31–40 of 71 posts
MWI seems more elegant than Copenhagen in many formulations because the problem of the relative magnitudes of the worlds is swept under the rug. If I perform a quantum coin-flip with 2/3 possibility of heads, then it creates two worlds - but I end up in one of them twice as often - why? The only solutions I've seen to preserve the relative probabilities are: 1) sufficiently unlikely worlds sometimes just disappear, o…
>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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wei…
> If you need to postulate such amazing complexity just to say basically nothing in terms of realism, then you’ve already lost. What about many worlds is complex? The Schrodinger equation predicts macroscopic decoherence. Macroscopic decoherence implies many worlds. Many worlds can hardly be called an interpretation. Rather, it is a prediction. It is just taking the Schrodinger equation literally. Every other "interp…
>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…
If futures where you are not conscious are inaccessible by the anthropic principle, then dreamless sleep cannot be in your future.
Most sleep is dreamless. At 4:00am this morning I will almost certainly be in this state. But being unconscious is not an experience I can have, so by the reasoning of quantum immortality, I should expect with certainty to find myself awake at 4:00am if there are any Everett universes where this is the case. And of course the same argument applies to every other moment of my entire life, and yet somehow I haven't been trapped in a state of wakefulness since the day I was born...
(If sleep is breaking the rules, the substitute it in with "temporary death" if you prefer. Why I am I allowed to "fork into" the branch where I die as long as I wake up later? How does the information about my eventual revival make it to the branching point, earlier in time? Or does the revived version of me exist with measure zero? These seem plain absurdities to me).
Think carefully about why many-worlds doesn't prevent you from sleeping. I think this leads to the correct answer.
I think of it in terms of a phase space diagram. You are conscious in some parts of phase space. Those regions of phase space have certain measures. You should expect to find yourself in parts of phase space with large measures, and not in the parts with small measures. Like this: [1]
In the diagram, increasing purple is "increasing probability consciousness." You should expect to find yourself in the purple area, not 10,000 years off the top of the diagram, deep in a white region. Quantum immortality supposes the latter, and that should be a self-evidently bad hypothesis.
>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…
I agree. I think quantum immortality is real, but even if I was 100% confident, I don't see a clear way to take advantage of it beyond having a long-term outlook. If you did want to build a suicide machine, it better be perfect. If you are trying to win the lottery with say 1:10^9 odds, your machine better have less than a 1:10^18 chance of seriously injuring you but not killing you. If you are capable of building su…
Could the anthropic principle taken into conjunction with our continued existence be used to show that the MWI is more probable? Here's the situation that I'm thinking about: it's well known that we've come close to nuclear annihilation multiple times, either by accident or by tensions between the US and the USSR in the Cold War. If the MWI is correct, it is probable that a good chunk of these worlds have been reduce…
>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…
Unappealing is subjective, though. Sure, the vast majority of "your" measure will be in worlds where quantum suicide will kill you. But there is no reason you can't think of "I will be dead but some version of me will be alive in another universe" as an appealing scenario.
As a thought experiment, suppose that instead of involving quantum mechanics, you were an emulated mind capable of making an exact copy of yourself in this universe. And, for some reason, someone is willing to give you money in exchange for you copying yourself and then immediately deleting one of the copies at random. In a lot of ways this looks similar to the quantum lottery scenario: "you" will split into two copies, one will end up dead, and the other will end up richer.
One difference is that in the quantum scenario, you're leaving behind a whole universe without you in it, whereas in the emulation scenario, the universe will end up with one copy of you either way. But if you don't care about the universe, only yourself, then that wouldn't matter to you. Another difference is the alternative if you choose not to perform the experiment: two copies of yourself (or a self with twice as large a measure) in the quantum scenario, one in the emulation scenario. But then, as an emulation, you could just decide to copy yourself and not delete one of the copies. Normally, that would be pretty different, since the two copies of you would have to interact with each other, perhaps compete for the same resources, while two quantum copies exist fully independently of each other. But you could imagine sending one of the copies off at lightspeed to some distant place, with no intent to ever communicate with the copy again – heck, you could theoretically send the copy beyond the cosmic event horizon so that it's physically impossible to ever communicate again. There wouldn't be anything wrong with doing that – but if you decided "nah, I don't feel like it; one of me is enough for this universe", you can't say that would be irrational or suicidal. So, in the quantum scenario, why should you prefer having two of you (by not doing the experiment) over having one (by doing it)?
MWI seems more elegant than Copenhagen in many formulations because the problem of the relative magnitudes of the worlds is swept under the rug. If I perform a quantum coin-flip with 2/3 possibility of heads, then it creates two worlds - but I end up in one of them twice as often - why? The only solutions I've seen to preserve the relative probabilities are: 1) sufficiently unlikely worlds sometimes just disappear, o…
Or it actually creates three worlds, two heads worlds and one tails.
