3, U2 into U21 and U22, U3 into U31 and U32, is it possible that (say) U21 and U31 might be identical? In which case, couldn’t you say they are the same, and a case of U2 and U3 merging/converging?

Dollars are fungible, but you can still have two of them.

But if you are going to say that - why describe it as a “split”, as opposed to two separate universes which happen to identical in contents up to some point, non-identical thereafter?

Also, what you say about dollars is true because they have certain properties - effectively they have two different criteria of identity, one economic, the other physical. What is the criterion of identity for universes/branches?

>But if you are going to say that - why describe it as a “split”, as opposed to two separate universes which happen to identical in contents up to some point, non-identical thereafter?

But they are (presumed under this model to be) splitting. You posited a case where two later happen to be identical, but that doesn't mean they merge. You'd just have two of them.

>Also, what you say about dollars is true because they have certain properties - effectively they have two different criteria of identity, one economic, the other physical. What is the criterion of identity for universes/branches?

I'd guess that there is none, like electrons. But though those are even more indistinguishable than dollars, you can still have two of them.

> But they are (presumed under this model to be) splitting.

Okay, but what's the actual model here? Let's talk about two different versions of many-worlds:

Version 1: Universes splitting

Version 2: No "splitting" per se ever actually occurs, universes are identical up to time t, different thereafter

Is there any difference between 1 and 2 from a physics perspective–any difference in the maths, or in conceivable results of observation or experiment? Or are they just different ways of wording it? A metaphysical/philosophical difference, but not an empirical/mathematical one?

Also, if the theory is symmetric with respect to time, you'd expect merger as well as splitting, since the former is just the time reversal of the latter – isn't QM supposed to have T-symmetry? Does MWI have T-symmetry?

I think their mere existence is profoundly alienating. For example anytime you make a choice to be kind, there's another universe where you make the choice to be cruel in the same circumstance. Likewise the opposite. The result is that nothing you do really matters in the multiverse, everything happens anyway regardless of your choices. You're just choosing to experience one of countless paths. Arguably it could even be said to be selfish, you're consigning another version of yourself to the cruel path.

I think it's not dissimilar to absolute determinism. Many people, even irrelegious, have a deep aversion to the idea that their choices may be deterministic. You might say why does it matter if they cannot be predicted, and of course the path is one that your brain decides to take, not something that is being forced on it. Still lots of people like to imagine some sort of weird quantum consciousness woo that lets brains make free thoughtful choices independent of physical laws.

One caveat here is that even if every outcome is taken in some branch of the world, they don’t have equal likelihood. So while there might exist a world where a person makes that cruel decision, it may only be a small fraction. I imagine we could ask, how do we feel about our expected behavior averaged across all worlds?

The result is that nothing you do really matters in the multiverse, everything happens anyway regardless of your choices.

That's ridiculous. It's like saying there's no point in playing a videogame because other people are playing the same game differently. If it doesn't affect you why do you allow it to make you care or not care? Personally I think it comes from this sort of arrogant thinking where people are aware they are an insignificant cosmic bug but also are somehow above caring about things at the level of a cosmic bug. It's an ass-backward way of thinking, this "I don't matter so I don't care". A better way of thinking is "I don't matter, so I can care about things that also don't matter, because they're no more insignificant than I am." If a dog turned to us and said "I can never write a symphony, therefore gnawing on bones is pointless" we would call him a foolish dog for refusing to engage with reality at his own level, for thinking that things so far beyond him should make any difference to him and how he lives his life.

To quote James Watson, "I don't think we're here for anything, we're just products of evolution. You can say 'Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose' but I'm anticipating a good lunch."

I think retro-causality explains QM better.

To connect the dots that sibling comment nicely laid out, if the universe splits at every decoherence event then its total size is incomprehensibly more enormous than the jump to "the observable universe" when we discovered other galaxies.

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