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> And you know this with certainty.... how? With enough branches in a truly infinite timeline, the likelihood of there being a combination which produces a spec
by r3trohack3r 3y ago
> And you know this with certainty.... how? With enough branches in a truly infinite timeline, the likelihood of there being a combination which produces a specific outcome is quite high.
It is not. It is quite low. The number of possible states grows at a faster rate than the rate necessary to maintain “infinity.” It’s only true if you assert that all possible states at a branch are added to the set, which is a tautology.
A fun puzzle. Let’s say you have an empty set whose members are sets. You add a set to it of infinite size (like the set of all positive integers). Next, you add another set to it whose size is also infinite but whose members are not contained in the first set. Now you repeat this process an infinite number of times.
You have an infinite set of infinite sets. The question is: is such a set possible and, if so, does your infinite set of infinite sets necessarily contain all possible infinite sets?
- mynameisvlad 3y ago> It’s only true if you assert that all possible states at a branch are added to the set That is generally how "multiverses"/branching timelines are handled, yes.
- ravi-delia 3y agoMost pitches for Everett branches (which are a specific enough concept that it's silly to get all technical, but whatever) hold that there is an amplitude distribution over the entire configuration space of the universe. While the proposed mechanism of decoherence implies a sort of discreteness, every single possible configuration would have non-zero amplitude. Of course there's no specific evidence for this over, say, collapse theories (or something stranger, like Bohmian mechanics), but there's certainly no philosophical issue. Not sure what you think ZFC has to do with physics, but an empty set with members is a tad nonexistent.