On 29 Oct 2014, at 01:12, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/28/2014 4:12 PM, LizR wrote:
On 28 October 2014 22:52, Richard Ruquist <yann...@gmail.com> wrote:
Liz,
I define consciousness as my ability to make choices.
That is an unusual definition, and not one I think most people
would agree with, although they'd probably agree it's involved in
consciousness. But yes, using that definition the MWI makes
consciousness an illusion.
(Most people call the ability to make choices free will. That is an
illusion under the MWI, and indeed most theories of physics.)
Bruno responds with the Gaussian (somewhat like measure theory)
which suggests that some worlds are less important than this one.
I don't know about Bruno but David Deutsch appears to think that
some decisions will have a much higher measure in the multiverse
than others. So, say, 99.99% of me (so to speak) will have coffee
and only 0.01% will decide on a whim to have a milkshake. (And
0.0000000000001% will think so hard about it that they
spontaneously combust.)
That raises the question of how the multiple-worlds split. Does the
0.01% imply that the world must split into 1e5 copies, in one of
which you have a milkshape? Or does it require that it must split
1e15 ways so that you can spontaneously combust in one. I think
Bruno's UD tries to take care of this by have infinitely many
threads thru the occasion of your whim. But this is different
compared to the Helsinki/Moscow/Washington thought experiment. In
that case the Moscow and Washington guys are created. But in the
UD's infinite threads the infinite threads all exist timelessly.
In the DeWitt-Wheeler equation, time disappears too. In the WM-
duplication, guys are created relatively to you, and *that* happens
infinitely often in the UD-computations. Like Einstein said, "time is
an illusion, although a persistent one".
Neither Everett, nor Deutsch, nor computationalism solved all problem,
we just get the tools to formulate them.
Wise many-worlders will not pretend that "no collapse" explains all
weirdness. They just feel like the collapse itself is just too much
weird than to be accepted. Here too I am close to Einstein view: I
don't see what it could mean to abandon 3p- determinacy and 3p-
locality in the physical realm: God does not play dice, and there are
no action at a distance, although it might look like that, but only if
we abstract away some terms or the superposition. In quantum
teleportation, Alice has to send some bit of classical information to
tell him which part of the multiple terms wave they share.
Bruno
Brent
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