The Many-Worlds Interpretation Has Many Problems

Philip Ball explores the problems that many world interpretation poses to the concepts of self and meaningfulness of life in the sense that he understands them.

Nothing in the article clearly points to problems in physics or even philosophy of physics in many world interpretation.

Makes me feel uncomfortable is not very deep argument.

>What can you do with this power to generate worlds and selves? You could become a billionaire by playing quantum Russian roulette.

Quantum suicide isn't exploitable, for reasons I went over in a thread on reddit:

>One thing about these quantum immortality (or modal realism, dust theory, etc.) arguments is they imply one should expect to end up in those proportion of worlds that have the highest measure in which "you" exist. And the most probable actions you should expect to remember are the highest-measure actions that leads to the perpetuation of your conscious experience.

>In this way quantum suicide is not really exploitable, as the vast majority of "your" measure will be in worlds where you find quantum suicide to be unappealing. Even failed attempts will be of much smaller measure then those in which you never try. So stories like Permutation City are sort of the equivalent of stories in which magic is the result of quantum fluctuations. They don't violate any laws of physics but they focus on such a ridiculously myopic slice of possibility space that it is a little absurd, even when you condition on the continuation of conscious experience.

Even if it were exploitable, this is not a reason to doubt many worlds, any more than time dilation is a reason to doubt relativity.

This great comment on that piece by Sengachi is a must read: http://disq.us/p/1wnl71q

> This, he says, is contrary to what we generally learn from physics: that most of the fine details make no difference at all to what happens at larger scales."

Oh? Since when have we disproved the butterfly effect?

People ridicule the nonlocality of Pilot Wave theory. But I’d rather question locality than embrace Everett’s many-worlds theory. If you need to postulate such amazing complexity just to say basically nothing in terms of realism, then you’ve already lost.

Meanwhile as one good physics professor pointed out, none of these alternatives to PWT even rule out nonlocality. So why not just assume it and be done with the weirdness?

Quantum suicide is a fascinating thought experiment. If consciousness is a property of a certain type of brain (or calculation?), then the concept of ‘’’me” is just a variation of the anthropic principle: I believe my subjective experience to be something unique, but there’s nothing unique or special about a human brain and the conscious experiences it produces.

So even if there are billions of worlds, there aren’t billions of “me”s out there. There are simply billions of consciousnesses which share common memories and thought patterns. Each variation would believe itself to be the true “me”, when in fact they are all wrong: there is no “me”. Just the consciousnesses that all those brains create.

So in quantum suicide, there is no transfer of any sort. One consciousness is simply extinguished forever. The other continues.

This aligns somewhat with Buddhist teachings about the illusion of “self”. I don’t believe in the supernatural, but one could consider the idea of reincarnation as merely the fact that there are not instances of consciousness, but instead manifestations of one phenomenon. Which could possibly mean that if you are a conscious being reading this comment at this moment, you can rest assured that your death will not stop “you” from continuing to experience subjective experiences as another person, in another place, at another time. You just won’t realize it, because you won’t be “you” anymore.

Or maybe it’s all nonsense.

I have a hunch there is a variation of quantum suicide that would be less lethal, but no less measurable.