5 ms·

Which parts have the story you are experiencing? It’s random, isn’t it? I mean at this point you might as well just start arguing that nobody can reason or arg

Which parts have the story you are experiencing? It’s random, isn’t it? I mean at this point you might as well just start arguing that nobody can reason or argue anything.

layer8 4y ago
Honestly, I don’t quite understand what problem you see. The obvious answer is that each you has been experiencing the branch they are in, and will continue to split into more yous that will each again experience the branch they are in. It seems that you’re assuming that there is only a single linear you with a single subjective future, and can’t conceive of your subjective experience forking. But the point is that the perceived linearity of the self is only an illusion, stemming from the vantage point of any given you at any given point in time looking at his/her respective past at that point in time (which for each of them indeed looks linear). Your future branches are all equally real futures of your current self. Your current self will end up in all of them, but of course each of those future yous will only remember their shared past (your current present) and not have any perception of the other branches. The fact that we never subjectively experience the branching (because we are merely a content of the branch, just like the running program is merely a content of the forking VM and does not notice that it is being forked) may be why some people have difficulties with the idea of their subjective experience splitting into separate futures. Again, take the program/VM analogy. What would you expect the program to experience? The answer is that the experience will differ depending on which clone you consider (assuming that the VMs diverge like the MW branches diverge), yet all of the clones used to be the same running program. All the clones are equally real continuations of the original running program, just like in MW the different yous are equally real continuations of their former single consciousness (but now are separate consciousnesses). You are right that we can’t reason about which future we will end up in, because we will end up in all physically possible futures. That can indeed be a philosophical conundrum. Decisions we make are only effective in the branch they are made, and there will presumably always be (equally real and existing) branches where they are not made. That shouldn’t detract from making desirable decisions though, because once we make them, we are necessarily in the branch where we made them, and it’s only our unlucky former future selves who didn’t make them that are now in the less desirable branches.
- raattgift 4y ago
  > That shouldn’t detract from making desirable decisions though, because once we make them, we are necessarily in the branch where we made them, In a branch, surely? While you're thinking for a second or so, there will be numerous nuclear decays in the relevant areas of your brain. Potassium-40 specific activity in the brain human brain is in on the order daBq to hBq kg^-1; there are other radioactive isotopes to be found in the brain, and there are plenty of other branching events. So "there will always be (equally real and existing) branches in which they are made", right? When thinking of how many worlds in the MWI formalism there are, always think much larger than your intuition tells you, since every quantum outcome is realized. One needs only a small finite fraction of the universe to reach uncountably infinite branches. That should be taken into account when evaluating aesthetic concerns like conceptual clarity particularly for something that requires a weighty set of quantum numbers, like consciousness. > assuming VMs diverge like the MW branches diverge You could try to apply this to your VM-forking analogy, by generating a different VM image per bit of VM memory (including registers and memory-mapped I/O devices and the like) per clock cycle, taking the simplifying assumptions that clock-time is uniform for all bits and the clock cycle is the minimum possible time. Then as they say, shrink the lattice, taking clock cycle -> Planck time, bit-layout -> Planck volumes, binary content of each bit -> field content of (continually interacting and self-interacting) 24+ Standard Model fields. And we're still not even fully relativistic. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_number
  - layer8 4y ago
    If I understand correctly, you are arguing that MW is unattractive as an interpretation due to the number of branches. I don’t feel that way. I find MW attractive because it requires less assumptions. It feels natural to me that the physical laws describe a relation (in the mathematical sense) between past and future, rather than a function. I don’t have a problem with uncountable infinity. I mean, the number of possible functions on the natural numbers, a fairly simple thing, is already uncountable. It shouldn’t be a surprise. We also don’t know whether the universe is actually non-discrete at the base level. It may still turn out that there is really just a countable infinity of possible states of the universe, and thus also just a countable infinity of branches. That’s still humongous — it can accommodate anything you could possibly imagine — but I rather see this as a pro of MW.

Which parts have the story you are experiencing? It’s random, isn’t it? I mean at this point you might as well just start arguing that nobody can reason or argue anything.

layer8 4y ago

Honestly, I don’t quite understand what problem you see. The obvious answer is that each you has been experiencing the branch they are in, and will continue to split into more yous that will each again experience the branch they are in. It seems that you’re assuming that there is only a single linear you with a single subjective future, and can’t conceive of your subjective experience forking. But the point is that the perceived linearity of the self is only an illusion, stemming from the vantage point of any given you at any given point in time looking at his/her respective past at that point in time (which for each of them indeed looks linear). Your future branches are all equally real futures of your current self. Your current self will end up in all of them, but of course each of those future yous will only remember their shared past (your current present) and not have any perception of the other branches. The fact that we never subjectively experience the branching (because we are merely a content of the branch, just like the running program is merely a content of the forking VM and does not notice that it is being forked) may be why some people have difficulties with the idea of their subjective experience splitting into separate futures. Again, take the program/VM analogy. What would you expect the program to experience? The answer is that the experience will differ depending on which clone you consider (assuming that the VMs diverge like the MW branches diverge), yet all of the clones used to be the same running program. All the clones are equally real continuations of the original running program, just like in MW the different yous are equally real continuations of their former single consciousness (but now are separate consciousnesses). You are right that we can’t reason about which future we will end up in, because we will end up in all physically possible futures. That can indeed be a philosophical conundrum. Decisions we make are only effective in the branch they are made, and there will presumably always be (equally real and existing) branches where they are not made. That shouldn’t detract from making desirable decisions though, because once we make them, we are necessarily in the branch where we made them, and it’s only our unlucky former future selves who didn’t make them that are now in the less desirable branches.

raattgift 4y ago
> That shouldn’t detract from making desirable decisions though, because once we make them, we are necessarily in the branch where we made them, In a branch, surely? While you're thinking for a second or so, there will be numerous nuclear decays in the relevant areas of your brain. Potassium-40 specific activity in the brain human brain is in on the order daBq to hBq kg^-1; there are other radioactive isotopes to be found in the brain, and there are plenty of other branching events. So "there will always be (equally real and existing) branches in which they are made", right? When thinking of how many worlds in the MWI formalism there are, always think much larger than your intuition tells you, since every quantum outcome is realized. One needs only a small finite fraction of the universe to reach uncountably infinite branches. That should be taken into account when evaluating aesthetic concerns like conceptual clarity particularly for something that requires a weighty set of quantum numbers, like consciousness. > assuming VMs diverge like the MW branches diverge You could try to apply this to your VM-forking analogy, by generating a different VM image per bit of VM memory (including registers and memory-mapped I/O devices and the like) per clock cycle, taking the simplifying assumptions that clock-time is uniform for all bits and the clock cycle is the minimum possible time. Then as they say, shrink the lattice, taking clock cycle -> Planck time, bit-layout -> Planck volumes, binary content of each bit -> field content of (continually interacting and self-interacting) 24+ Standard Model fields. And we're still not even fully relativistic. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_number
- layer8 4y ago
  If I understand correctly, you are arguing that MW is unattractive as an interpretation due to the number of branches. I don’t feel that way. I find MW attractive because it requires less assumptions. It feels natural to me that the physical laws describe a relation (in the mathematical sense) between past and future, rather than a function. I don’t have a problem with uncountable infinity. I mean, the number of possible functions on the natural numbers, a fairly simple thing, is already uncountable. It shouldn’t be a surprise. We also don’t know whether the universe is actually non-discrete at the base level. It may still turn out that there is really just a countable infinity of possible states of the universe, and thus also just a countable infinity of branches. That’s still humongous — it can accommodate anything you could possibly imagine — but I rather see this as a pro of MW.