curmudgeon
Is there an “out there” out there?
There are always anniversaries, real or concocted, to
loosen the columnist’s writer’s block and/or justify
the intake of alcohol. I’ll drink to that—to the fact
that we are blessed with a reasonably regular solar system
providing a timeline of annual increments against which
we can enumerate and toast past events. Hic semper
hic. When the drinking occurs in sporadic and excessive
bursts, it becomes known, disapprovingly, as “bingeing.”
I’m tempted to claim that this colorful Lincolnshire dialect word binge, meaning soak, was first used in the booz-ing-bout sense exactly 200 years ago. And that, shurely,
calls for a schelebration. 1 When I was lecturing (briefly) in
Soviet Union2 pre-perestroika, the anniversary-induced
tipple was as richly refined as the Stoli (Stolichnaya)
vodka. You might call it the microbrewed anniversary:
“Exactly 43 years 2 months 6 days ago, Vladimir Ilyitch
took delivery of People’s Blue Rolls-Royce!”
I can’t be as precise, but I feel that a significant point
in my own inscrutable timeline is struggling to assert
itself. Therefore, let us celebrate my first encounter with
David Deutsch’s FOR ( The Fabric of Reality), published
almost exactly 10 years ago, give or take a few Min Planck
units. 3 At that first scan, I had formed distinctly mixed
feelings about my dear old Deutsch. While agreeing with
his pro-Karl Popperism and the central importance of
the Turing principle and virtual reality computers, I was
annoyed by his confused and confusing views on “The
Nature of Mathematics” (chapter 10). An unexpected
package in the mail from Bob Toxen last month, containing a slightly foxed copy of FOR, gave me the opportunity
to reread and rejudge.
I’m now more sympathetic to his grand tour. His
destination is: What’s really going on “out there”? Of
course, we need first to agree that there is an “out there”
out there, to which we can apply the term reality. We may
disagree in detail as to what is “knowable-for-certain”
about this outside reality, and what is merely plausible
conjecture. Some of our observations and perceptions are
surely inconsistent and misleading, but unless you accept
that something out there is “kicking back,” you must
THE FABRICATION OF REALITY
Stan Kelly-Bootle, Author
kindly leave our stage and find another. “Solipsists of the
world, unite” and leave us alone! And what on earth are
you doing reading my column?
There are four FOR strands in Deutsch’s attempt
to grab the ultimate Holy Grail: Popperian epistemology; Darwinian/Dawkinsian evolution; QM (quantum
mechanics); and CS (computing science) including,
especially, the strong Turing principle and QC (quantum
computing). Starting with what will probably shock
you the most: Deutsch asserts the inescapable reality of
parallel universes. Those weird multi-slit photon interferences that so bedeviled the early quantum pioneers
imply an MV (multiverse). It’s worth stressing that under
Karl Popper’s theory of scientific knowledge, some future
“better” hypothesis could conceivably replace or modify
FOR’s MV hypothesis. But MV signals an end to the metaphysical speculation known as the Copenhagen Interpretation, which drags in weird interactions between human
consciousness and atomic particles at the moment of
observation. Some think that the enormous profligacy
of all those parallel universes splitting off at the drop of
a slit is too big a price to pay! Yet, is that just our finite
minds seeking a parsimony that has no place in the fabric
of reality?
We next consider Deutsch’s views on the nature of
scientific theory and its evolution, where, incidentally, he
dismisses the relevance of Kuhnian paradigm shifts. He
places priority on a theory’s power of explaining reality, as
opposed to the “instrumentalists” who place the emphasis on a theory’s ability to make correct predictions. FOR
makes the point that making false predictions rules out a
theory. But of two theories that both make good predictions, you go for the one that offers the better explanations. Here, I detect a weakness, in that FOR does not deal
with the intrinsic subjectivity of explanations. Of course,
you must assume some kind of select “elite” capable of
understanding and comparing the explanatory powers
of, say, Deutsch’s and Hawkings’s cosmologies. Further,
FOR skims over the semantic problems involved in NL
(natural language), which, ultimately, is the only real
