I've read Mr Kent's paper, or most of it (I'm afraid with limited time I skipped a few bits that seemed incoherent to my fuzzy brain at least) and I have to admit it didn't appear to say anything for or against the MWI except that (a) he obviously doesn't like it, and (b) some people have apparently misunderstood some of its implications (or perhaps (c) *nobody*understands its implications, which would put it in the same position quantum theory was in for at least its first 50 years, though without the experimental successes to bolster belief that it's correct).
His proposed test doesn't strike me as terribly useful, if only because he seems to have roughly approximated the reproductive strategies of (most) male and female animals that care for their young - the males tend to follow the "tripe or bust" strategy, the females the "slow and steady" one, for reasons that I believe are obvious to any evolutionary biologist. Does this mean that males live in a multiverse and females a universe? :-) Maybe that explains the alleged monofocus of typical male humans vs the alleged broader focus of females... (Or that could be explained by the requirements of hunting vs those of looking after children.) So I'm not sure where this leaves any proponents or opponents of the MWI. On 24 March 2014 19:57, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: > On 3/23/2014 11:27 PM, LizR wrote: > > On 24 March 2014 17:48, chris peck <chris_peck...@hotmail.com> wrote: > >> The only person in any doubt was you wasn't it Liz? >> > > Er, no, lots of people got the wrong end of the stick and argued about > it at length. I was one of the ones who said he probably meant ... whatever > it turned out he meant. (Maybe I just don't have enough maths background to > get the wrong end of the stick on this sort of thing.) > > > I wonder if people on the list are aware of Adrian Kent's proposed test of > MWI. Before you look at his paper on the link below, answer this question: > > By courtesy of genetic engineering and an oppressive Orwellian government, > you must choose a reproductive strategy for yourself and all your > descendants. You will become a member of either humans-a or humans-b. > Each generation, say 70yrs, all humans-a die and leave one progeny, so the > human-a population stays constant. But each generation the human-b > population will, in accordance with a 0.5 probability quantum event, either > go extinct, none have progeny, or they triple, each one dies leaving three > progeny. > Then the question is, which new subspecies do you want to join, human-a or > human-b? > > Kent's paper is arXiv:0905.0624v2. > > Brent > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
