Everett "Parallel Universes" Nonsense Is the Ultimate in Escalation of Commitment

Thanks to the diligent book-hawking efforts of a certain errant professor, you may have read recently about  what is called the Everett Many Worlds theory, a theory that is claimed by its proponents to be “an interpretation of quantum mechanics.” The theory holds that every instant the universe is constantly splitting up into an infinite number of copies of itself, so that every possibility (no matter how unlikely) can be realized. The theory has a name that makes it sound not so unreasonable (with all the planets being discovered, the phrase “many worlds” doesn't sound too far-fetched). But the name “many worlds” doesn't describe the nutty idea behind the theory. The theory would be more accurately described as the theory of infinite duplication, because the theory maintains the universe is duplicating itself every second.

There is no evidence whatsoever for this theory, which is endorsed by only a minority of theoretical physicists. The Everett Many Worlds theory has been rejected by physicists such as Adrian Kent, Chad Orzel, Sabine Hossenfelder, T. P.Singh (who says it has been falsified), Lee Smolin, Lubos Motl (who heaps unsparing scorn on those who advance the theory) and also Casey Blood, who calls it “fatally flawed.” No one has ever observed a parallel universe. We also cannot plausibly imagine such a theory ever being verified. To verify the theory, you would need to travel to some other universe to verify its existence, which is, of course, impossible. Even if you did travel to such a universe, you could never verify the idea that every possibility is occurring in other parallel universes.

Why would someone believe something as nutty as the Everett Many Worlds theory? Belief in the theory seems to be an extreme example of what psychologists call “escalation of commitment.” Escalation of commitment is typically when someone double-downs, triple-downs or quadruple-downs on some monetary or belief commitment he has already made, typically in response to some evidence suggesting that the original commitment was not a wise one. Here's an example:

Wife: Why did you invest so much money in the stock of Worldwide Widgets? The price has dropped 50% since you bought all those shares.

Husband: I totally believe in Worldwide Widgets! Why, now that you mention the company, I'm going to go and invest twice as much money in it.

There's a British expression to describe this type of behavior: “in for a penny, in for a pound” (which refers to the British currency unit worth many pennies).  An American version of the same phrase might be "in for a buck, in for a bundle," the word "bundle" meaning a large amount of cash. 

The classic case of escalation of commitment was the Vietnam War. Modest military commitments were made by the US in the war around 1964, under President Lyndon Johnson. But things started to go bad. Then the commitments of costs and troops escalated dramatically around 1965 and 1966. Despite the low prospects of victory under an all-but-unwinnable military situation, more and more US soldiers (more than 500,000) were sent to South Vietnam. Also, more and more bombs were dropped, until the total number of bombs dropped vastly exceeded all the bombs dropped in World War II. It was as if Lyndon Johnson just couldn't bring himself to admit that he had made a mistake by getting involved in the war. He kept doubling-down and tripling-down his original commitment. The US ended up losing the war.

Escalation of commitment can also occur in regard to beliefs. Once a person has committed himself to some belief, he may then start adopting additional beliefs, perhaps extravagant and irrational beliefs, if such additional beliefs seem to be needed to shore up or defend his original belief decision.  An interesting example of escalation of commitment can be found in the case of physicists who appeal to a multiverse to try to explain away cosmic fine-tuning.

During the twentieth century, it was discovered that the fundamental constants of the universe are remarkably fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life forms such as ourselves. In many cases it was found that some small change in the universe's fundamental constants would have ruled out the possibility of life in our universe. A dramatic example is the exact equality (to more than eighteen decimal places) of the absolute value of the proton charge and the electron charge. Each proton has a mass 1836 times greater than the mass of each electron. But the electrical charge on each proton is the very exact opposite of the electrical charge on each electron. According to page 6 of this textbook, a scientific experiment "proved that the proton and the electron do not differ in magnitude of charge by more than 1 part in 10²⁰."  Were it not for this exact match, which we would not expect to occur in 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 random universes, the chemistry of life would be impossible, and planets would not be able to hold together (as the electrical repulsion of their particles would vastly exceed the gravitational force that holds them together).

Faced with many cases such as these, many physicists began to evoke the idea of a multiverse: that maybe there are an infinity or near-infinity of universes, perhaps so many that we would expect one of them to have been as fortunate as our universe. Such an idea was a most dramatic example of escalation of commitment. The commitment made by the typical physicist was a commitment to the idea that the universe was merely the product of blind, random forces. The discovery of cosmic fine-tuning threatened that commitment, seeming to make the idea seem dead wrong. Rather than retract their commitment to an idea that seemed to be discredited by facts, some physicists “super-escalated” their commitment to such an idea, by evoking the infinite baggage of an infinity of universes. In for a penny, in for a pound – or, in the case of the multiverse idea, in for a seemingly infinite number of pounds.

Of course, the idea of the multiverse is quite worthless in defending the claim that ours is a random, purposeless universe. The idea of a multiverse may be of some value in defending an idea that nobody cares about, the idea that some universe in a vast collection of universes might be coincidentally fine-tuned. But the idea does nothing to defend the idea that our universe is coincidentally fine-tuned. You do not increase the probability of any one random trial being successful by evoking the possibility that there were a gigantic number of trials. For example, if you imagine a trillion lottery players on a trillion planets, each betting a large amount that the number 8328293232 will win the lottery, this increases the chance that one of these players will win with that bet, but does absolutely nothing to increase the chance that you will win making such a bet. So the multiverse idea does nothing to help out the person who has made the ideological commitment to the idea that our universe is random and purposeless. The probability of our universe having all of the physics long-shots needed for biological habitability is exactly the same microscopic probability, regardless of whether there is only one universe or an infinite number of them.

So the multiverse is an example of an utterly futile escalation of commitment. But completely futile escalations of commitment are very common, such as when an investor buys twice as many shares of a stock he previously bought, a stock with a price that is now plunging. An escalation of commitment is usually not a rational thing. It is typically an irrational impulse, an act of desperation to reduce or stifle someone's uncomfortable suspicions that maybe a previous decision or commitment he made was unwise.

There is another case where some physicists have made a gigantic escalation of commitment. Under quantum mechanics, it was maintained that until it is observed in one location, the position of an electron near an atomic nucleus exists as a kind of “probability cloud.” Then when the electron is observed, this probability cloud “collapses,” and the electron is observed in one particular spot in the probability cloud. This is sometimes called a collapse of a wave function.

There was a reason why quantum mechanics made some people very uncomfortable. Quantum mechanics seemed to imply that the act of observation actually determines reality. So in the case of the electron near a nucleus, the act of observation seems to change the electron from something “smeared out” across a kind of probability cloud, to something existing in one exact spot.  Other experiments were done, including the double-slit experiment, that seemed to show that the mere act of observation can fundamentally change how tiny particles act. For example, a group of particles might act like a wave if they are not observed, but act like particles and not act like a wave if they are observed; or vice versa.

Nature therefore seemed to be sending us a message loud and clear: observers are a fundamental part of the fabric of reality. This message was a complete horror and an anathema to a certain kind of physicist, one believing that observers are mere accidental by-products or epiphenomena of nature's blind workings.

Some of these physicists responded to this message of nature by engaging in a gigantic escalation of commitment, one designed to sweep under the rug the message of quantum mechanics that observers are a fundamental part of the fabric of reality.  This escalation of commitment was the Everett many-worlds theory.  The believers in this nonsense claimed that that there is no collapse of the wave function, and that every time an observation is made, all of the possibilities represented by the probability cloud are actualized, each in a separate universe. It was kind of thinking along the lines of "there wasn't a cloud of possibilities that collapsed into one possibility when an observation was made, but instead all of the possibilities in the cloud of possibilities became realities in separate parallel universes." 

The supporters of this raving nonsense seem to think that there are an infinite number of copies of themselves in alternate parallel universes (presumably including many universes in which they rule as the King of America, since their thinking is that every physically possible thing occurs innumerable times).  Such thinkers claim this idea is an interpretation of quantum mechanics. But the Everett many-worlds idea is not an interpretation of quantum mechanics, but instead merely a bizarre fantasy very loosely inspired by quantum mechanics. Similarly, if I look through a telescope and see a tiny point of light, and speculate that this is a fleet of extraterrestrial spaceships coming to conquer our planet, that is not an interpretation of my telescope observation. It is instead a bizarre fantasy very loosely inspired by my telescope observation. 

What's going on with the Everett many-worlds theory is escalation of commitment, some escalation of commitment a billion times more dramatic than when someone doubles-down on his bad stock pick by buying twice as many shares of the plunging stock.  Having committed themselves to the idea that observers are mere accidental by-products of a purposeless universe,  like the scent from some boiling soup, certain people cannot stand to believe what quantum mechanics is telling us, that observers are a fundamental part of the fabric of reality.  As a desperate defense against such an indication of nature, such people have erected speculations of an infinity of parallel universes, thinking this will somehow help.  Such speculations are ludicrous, but that's how escalation of commitment typically is. It's usually not something logical, but an act of desperation to try to prop up beliefs or conceits or previous commitments that are threatened.  Escalation of commitment in some of the cases I have mentioned isn't just "in for a penny, in for a pound" or "in for a buck, in for a bundle"; instead, it's "in for a buck, in for an infinity of bucks." How high will some of our dogmatic materialists escalate their commitments (and pile up belief baggage) to try to defend their previous belief commitments?  Higher than the clouds in the sky.