On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 3:02 PM, John Mikes <jami...@gmail.com> wrote:
> *Brent(?) wrote*: > No I never read that, but hell yeah, MWI worries me! Doesn't it worry you? > I mean I know at one level that in a very real sense it doesn't matter > whether it's true or not, since the other universes can never affect me, > but at another the reality that everything happens to me that I can imagine > is just plain terrifying. And the 'me' isn't just the versions of me that > are still called by my name, I can't escape the conclusion that I am > everyone and everyone is me and that *everyone's* experience is my > experience at some level. If MWI ever does become the accepted conception > of reality, we have a huge amount of philosophical reorientation ahead of > us. For instance, if I take some risk (like drink-driving, a relevant topic > on another thread), and 'get away with it', MWI suggests I am still > responsible for other realities in which I crashed and injured or killed > myself and/or others. My whole approach to risk management becomes quite > different if all outcomes are realised. > In what ways would your approach to risk management need to change if there was still some notion of different outcomes having different "measures" that correspond to normal classical probabilities? In a MWI context you might have a scenario where you can say "if I take action X, then I expect in 95% of worlds outcome Y will occur, but in 5% of worlds outcome Z will occur", but in what cases would your choice about whether to take outcome X be any different than a one-world scenario where you can say "if I take action X, then I expect there's a 95% probability outcome Y will occur, but a 5% probability outcome Z will occur"? Can you think of any specific examples where this would change your decision? The MWI advocate David Deutsch had a quote about choices and morality in the article at http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17122994.400-taming-the-multiverse.htmlwhich made sense to me: "By making good choices, doing the right thing, we thicken the stack of universes in which versions of us live reasonable lives. When you succeed, all the copies of you who made the same decision succeed too. What you do for the better increases the portion of the multiverse where good things happen." Jesse -- 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.
