Re: SUO: RE: RE: RE: On the relevance of EXPRESS, EPISTLE, etc.to SUO -- RE: RE: RE: Some Procedural Suggestions
>"West, Matthew MR SSI-GREA-UK" <Matthew.R.West@is.shell.com>:
>MW: We have built in the idea that spatio-temporal extents are "possible".
>Some of the possible ones are actual, i.e. in the universe we inhabit. Each
>possible universe is some spatio-temporal extent. Alternative Universes can
>share temporal parts, so JFK's life up to his going or not going to Dallas
>cold be shared by two 4D universes (this is much more problematic with a 3D
>ontology).
>Philip Jackson <phil.jackson@computer.org>:
> > More
> > broadly, how
> > would EPISTLE represent the concept of a "multiverse" as
> > postulated in the
> > "many worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics?
>
>MW: I am not familiar with this, so either you can deduce how to do it from
>what I have already said, or you need to give me a more detailed
>description.
I think that it would fit into the EPISTLE ontology pretty well, in
fact. The only important change is that 'reality' would have to be
expanded to allow a branching set of possibilities, with the
provision that any particular branch in this is the 'observed
reality' to the observers which inhabit it. This raises some
conceptual difficulties in accounting for shared experiences between
observers, but these arise in the Everett interpretation of QM in any
case.
Pat Hayes
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