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Of course it seems weird to think of Many Worlds as somehow manufacturing universes for each fluctuation. That seems weird and wrong ... because it probably is.
by jblow 8y ago
Of course it seems weird to think of Many Worlds as somehow manufacturing universes for each fluctuation. That seems weird and wrong ... because it probably is.
A better way to think of it is as the equivalent of the relativistic block universe. All these different spaces already exist in some superspace, and ‘random’ events take you from one space to a neighboring one. Nothing is manufactured.
- JProthero 8y agoWell put; this is more or less what Everett actually proposed, and it's the interpretation that mainstream Everettians like Sean Carroll and Max Tegmark subscribe to.
- r_c_a_d 8y agoYes, before reading Tegmark I thought that MW was silly because "splitting" the whole universe for every tiny event just seemed crazy. Thinking of the multiverse as more like a probability distribution where everything exists in a kind of overlay seemed to make sense.
- philwelch 8y agoYou can also think of it (at least I think of it) as a domain-specific subset of modal realism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism From a certain point of view, these kinds of metaphysical ideas are pointless in the sense that it's impossible to actually determine whether they're true or false, and even if you could ask God and God told you, the answer wouldn't matter. It's to some extent a completely meaningless distinction that doesn't describe anything that's directly useful to us. On the other hand, as an illustrative model, it can be an intuitive way to understand nondeterminism. If it isn't intuitive to you and some other model is more intuitive, use that instead. Until the differences between these models become somehow falsifiable, it doesn't matter anyway.