[gwnn]

I think if we had a village of silly robots with no free will and one of the silly robots started to break other robots' necks it would be an objective necessity to isolate it from the rest in order to preserve them. Putting people in jail is more than just "eye for eye" (well, sort of) morality. It has to do with common sense also. Or is this just my silly interpretation?

[helene_t]

gwnn, on Jun 21 2007, 12:14 PM, said:

I think if we had a village of silly robots with no free will and one of the silly robots started to break other robots' necks it would be an objective necessity to isolate it from the rest in order to preserve them. Putting people in jail is more than just "eye for eye" (well, sort of) morality. It has to do with common sense also. Or is this just my silly interpretation?

Absolutely, I agree.

Also, I think that natural selection would favor the evolution of silly robots with a concept of justice that allowed them to isolate destructive robots. But that is not trivial. One might ask if the robots would necesarilly perceive "justice" in the same way as we do, or if there are other solutions to the problem. (Of course, to make this a scientific question one has to define "perception of justice" in a way that would allow for testable hypotheses about it).

There is a second (possibly) rational reason for punishing: The idea that it may deter would-be criminals from commiting crime. This is the root of the idea that only a criminal with a free will "deserves" to be punished: aquiting someone because he had no free will has no influence on the behavior of would-be criminals, because they will either
A) Fail to use their free will in which case they are just programmed either to commit crime or not to, and the threat of punishment will not influence them, or,
B: Use their free will in which case they will know that the rules that zombis don't get punished won't help them

But A) is false, IMO. It is perfectly possible to program a robot to let its decision be influenced by a punishment threat, so one can also believe that punishment works without believing in free will.

More importantly, by aquiting someone because he did not act out of "free will" we motivate other criminals to pretent not to have acted out of free will. Criminals have been known to use the defense that "it wasn't me, it was my genes" or "it wasn't me, it was the way my parents raised me".

[Al_U_Card]

helene_t, on Jun 21 2007, 02:45 AM, said:

Al said:

What would you like consciousness to be?

This is because I worship Occam's Razor.

So, consciousness was developed (by and for you) so that you could observe (and hopefully appreciate) nature? Kind of like getting an artistic appreciation by taking art history. So, once you have observed and appreciated, what's next.......uh oh, do I sense an urge to "create" a response? (Or will you prefer to quote some techno-geek who has neither your experience nor your point of view. Since you are the one that I am exchanging with, hopefully it will be the former. )

[helene_t]

Al_U_Card, on Jun 21 2007, 01:49 PM, said:

So, consciousness was developed (by and for you) so that you could observe (and hopefully appreciate) nature?  Kind of like getting an artistic appreciation by taking art history.

I don't understand that comment. You asked me what I would like consciousness to be and I gave you the answer that I have the most sympathy for. Am I being egocentric by mentioning my own subjective preference? Maybe so, but that was what you were asking for.

Quote

(Or will you prefer to quote some techno-geek mad.gif who has neither your experience nor your point of view. Since you are the one that I am exchanging with, hopefully it will be the former. )

Why not? Maybe the tecno-geek has come up with a better theory than I would be able to come up with myself. Of course I can't tell you how it feels to be that tecno-geek, but that's not my concern. If he can come up with some interesting empirics and some good reasoning, I don't care if he's a zombi, a spiritual person, or whatever.

[Al_U_Card]

helene_t, on Jun 21 2007, 07:00 AM, said:

Al_U_Card, on Jun 21 2007, 01:49 PM, said:

So, consciousness was developed (by and for you) so that you could observe (and hopefully appreciate) nature?  Kind of like getting an artistic appreciation by taking art history.

I don't understand that comment. You asked me what I would like consciousness to be and I gave you the answer that I have the most sympathy for. Am I being egocentric by mentioning my own subjective preference? Maybe so, but that was what you were asking for.

Quote

(Or will you prefer to quote some techno-geek mad.gif who has neither your experience nor your point of view. Since you are the one that I am exchanging with, hopefully it will be the former. )

Why not? Maybe the tecno-geek has come up with a better theory than I would be able to come up with myself. Of course I can't tell you how it feels to be that tecno-geek, but that's not my concern. If he can come up with some interesting empirics and some good reasoning, I don't care if he's a zombi, a spiritual person, or whatever.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. I was more interested in your pov and not what you agreed with etc. If that is your pov then I fully appreciate and respect it.

As well, we all learn from our observations and experience. What we learn and what we do with it depends only on how we choose to apply it. That free will thingie again. But that is another thread altogether, don't you think?

[DrTodd13]

gwnn, on Jun 21 2007, 02:14 AM, said:

I think if we had a village of silly robots with no free will and one of the silly robots started to break other robots' necks it would be an objective necessity to isolate it from the rest in order to preserve them. Putting people in jail is more than just "eye for eye" (well, sort of) morality. It has to do with common sense also. Or is this just my silly interpretation?

Why would you want to preserve the other robots? The whole concept of having a reason for doing something depends on the notion of free will. Moreover, there is no such thing as a "necessity" if free will doesn't exist. If there is no free will then what will be will be and the reason it is that way is physics, not a free will decision. I suspect most people can't grasp the full ramifications of the lack of free will and that those who do claim to believe that free will doesn't exist can't reconcile their desire for survival, lack of pain, etc. with their belief.

[DrTodd13]

helene_t, on Jun 21 2007, 02:19 AM, said:

gwnn, on Jun 21 2007, 12:14 PM, said:

I think if we had a village of silly robots with no free will and one of the silly robots started to break other robots' necks it would be an objective necessity to isolate it from the rest in order to preserve them. Putting people in jail is more than just "eye for eye" (well, sort of) morality. It has to do with common sense also. Or is this just my silly interpretation?

Also, I think that natural selection would favor the evolution of silly robots with a concept of justice that allowed them to isolate destructive robots. But that is not trivial. One might ask if the robots would necesarilly perceive "justice" in the same way as we do, or if there are other solutions to the problem. (Of course, to make this a scientific question one has to define "perception of justice" in a way that would allow for testable hypotheses about it).

There is a second (possibly) rational reason for punishing: The idea that it may deter would-be criminals from commiting crime. This is the root of the idea that only a criminal with a free will "deserves" to be punished: aquiting someone because he had no free will has no influence on the behavior of would-be criminals, because they will either
A) Fail to use their free will in which case they are just programmed either to commit crime or not to, and the threat of punishment will not influence them, or,
B: Use their free will in which case they will know that the rules that zombis don't get punished won't help them

But A) is false, IMO. It is perfectly possible to program a robot to let its decision be influenced by a punishment threat, so one can also believe that punishment works without believing in free will.

More importantly, by aquiting someone because he did not act out of "free will" we motivate other criminals to pretent not to have acted out of free will. Criminals have been known to use the defense that "it wasn't me, it was my genes" or "it wasn't me, it was the way my parents raised me".

Sorry Helene. I think you are just really confused. Your post is laden with notions of goodness and badness. It is "bad" for a robot to destroy other robots? Why would I want to prevent this from happening? Why should absolutely anything be valued in a strictly deterministic universe? I just don't believe that concepts of good and bad exists in a deterministic universe. The notion of "want" is quite meaningless if my "wanting" is merely illusory. The only way that existence or want or "I" can have anything meaning is if something is transcendent. People may tell you that they still care about what they want even if wanting is illusory but I don't find that illusionary desire as a reason to do or not do anything. As I just illustrated, it is so easy to presume free will because "do or not do" presumes choice.

[luke warm]

Al_U_Card, on Jun 20 2007, 10:14 PM, said:

luke warm, on Jun 20 2007, 04:37 PM, said:

everyone pretty much knows my beliefs re: God, so this hypothetical will concern him assume for the sake of argument that God exists (is all knowing, etc) and created the universe... since he is omni in all his attributes, he would know the choices made by me throughout my life... so my question is, would the fact that he knows what i will do in each situation have any bearing upon whether or not my actions are of my own choosing, ie would his foreknowledge negate any vestige of free will?

Were you not created in its own image? An image cannot be an idol as that would go against a commandment, so you must be a part of the whole but including all of its attributes whether expressed and perceived or not. (Like a hologram.)

i agree that 'created in his image' means we were created with all God's attributes, though his is omni and ours not - one reason for eternity imo

Quote

So, you are here and it is there.  You are doing something here that it cannot do from there.

but this does not follow... i can't think of any definition of an "omni" God that would preclude actions by him simply because his creatures reflect him

Quote

Since you are the same, you have the same purpose, just a different mode of expression.  So, you both are doing what you must to fulfill your needs.  How you do these things that are required determines how well you accomplish your task.

yes and no... my purpose was ordained, and is known by God... that being so, is my will free?

helene_t, on Jun 21 2007, 02:45 AM, said:

~~

jimmy said:

i wonder why you feel that "mindstuff" (whatever it is, if it is) must be physical in order to interact with the physical... i assume the opposite would be true, that the physical (for example, the brain) can only interact with other physical entities... true?

According to Denett, this is not just what I feel, it's something virtually all contemporary philosophers and scientists agree on. Even Descartes himself recognized that it was a big problem, it was just that he couldn't imagine any alternative. But the following question is crucial:

csaba said:

It would be interesting to establish what exactly "physical" means.

Today, physics is pretty much the theory of "everything", which renders "x is something physical" nearly tautological. One could imagine the objective World consisting of three classes of objects:
- physical objects which (this is the defining property for physical objects) interact with other physical objects
- nonphysical objects, such as spirits, which (defining property for nonphysical objects) don't interact with physical objects
- the human mind which is the only object that can interact with both. I suppose you could put "God" in this category as well, if you want.

this is the part i'm having trouble with... how can "x is something physical" be tautological? it sounds as if you are saying that there has been a change in thinking re: things metaphysical, for example logic or kindness... or maybe you and i are missing a connection, maybe you are equating the results of physicality with the results of spirituality... or maybe you are saying there is a difference between a thing being physical and a thing being material... are those words synonymous (to you)?

Quote

In Descartes' time, nearly everybody saw "living objects" as possessing non-physical properties: the spiritual was interacting with the physical in animals, the human soma, maybe even in plants. So Descartes was outrageously materialistic for his time. Today, physics has become "everything" so we see Descartes as a dualist. But he was very much monist for his time.

i disagree, i believe Descartes was dualist and i believe the proof is in his writings... now it's true that we can change the definition of words and labels so that today's dualist is the new monist, or whatever

[helene_t]

DrTodd13, on Jun 21 2007, 08:24 PM, said:

It is "bad" for a robot to destroy other robots? Why would I want to prevent this from happening? Why should absolutely anything be valued in a strictly deterministic universe? I just don't believe that concepts of good and bad exists in a deterministic universe.

Maybe you wouldn't care for the robots, but the robots themselves might. Suppose there was some variation in the heritable factory defaults ("instincts") of the robots so that some robots cared for their own kin (and for themselves) while others did not......

As for good and bad in a deterministic universe: suppose you have a sister who is multi-disabled so that she cannot control her own boddy and cannot talk to other people. Yet a functional MRI shows that she can feel pain and joy. When you tell her that you love her she feels happy even if she can't express it. When she hears the doctors discussing whether they "might as well pull the plug" she feels horror, even if she can't express it.

One could say that she has no free will since she cannot influence anything. Would you care for that sister? As a good Christian you probably would.

You might say that her own control of her mental state consitututes free will. If that is so, her free will could become operational if someone enabled her to control a pointing device of a computer by connecting it to the MRI scanner. But I don't see why she would have to be able to control her own mental state in order to be sentient.

Deterministicness belongs to physics. If a single atom is 100% deterministic, so is any network of atoms no matter how complex. At least that's how I understand physics. Whether sentiense has anything to credit physics for, is much less clear. Some would say that even if a single atom is 100% zombi, a network of atoms could be sentient.

Or should free will read "desire", and not "control"? In that case we agree. I believe in desire and I think it's an important concept in ethics. Maybe we have been discussing two different things.

[DrTodd13]

I think all these discussions beg the question. If there is no free will then we have no choice in what we do so it makes no sense to talk about options or to use the word "or." You can try to define right and wrong based on a deterministic sentience all you want but one thing you can never do is bridge the gap between "X is wrong" and "you shouldn't do X" because the missing theorem is "you shouldn't do something that is wrong." First because again this implies one has an option to do or not to do it. Second because I see no reason to treat this as an axiom (in a Godless universe) and you can never prove such a statement because I can always keep asking "why." You shouldn't hurt people because they feel pain. Why shouldn't I cause pain? Because people perceive it as uncomfortable. Why does their illusory comfort matter? Etc., etc.

[helene_t]

luke warm, on Jun 22 2007, 01:07 AM, said:

how can "x is something physical" be tautological? it sounds as if you are saying that there has been a change in thinking re: things metaphysical, for example logic or kindness... or maybe you and i are missing a connection, maybe you are equating the results of physicality with the results of spirituality... or maybe you are saying there is a difference between a thing being physical and a thing being material... are those words synonymous (to you)?

This is very difficult to discuss since it's so difficult to provide concise definitions of all these concepts. I have never been exposed to a concise definition of "physical", "material" etc. Rather, I have formed my own concepts by inference from the way people around me used such words. Unconsciously, I rely on the assumption that people around me have formed the same concepts because they have been exposed to the same language. This assumption clearly breaks down when I encounter someone like you who seem to have been raised in a different culture than mine. Maybe some of these words have been used in a slightly different way when they were told to you than when they were told to me. More importantly (but also more tricky) the concepts you need to form when raised in a (say) materialistic culture may be different from the concepts you need to form when you are raised in a (say) spiritual culture.

Consider this analogy: you and I discuss the color of some object. If you say it's "red", would that make the provoke the same mental image in me as it does in you? Who knows. Even if an MRI scan could prove that you think about the color "red" in exactly the same way as I do, it would not prove that we "feel" the same when thinking about "redness".

Some would say that this doesn't matter (or isn't even meaningful) as long as we both agree that tomatoes are usually red: the important thing, in a social context, about "redness" is that it is the color of tomatoes, not the way it feels to think about red things.

But if I come from a planet where tomatoes have the same color as cucumbers while strawberries have the same color as aubergines, we must be very careful how to use the labels "red", "green" and "violet" when talking to each other. (Of course this could be resolved by reference to some light source the color of which can be predicted from the laws of physics, such as a sodium lamp. But I hope you see what I mean ....)

Anyway, let me try:

"Physics" is a/the science that aims at constructing a single, coherent model that can explain and predict empiric evidence. As such it differs from biology, psychology, sociology etc. which aim at a ratatouille of shallow models that make biased predictions including "noise", the nature of which is beyond the scientific discipline. In the time of Descartes, physics was seen as limited to simple objects like planets and snooker balls. Very few philosophers imagined that such a single model would also apply to life, let alone mental states.

Today, virtually all biologists agree that biology is in principle just physics plus complexity. The reason why we haven't closed down the biological labs and transfer their tasks to the dpt. of applied physics is that the gap between physics and biology still exist at the practical level: our data are still too sparse and inaccurate, the reasoning to complex, our computers too slow.

What about the gap between physics and psychology? Memory, perception, emotions and mental images are just in these decades getting understood as physical phenomena. But somehow it "feels" as there is more to consciousness than the movements of the electrons in the synapses in my brain. That is the hard problem of consciousness. Some dismiss consciousness as a non-phenomena, but I have a number of problems with that. Conscious behavior seems to be different from unconscious behavior - blindisighted people who can perceive images but aren't conscious about them respond differently to the images than normal people do.

It is logically possible that there is something "out there" beyond physics. But I don't see much reason to assume that. You mention logic. That is not something "out there", as I see it, merely the common ground that all reasoning must build on, regardless of the kind of empiric it relies on. Kindness? May depend how you define it but I think it's a down-to-Earth psychological phenomena that can be explained without invoking consciousness or other problematic things.

In the days of Freud, the science of the mind (as opposed to merely behavioral psychology) relied almost exclusively on introspection. Maybe one could argue that as long as that was the case, psychology should, at least partly, be regarded a metaphysical rather than physical theory. But today psychology is becoming more and more of a natural science.

[luke warm]

will you accept as a working definition "that which is suspended in space and time" for either/both 'physical' and 'material'?

[helene_t]

luke warm, on Jun 22 2007, 07:25 PM, said:

will you accept as a working definition "that which is suspended in space and time" for either/both 'physical' and 'material'?

hmmmm .... information has a time dimension, yet it's not quite clear if information should be considered something physical. It probably is in modern physics, but the classical way of looking at it is more like that the paper and the ink are physical things while the information written with the ink is more like something we humans attribute to it.

Not sure if this response makes sense .....

[luke warm]

helene_t, on Jun 22 2007, 12:34 PM, said:

luke warm, on Jun 22 2007, 07:25 PM, said:

will you accept as a working definition "that which is suspended in space and time" for either/both 'physical' and 'material'?

hmmmm .... information has a time dimension, yet it's not quite clear if information should be considered something physical. It probably is in modern physics, but the classical way of looking at it is more like that the paper and the ink are physical things while the information written with the ink is more like something we humans attribute to it.

Not sure if this response makes sense .....

of course it makes sense, everything you write does (or would, if i understood half of it - which i don't)... in any case, i'm used to thinking of things in this context as either material or immaterial (and am unsure how 'physical' differs from 'material'), and have had many debates with people who say that only the material exists... they in effect deny the existence of anything metaphysical, and while this stance is intuitively incorrect it can only be disproved on philosophical grounds

or it could up to now... now i think even physicists can be considered 'dualists' (at the least)... so if that's true, ie. if the immaterial (or non-physical if that's acceptable) does exist, it can hardly be tautological to refer to the physical (or material) as something that exists

but back to the topic, i still maintain that "mindstuff" can interact with the material and vice versa without itself being material (assuming, again, that 'physical' and 'material' can be used interchangeably)... as i said in my first post, wonderful topic

[Al_U_Card]

In an infinite universe EVERYTHING exists. (Yes, Jimmy, there is a Santa God.....;-) ) Therefore reality includes whatever you can conceive of so you need only define things by their appearance and that is totally subjective and depends on your intention when you become aware of their presence.

Btw physical refers to.....the empty space that is 9.9x10 exp30 of most things? But space is not "empty" at the quantum effect level. Beyond the Planck length..... Immaterial should only refer to that which is beond your awareness and therefore unable to receive your intention.

The universe (ours among the infinite multiverses) exists because of our awareness (our consciousness perceives it). Our intention is to understand our purpose within it and then (hopefully) to fulfill that purpose.

[barmar]

I'm jumping into this thread pretty late, but I'd like to recommend a recent book to the list in the original post: Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop. His basic thesis is that just about everything is conscious, but that there are different levels of consciousness (insects are near the bottom of the scale, mammals and baby humans in the middle, grown humans at the top -- and some humans are more conscious than others). Consciousness comes from the ability of a mind to contain representations of minds -- both itself and of others. The notion of "I" is just a special case of the way we're able to think about the actions and intentions of people -- it just happens to be the case where that person is onself. This is the "strange loop" he refers to in his title.

His book is also related to a personal tragedy he suffered. He wrote the book after his wife died, and much of what he came up with is inspired by the way bits of the consciousness of departed loved ones remain in those who survive them. Although she is no longer around to express opinions, often he'll see things and think things like "She would have loved this." These thoughts are probably what inspired our ancestors to create myths about souls, spirits and ghosts -- something about the person seems to persist after the body dies.

[helene_t]

luke warm, on Jun 23 2007, 02:10 AM, said:

in any case, I'm used to thinking of things in this context as either material or immaterial (and am unsure how 'physical' differs from 'material'), and have had many debates with people who say that only the material exists... they in effect deny the existence of anything metaphysical, and while this stance is intuitively incorrect it can only be disproved on philosophical grounds

As I wrote in response to Quantumcat I think the verb "to exist" means different things in different areas. To a mathematician, things exists if they could conceivably exist - this is because Math is a/the science of the conceivable, and "real" existence is irrelevant. If a mathematical object exists it merely means that it could serve as a model for "real" things that could convceivably exist, but whether those "real" things in fact exist is none of the mathematicians concern. In fact much of math is about sets that are too large to be oberved if translated into physical things - the bandwidth of our sensory inputs as well as to our memory is limited to finite sets of objects and countable sets of states of those objects, but that does not prevent mathematicians from proving the existence of much larger sets.

One can see physics as the science of the "real", but I think a deeper (which not necessarily means "better") way of seeing it is as the science of particular models for commonly accepted empirics. We cannot logically prove commonly accepted empirics is "real", and there are also an infinity of models that could fit our empirics and we cannot logically prove that the model we have chosen will be consistent with future empirics. That is why physics, unlike mathematics, is open to debate and revision. However, there are some pretty well established philosophical principles that help us choose among possible models so that physics will tend to produce the most useful insight given our limited knowledge and reasoning capabilities, and so that scientific "facts" rarely get revised. (When a theory has reached undergraduates' textbooks, it is unlikely to get refuted. Of course, merely getting its way into a few peer-reviewed articles doesn't necessarily make a theory a "fact").

One of these principles is Occam's razor which forces us to choose the simplest model among several candidates. Now it is sometimes disputable what "simpler" means (is it simpler to assume the free will to exist or to be an illusion?) but in general, it is simpler to assume that things don't exist. So in physics, things tend not to exist unless it is inconceivable (or at least leads to awkward thinking) that they don't exist. This is almost the opposite of the math criteria.

Example: There is a model for cosmology that says that whenever something happens that might not have happened, the universe has branched in two (think of the way Internet Explorer behaves when you open a new window: it loads a new copy of the document you were already reading so you get two identical windows. If the windows show random animation, they may be slightly different due to the randomness). So after trillions of random events have happened, there are 2^{trillions} parallel universes. Is this a "simple" model? Since it solves the otherwise tricky question of accounting for why random events turn out as they do, one could say so. More to the point: suppose we accept the model. Do the other universes "exist", then? Some would say no, since the model prevents us from observing them (even indirectly) and therefore by definition, they don't exist.

As I see it, the existence of the other universes (assuming that we accepting the multiple universe model) is not a physics question but rather a question related to the meaning of the verb "to exist", which is a philosophical one.

barmar said:

Consciousness comes from the ability of a mind to contain representations of minds -- both itself and of others.

This is interesting. The "mirror test" is seen as a test for consciousness. I never really understood this, to me sentience (consciousness?) is intuitively something very different from self-awareness and empathy. I see self-awareness and empathy as rather mundane things that could easily be programmed into a "stupid" computer. But maybe I'm seeing things completely wrong.

Anyway, if consciousness can really be reduced to self-awareness and empathy, then progress could speed up a lot since a lot is becoming known about the neurophysiology of those phenomena.

[Al_U_Card]

helene_t, on Jun 24 2007, 06:24 AM, said:

Example: There is a model for cosmology that says that whenever something happens that might not have happened, the universe has branched in two (think of the way Internet Explorer behaves when you open a new window: it loads a new copy of the document you were already reading so you get two identical windows. If the windows show random animation, they may be slightly different due to the randomness). So after trillions of random events have happened, there are 2^{trillions} parallel universes. Is this a "simple" model? Since it solves the otherwise tricky question of accounting for why random events turn out as they do, one could say so. More to the point: suppose we accept the model. Do the other universes "exist", then? Some would say no, since the model prevents us from observing them (even indirectly) and therefore by definition, they don't exist.

Hi Helene

As a mathematician, you are better placed to know about what is simpler, (ie more likely) a single unique event or a continuing series of events to even infinite series.......

All of these "parallels", like the virtual nature of quantum dynamical particles, only exist if they need to. They only need to if they are to be perceived and the superposition of the wave-function collapses (coalesces is perhaps more adroit) resulting in their existence.

No need to sweat it, as we have "created" quite a few since this thread began...lol

[helene_t]

Came to think of something:

Denett's model is this: Consciousness is required to ask the questions to which the "lower-level" mental modules provide answers. For example, a blindsighted patient cannot on his own initiative discover an object in his visual field because he lacks the fantasy to ask himself about the existence of the object. But if someone else asks the blindsighted patient if the object exists, the patient can verify it. Presumably, without consciousness the patient has insufficient bandwidth to scan his own visual field and requires some "inspired guess" as to what to look for - somehow the consciousness can provide those guesses.

Let's try to combine this with Penrose's idea. The blindsighted person is just a stupid Turing machine so he cannot prove Godel's theorem. Yet if someone presents a candidate Godel-proof for him he can verify if that particular proof is correct. Now this inspired guess of what a Godel-proof might look like has to come from some "super-Turing" source, such as the patient's own consciousness.

Of course this is somewhat sloppy since Denett talks about bandwidth and Penrose talks about computability, but maybe that could be reconciled. Denett is not too specific about his "bandwidth problem" anyway, maybe it is in fact a computability problem.

[helene_t]

Al_U_Card, on Jun 24 2007, 03:06 PM, said:

As a mathematician, you are better placed to know about what is simpler, (ie more likely) a single unique event or a continuing series of events to even infinite series.......

All of these "parallels", like the virtual nature of quantum dynamical particles, only exist if they need to. They only need to if they are to be perceived and the superposition of the wave-function collapses (coalesces is perhaps more adroit) resulting in their existence.

Hmmmm .... there is a mathematical concept called "Kolmogorov Complexity" which is roughly the size of a document after it has been compressed by TAR or ZIP or such software. So maybe I can just take all the documents that claim to provide a coherent interpretation of quantum mechanics, ZIP all of them, and then pick the smallest one. Pretty cool, I could become one of the few people who have a qualified opinion about the interpretation of quantum mechanics and I don't even have to read anything about quantum mechanics, let alone understand it