I gave this 5 stars because it is a thought-provoking work, despite some issues described below.
First, two notes to potential readers are in order. First note: you probably won’t appreciate or fully make sense of this book if you do not have an academic background in physics or philosophy of physics. Second note: if you are not familiar with David Albert, he has a unique, precise, deliberate way of speaking that comes across in this book as though through dictation. The reader may want to look up some youtube videos of David speaking in order to better appreciate his writing style.
Here are a few noted defects of this work (one for each of the three chapters):
1. In Chapter 1 David painstakingly shepards us through an argument that a careful analysis of classical mechanics should lead one to consider, even without empirical signposts whatsoever, quantum mechanics as an inevitable possibility. The key insight is that the consideration of multiple particles interacting in phase space (as opposed to the ordinary situation in Hamiltonian mechanics of a many-particle system being represented as a single high-dimensional point in phase space) naturally leads to entanglement between “branches” of states which, upon measurement, get “pushed off into another dimension.” The denouement of David’s analysis is the representation a physical state of affairs that is identical to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics; as David writes, “Quantum-mechanical sorts of behavior seem to require that the space of the elementary physical determinables is bigger than the space of ordinary material things,” and indeed gives an explicit example of branches of the wave function being “pushed off” into that space in exactly the same way that they are under many-worlds. And so it was baffling to me that David then dismisses the very ontology he has himself so painstakingly birthed, with a mere sentence fragment and a footnote which cryptically states that the interpretation is “incoherent” because of the difficulty of explaining probabilities.
Now, the position that David is flippantly gesturing at here is well-known to those who study quantum interpretations, but it is particularly strange in this context — for one because he has himself rediscovered and presented something identical to many-worlds, for two because this work is focused on the study of quantum interpretations and many-worlds is one of the most studied in the quantum interpretations literature, and for three because David is elsewhere so very careful and exhaustive and humble in his analysis — that he sets aside nothing more than a single sentence to dismiss even the discussion of the topic. It is made further bizarre by his particular choice of words, not taking issue with any derivation of the Born rule, but with probabilities existing at all in such a deterministic interpretation. The reason I find this such an odd stance is that it is famously easy to come up with a thought experiment, even classically (the “Kirk transporter malfunction” or similar explored by Parfit, Dennet, etc) where one is forced to accept chance in answering a question like “which planet am I going to be on when I open my eyes after transport duplication.” Regardless of where one stands on what those probabilities turn out to be, the fact that subjective probabilities should exist at all in such duplicative frameworks is definitively proven by such thought experiments.
2. In Chapter 2 David dismisses the objection that “the kinds of explanations that this embedding theory has to offer us are extrinsic explanations rather than intrinsic ones” because, he claims, such a criticism can equally be leveled at any physical theory formulated in terms of any abstract objects at all. I don’t find this convincing, and like my previous criticism, many more words are warranted here. Here is an explicit counterexample to David’s claim: mathematical platonism as a physical ontology.
3. In Chapter 3 David makes a big deal of the Hamilton-Jacobi transformation, claiming that “the mere mathematical existence of such a mapping is apparently going to commit the global functionalist to the claim that [all the complexity of the physical universe can be reduced to] a single structureless point-like physical item at rest in a sufficiently high-dimensional fundamental space, and to stipulate that the single law of the evolution of the world is that nothing ever happens.” But, as I think David does (or should) know, this is incredibly misleading. David himself explains that the mapping itself is of course complicated and time-dependent, and that it encodes the dynamics, not the law of evolution of the single point described above. Maybe I misunderstood David here, that he meant this kind of wording as a foil for his later arguments, but he made quite a bit hay of this point, so I don’t think so.
Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now.
Similar items that may deliver to you quickly
Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1
From the Publisher
|
|
|
|
|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
About the author
Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
