I don't know the data on this, but I'm surprised you're doubtful. Don't you think the media and doctors alike have been pushing the idea that plant-based diets are healthier? My doctor suggests a plant-based diet for health. A family member of mine who gets most of his scientific and historical info from netflix is thoroughly convinced that meat will kill you. Just anecdotes of course.
Honestly, I wish media would be pushing the idea that plant-based diets are healthier. Instead, all I see in the media is advertisements for meat and dairy products. Doctors tell me that "oh maybe it's because you're vegan?" whenever there is ever anything wrong with me, like say, a cavity at the dentist.
I know about 20-30 other vegans, and literally all of them are vegan for ethical or environmental reasons. None of them do it for health reasons, otherwise vegan pizza, vegan hot chocolate and vegan muffins wouldn't have been a thing.
My experience is also just anecdotal of course. And it might also be a difference in culture or country, perhaps.
Hm, interesting! I see advertisements for meat too, but I generally don't get the impression of them trying to say meat isn't unhealthy. I mean, by and large, it does seem true that pushing veganism or vegetarianism would have a positive effect on people's health, as far as I can tell. Maybe the media should actually be pushing it more. Or at least, in your country/culture.
But I wonder if the high saturated fat content in fattier meats and meat's higher caloric content are still confounders here. I would be shocked if controlling for calories, saturated fat, and fiber still yielded differences in these risk factors.
People pushing these views (views I am highly sympathetic to, to be sure) often don't understand how to communicate them properly to people who don't already agree with them. People are already resistant to changing their minds through cordial and well-reasoned discussion, let alone through polemics.
If you're a discord user, there's a high, high chance that you don't give a hoot about privacy or anything like that. Convincing people to deal with inconveniences for the sake of something that doesn't yield a short-term reward is difficult, even with things normally acknowledged to be important, like health or finances---with privacy, it's going to be at least an order of magnitude more difficult to persuade someone not just in the abstract but enough to actually get them to make changes.
I think you have to be, so to speak, the midwife who helps the other give birth to their own ideas---plant the seeds in their mind and allow them to come to the conclusions themselves. The temptation to shock people out of their dogmatic slumbers is strong, but it's just generally not going to work. I've been the person jumping up and down while screaming about how the 1984 dystopia is coming. It's never convinced anyone who didn't already agree with me.
...things would be different if there was an fully functioning free software, privacy-respecting drop-in replacement to discord; you could just say "instead of discord, why not use X?" with no polemics about privacy needed. That is, I think, the most effective way to actually get people to jump ship. As far as I can tell, none of mumble, xmpp, or matrix are as easy to use and convenient as discord. (As much as I love xmpp.) Maybe Zulip?
This reminds me of how, if I recall correctly, in the original paper on adversarial attacks, the authors found that adversarial attacks on one neural network would generally have some success on other neural networks if they were trained for similar tasks (say, labeling images).
I think GP's point was specifically about science answering the questions like "why is there something rather than nothing?"; relativity and QFT don't say anything about this question.
(Though lacking falsifiability isn't necessarily such a bad thing even for scientific theories anyway.)
I think the spirit of the question is why anything---atoms, consciousnesses, laws of nature, quantum fields, etc.---exists, instead of nothing at all---no atoms, consciousnesses, laws of nature, fields, etc. QFT doesn't answer this question, does it?
Yes, it answers these questions for all of those things except quantum fields. Why those fields exist we do not yet know, and may never know. But reducing the question to a single thing with an unknown origin rather than many things with (allegedly) unknown origins is still progress, particularly since that last remaining "thing" is not actually a thing that exists. And if you want to go down that rabbit hole, you should read this first:
How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature exist? I included atoms as only one of the items on the list for a reason.
Not to say science isn't useful or that it hasn't made progress in explaining things. But the line of thought that this question is related to is, loosely, whether there need be any ultimate, necessary explanation to things and what kind of explanation that would be, or whether explanations bottom out at brute, contingent facts. This kind of topic, regardless of whether your answer is a necessary existence or brute fact, doesn't seem to be scientific---or would you disagree?
> How does it answer why consciousness or laws of nature exist?
That's a longer story than will fit in an HN comment. But the TL;DR is that once you have atoms, that leads to chemistry, which leads to biology, which leads to brains, which leads to consciousness and all the other interesting things that brains do. But these are all emergent phenomena. There's nothing brains do that cannot be explained in terms of atoms.
> whether there need be any ultimate, necessary explanation to things and what kind of explanation that would be, or whether explanations bottom out at brute, contingent facts
You're flirting with teleology here. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm making an observation here, not a value judgement.
It is an open question whether there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things". But science can shed some light on that by demonstrating that if there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" it almost certainly has nothing to do with us humans. We're just the result of rolling countless trillions of cosmic dice in one tiny corner of the multiverse. That's not the answer that most people who ask the question of "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" want to hear, but all the evidence points to that being the truth. And so the best explanation of people asking this question hoping for a different answer is that they are engaging in the same kind of wishful thinking as, say, erstwhile inventors of perpetual motion machines. Science can't prove that it's impossible to do an end-run around the laws of thermodynamics, but there is still a reason that perpetual motion is the canonical example of crackpottery.
>There's nothing brains do that cannot be explained in terms of atoms.
But the relationship between brain chemistry and consciousness is at best correlating certain conscious states with certain neurological states. The question is why there is consciousness at all. Maybe it's an emergent phenomena, sure, but it's not clear to me how the arising of consciousness from matter can be completely characterized through science. One reason is because science deals only with physical things, but consciousness is a non-physical thing. No doubt there is relevant science, but I don't know that science alone provides an explanation for why we are not philosophical zombies. You can, of course, take Dennett's view that qualia don't really exist, but in defending this view he did a lot of... philosophy.
And QFT explaining laws of nature would be strange considering QFT is included in the laws of nature.
>teleology
Well, I'm not positing that there's any purpose or telos involved in these explanations, just that there are explanations---there are reasons why things are the way they are ("why" in the sense of material or efficient causes, not final causes).
>It is an open question whether there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things". But science can shed some light on that by demonstrating that if there is an "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" it almost certainly has nothing to do with us humans. We're just the result of rolling countless trillions of cosmic dice in one tiny corner of the multiverse. That's not the answer that most people who ask the question of "ultimate, necessary explanation to things" want to hear, but all the evidence points to that being the truth. And so the best explanation of people asking this question hoping for a different answer is that they are engaging in the same kind of wishful thinking as, say, erstwhile inventors of perpetual motion machines. Science can't prove that it's impossible to do an end-run around the laws of thermodynamics, but there is still a reason that perpetual motion is the canonical example of crackpottery.
So my point here is simply related to your first sentence---there are philosophical arguments as to why there must be an ultimate, necessary explanation, and there are philosophical reasons to believe these arguments fail. But I don't see science as being sufficient for adjudicating this dispute, as I think you'd agree.
(I would agree with your point about how science shows us just how small humanity is in the larger cosmos, though I'm not sure that's necessarily in contradiction with religion. But that's a whole other can of worms.)
>How ironic that you would say that in a thread about Daniel Dennett's passing. You have obviously not read "Consciousness Explained."
I mean, Dennett is denying the existence of qualia altogether, as I said, via philosophical argumentation. The argument that science tells the full story here is itself a philosophical one.
>You should watch this:
Yes, the bottoming out of explanations is exactly what's at stake. The idea of a necessary explanation is that the answer to the question of "why?" is that it must be that way, that it could not have been any other way---that's what it means for an explanation to be necessary. And there are arguments why there must be such a thing that could not have been any other way, and arguments against it---it's within the realm of philosophy. Feynman is right to note that scientific explanations can go no further past a certain point. It's a bit ironic that Feynman was so anti-philosophy when he gave a rather philosophical answer to what might seem like a straightforward scientific question at first glance.
>Yes, obviously. There are arguments for why the earth must be flat too. Why should I care about either? They're just wrong.
Well, the discipline of philosophy also includes people pointing out reasons why such arguments don't work, which seems worthwhile, just like science includes reasons why arguments for the flatness of the earth are untenable and reasons why the roundness of the earth is a far better explanation for the data.
> Dennett is denying the existence of qualia altogether
Not quite. Dennett's thesis is that qualia are illusions, not that they don't exist. Illusions exist, they are just sensory perceptions that don't reflect any actual underlying physical reality.
> The idea of a necessary explanation is that the answer to the question of "why?" is that it must be that way
Yes, I know that's the idea. But you can't get past the anthropic principle. Even if that is not the ultimate explanation, the fact that it could be, and the fact that there is overwhelming evidence that humans are not privileged in any way, means that even if there is a better answer, we can never find it because we can never rule out the anthropic principle. We have to make our peace with that, just as we have to make our peace with the Second Law and the halting problem.
> Well, the discipline of philosophy also includes people pointing out reasons why such arguments don't work, which seems worthwhile, just like science includes reasons why arguments for the flatness of the earth are untenable and reasons why the roundness of the earth is a far better explanation for the data.
Actually, scientists don't spend a lot of time debunking flat-earthers. They just write them off as crackpots who are not worth the bother. You're not going to get an NSF grant to study whether or not the earth is round.
I just mean to say that Dennett denies that there is anything that is "ineffable, intrinsic, private, [and] directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness". But my point is that this is a particular philosophical term whose existence and nature is being disputed, and that this is being done on philosophical grounds.
>Yes, I know that's the idea. But you can't get past the anthropic principle.
Well, the anthropic principle is more relevant for fine-tuning arguments, the question here is more whether or not there can be brute facts, but that aside, my contention is just that this dispute is not one that science adjudicates.
>Actually, scientists don't spend a lot of time debunking flat-earthers.
I mean, sure, because the scientific arguments for the roundness of the earth have been laid out and there's not much more left to say, but cases don't generally get so neatly closed in philosophy.
All of this is really just to say that there are areas of discussion where it's philosophy rather than science that has to be our instrument for adjudicating disputes. Maybe this area of discussion isn't interesting to you, but that's fine, not every subject in academia has to be interesting to you.
> the question here is more whether or not there can be brute facts
That depends on what you mean by "brute fact". Can you give me an example of one?
> there are areas of discussion where it's philosophy rather than science that has to be our instrument for adjudicating disputes
And I dispute that, and I believe I can support my position by refuting that very claim with science. If it is true that there exist "areas of discussion where it's philosophy rather than science that has to be our instrument for adjudicating disputes" then you should be able to give an example of such an area of discussion, and I predict that you can't.
BTW, I would like nothing better than for you to actually prove me wrong about this. But I've thought about this for a very long time and posed this challenge to a lot of people. If you succeed, you will be the first.
OK, I'd like nothing better than for you to show me that there's no such area.
Since we're talking about contingency...
I'll just lay out a version of the argument from contingency:
1. A contingent being (a being such that if it exists, it could have not-existed) exists.
2. All contingent beings have a sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation for their existence.
3. The sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation for the existence of contingent beings is something other than the contingent being itself.
4. The sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation for the existence of contingent beings must either be solely other contingent beings or include a non-contingent (necessary) being.
5. Contingent beings alone cannot provide a sufficient cause of or fully adequate explanation for the existence of contingent beings.
6. Therefore, what sufficiently causes or fully adequately explains the existence of contingent beings must include a non-contingent (necessary) being.
7. Therefore, a necessary being (a being such that if it exists, it cannot not-exist) exists.
8. The universe, which is composed of only contingent beings, is contingent.
9. Therefore, the necessary being is something other than the universe.
I'd like you to tell me what premise you deny, and why you deny this premise on purely scientific grounds.
But I will also happily concede that something other than the universe exists. Quantum fields exist and they are not part of the universe. (However, I do not concede that quantum fields are non-contingent. They may or may not be, we simply don't know. There could be an infinite hierarchy of causation.)
For one, this isn't an ontological argument, this is a version of the cosmological argument.
I mean, I'm not even concerned about the truth or falsity of the conclusion of this argument. I posed this argument to you, and right away, we've started talking about ontological categories and what it means for something to exist. Have we not already started doing philosophy? Wasn't this supposed to be a purely scientific discussion?
> For one, this isn't an ontological argument, this is a version of the cosmological argument.
Potato, potahto.
> Have we not already started doing philosophy?
No. Establishing the meanings of words is part of science. You should read chapter 7 of David Deutsch's "The Fabric of Reality" and pay particular attention to the part where he says, "Languages are theories."
I mean, talking about what things exist, and what things don't, and what it means for something to exist are things that philosophers do as part of philosophy (specifically ontology). I suppose there's nothing wrong with Deutsch's characterization, I guess we can just call the philosophers who, in doing philosophy, discuss the meanings of words (like what it means to exist or, as Dennett and many other philosophers have, what it means to have free will, or all kinds of other terms) scientists who are actually doing science. If we use the terms this way, the academic discipline of philosophy seems perfectly justified since it's actually secretly scientific (they just don't know it themselves!).
But maybe more seriously (and hopefully more fruitfully), I should ask, according to Deutsch's/your characterization, what would count as doing philosophy as opposed to doing science? I would normally say "the things that academic philosophers do as part of their discipline", but it looks like that definition isn't going to stand.
> (And note that "something" and "nothing" in that sentence are terms of art with more precise meanings than the colloquial ones.)
Bingo. You are using a much more specific definition than I was. As the other person commenting said - I was rather hoping you would grasp the spirit of my point rather than zoning on the rather hastily chosen examples. But let's stick with that for a moment.
I picked "Why is there something rather than nothing" because it's often used as the poster-child of unanswerable yet important questions. You have to understand it in that spirit and interpret "everything" and "nothing" in the broadest possible terms.
I wasn't claiming anything about the cosmology or quantum fields - I'm saying that "when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable. (you'll find that at least since Kant, this is a fairly uncontroversial viewpoint within Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science)
I think maybe the reason you struggle to appreciate the value of philosophy is because you use the irreducible wiggle room that is always present in language to frame discussions in such a way so that philosophy is always at a disadvantage. You're straw-manning rather than strong-manning my points and you seem very keen to frame me as some anti-science merchant of woo. (A characterisation which anyone that knows me would have highly amusing)
I am a huge believer in the scientific method and it's primacy. But I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science.
> You are using a much more specific definition than I was.
But this is exactly the problem. If what you meant to ask was, "Why do quantum fields exist" why didn't you just say that? Instead you asked, "Why is there something rather than nothing" which is a vaguely defined open-ended question with a lot of emotional appeal but no intellectual substance, i.e. typical of those parts of contemporary philosophy that are not part of science.
> when you take into account everything science will ever be able to touch - there will be something that remains unknowable
Yes, that's true. But it's not clear that what remains unknowable actually matters. We may never know why quantum fields exist, but so what? We can know that they were not created by a personal God who loves us and wants us to be happy or any such nonsense. We can know that our lives are finite and there is no afterlife and so we have to be judicious in how we spend our time, and so wondering why quantum fields exist might not be the most important problem for us to be addressing. It's enough to know that they exist, and that they behave according to simple mathematical laws.
> I don't believe anyone with any degree of reflection can maintain the view that every fact about reality will one day fall to science.
We know with absolute certainty that this is the case because (tada!) science can demonstrate this (e.g. the halting problem) so we have to make our peace with the fact that there are things we cannot know. But I see no reason to believe that any question that doesn't fall to science will yield to philosophy.
What do you think is nonsensical about Searle? My sense is that he's very much not obscurantist in the way one might think Heidegger or Kant is (of course, the defense is that they use technical language because they're discussing technical things). But maybe you just mean that his arguments fail.
The deep dive version of this convo might be a topic for another time, but the most concise answer I can give is to grab a copy of I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter, and flip to chapter 2 where he discusses an idea proposed by John Searle about the so-called "terribly thirsty beer can." This is an argument from Searle that he believes is a knockdown argument against the idea of consciousness embodied in something that isn't a biological mind as we know it. It is, and I do not say this lightly, it is just stunningly naive.
Hofstadter's dispensation of it in chapter 2 is to my mind, a completely decisive dressing down of the fundamental naivety of Searle's ideas about minds. I can't find any convenient quotation of the passage on the internet, but in my copy of the book it's page 29 chapter 2.
I think it puts on perfect display how truly ridiculous Searle's ideas are, and I think the Chinese room idea is similarly discreditable, and ultimately I think that Searle was more a fraud who more appropriately belongs in the category anti-science apologists along the lines of intelligent design proponents, rather than a positive contribution to the canon of Western analytic philosophy. And the extent to which he has gained influence in academic philosophy is something I take as discrediting of it as a field, to the extent that Searle is it's standard bearer. So if the commenter above cited him instead of Wittgenstein I would be cheering it on as a legitimate observation.
I would acknowledge that this is a rather original take of my own and you won't find many people who subscribe to it.
But the essence of it is, if you consider optimists about the possibility of computers and AI, whether they be philosophers or programmers for major tech companies, and then you consider an opposing camp, made up of various 20th century philosophers, the most prominent of them being Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle, the second camp attempts to approach the problem by asserting that there's an essence to intelligence or consciousness, and that essence is captured in certain key pieces of vocabulary, such as insight, "thinking" and so on. They declare that these are special things that human minds have, that by definition, in some sense, cannot be modeled by any formal description or scientific investigation, and the essence of their definitions is always a moving target.
Their approach to the topic also parallels that of intellectuals who insisted that Darwin was wrong about evolution, and the essence of their insistence was a failure of imagination for the explanatory power of evolution. Obviously I'm oversimplifying, but in some ways you could consider the crux of the debate to be this posture of incredulity that the spectacular complexity of life could be explained the iteration of essentially simple and blind rules.
Searle and Hubert Dreyfus, but Dreyfus especially, looked at the logic gates of computing, and then looked at the dynamic, associative, poetic, analogy oriented aspects of human thinking and thought that these contain some magical essence that couldn't possibly be modeled by computers, and that the fundamental ideas of computing needed to be replaced by some new set of core ideas. However, our recent breakthroughs, while they are based on special and new principles that relate to vector databases, convolutional networks and so on, perhaps exhibiting the very core ideas that Dreyfus and Searle believed were missing, those breakthroughs have happened on the same old boring foundation of computing, with logic gates and whatnot, and there was a failure of imagination on their part to understand that those foundational principles could give rise to the more dynamic concepts that they believed were necessary, and that these two things were not in fact in conflict at all.
And the preemptive assertion that they belong to two a category inaccessible to computing principles as they understood them, indeed to any sort of in computational principles of any kind whatsoever, is something that I would contend is a fundamentally anti-scientific instinct that comes from a place of lacking imagination.
What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do you have any examples? I guess it was a long time ago for you - but maybe you have some ideas of some keywords to search up? I actually am genuinely curious.
>religious apologetics
Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm curious what you mean.
> What kinds of papers made silly errors like that? Do you have any examples?
Good heavens, where to begin? Just about anything about natural language that came out of a philosophy department in the mid-80s. For that matter, a lot of what came out of CS departments in the mid-80s was bullshit too, but that's because people back then were basing their work on what turned out to be a false premise, that language and human reasoning could be effectively modeled by formal logic.
Two specific examples stick out in my memory as things that struck me as BS back in the day:
The second example is a whole book pointing out that the meaning of a sentence depends on the context in which it appears. Well, duh!
> Most philosophers in the west are atheist, unless you mean they're secretly theist? What kind of undercover religious apologetics do you think is going on? I'm curious what you mean.
One of my hobbies is studying points of view with which I radically disagree, so I've spent a fair bit of time talking to religious fundamentalists and young-earth creationists. A lot of their foundational rhetoric is philosophical. It's actually pretty impressive how much thought they've put into it. These people are wrong (IMHO obviously), but they're not stupid.
On religious apologetics, that fundamentalists use philosophical arguments to justify their positions doesn't mean philosophy is largely transparent cover for religious apologetics, does it? I imagine fundamentalists are only using a small sliver of philosophical arguments. Most philosophers today don't think they're providing cover for apologetics, anyway.
> that fundamentalists use philosophical arguments to justify their positions doesn't mean philosophy is largely transparent cover for religious apologetics, does it?
Not in and of itself. But I don't see many other applications. Do you?
Philosophy finds application as cover for religious apologetics to make it seem more intellectually respectable than it otherwise might. I don't see many other areas where philosophy has an impact outside academia.
It finds application for atheists making arguments against religion as well. It finds application in defenses of free will. Scientists seem to subscribe to a Popperian falsifiability. Logic, part of philosophy, has found widespread use, as I'm sure you know.
What are you expecting exactly? Most people aren't going to have a massive effect on the world, whether in philosophy or not. Philosophy is far from the only academic discipline in which most practitioners don't have a significant impact on the world.
I don't know -- something. And it's not about the individuals, it's about the field as a whole. Classical music is not something I particularly enjoy, but I get that some people do, and so the efforts of all the composers and conductors and musicians who produce it have value for that audience. I can appreciate that even if I don't particularly care for the music myself. Likewise for Domino's pizza. Nascar. Cricket. Truck pulls. Rodeos. I don't get it, but I get that some people do.
Philosophy seems to have no audience beyond its own practitioners. That puts it on a par with things like yoga and homeopathy, and does not justify having entire departments at universities studying it.
God help us, it turns out that you can actually get a Ph.D. in both fields:
Wait, I'm sorry - philosophy has no audience beyond its own practitioners? Just look at all the people interested in philosophy in this thread. I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that the majority of people who have implicitly expressed interest in philosophy here are not practicing philosophers. I'm quite surprised by your reference to music; music is something I usually bring up when people tell me that philosophy is useless.
You yourself like Dennett's work, don't you? I know you think that most philosophers haven't produced anything that interesting to you, but I think it's often the case that impact is Pareto-distributed across practitioners of a discipline, certainly not unique to philosophy. Like, I imagine a lot of people are only interested in a select few musicians/bands.
> Wait, I'm sorry - philosophy has no audience beyond its own practitioners? Just look at all the people interested in philosophy in this thread. I'm willing to bet a large sum of money that the majority of people who have implicitly expressed interest in philosophy here are not practicing philosophers.
That depends on how you define "practicing philosophers". The vast majority of people who do yoga are not yoga masters. But no one gets value from watching yoga. The only value in yoga is doing it. This is not true for e.g. music. You can get value from passively listening to someone else play an instrument. It's not necessary for you to to it yourself.
I would claim that the vast majority of people participating in this thread fancy themselves armchair philosophers. It is indeed fun to argue about this stuff. But that doesn't justify paying anyone to do it as a profession.
> You yourself like Dennett's work, don't you?
I've already said that Dennett is a notable exception, and one of the things that sets him apart is that he bases his work in science more than what is traditionally called "philosophy". He's more like a massage therapist than a yoga instructor.
I mean, there are plenty of people who read philosophy and enjoy it but don't publish papers in philosophy conferences or journals, discuss topics with academic philosophers, etc. Reading a work of philosophy without writing a work of philosophy is something that a lot of people do and enjoy.
I'm sure there are some people who do. But books for popular audiences like Consciousness Explained are taken seriously by philosophers too. I don't see why there's any relevant difference between philosophy and music here.
Fine, I'll just pick some random books: Feyerabend's Against Method, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Nietzsche's The Antichrist, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Descartes's Meditations, Spinoza's Ethics, Plato's dialogues, I could go on and on. Maybe you don't like all of these, but there are plenty of people who read these for fun, and all of them are taken seriously by philosophers.
> there are plenty of people who read these for fun
I really doubt that. I think you'd find it quite challenging to find people who have read these books who do not also enjoy engaging in philosophical debates.
But given the effort it would take to test this I think we should just agree to disagree.
>who do not also enjoy engaging in philosophical debates.
Philosophical debates as in talking with other random people about philosophy? Sure, I'm sure most people who have read these books enjoy that. But that's not doing philosophy---such conversations are usually going to be riddled with errors and just not up to par for academic philosophical discussion.
I think we've gone so far down the rabbit hole about why the discipline of philosophy isn't justified that I've nearly forgotten why this current discussion is that relevant. Plenty of people enjoy philosophy, and it's something that humans have been discussing in a rigorous way for thousands of years. Somehow this isn't good enough? I really just don't see why music somehow meets the bar as being enjoyable enough for enough people, but philosophy doesn't. You don't have to be a musician to enjoy musician, and you don't have to be a philosopher to enjoy philosophy. "Oh, well, the people who do enjoy philosophy probably enjoy philosophical debates, so they're basically philosophers!" I mean, isn't this like me saying, "The people who enjoy music probably enjoy humming or singing tunes, so they're basically musicians!" The distinction seems to be getting continually more and more contrived.
There are two different ways of approaching QM: the physicist's way and the computer scienctist's way. You were probably taught it the physicist's way, which is not wrong, but obscures the parts you need to know to understand the MWI. That part really is pretty simple. You should try again.
