On Tue, Apr 29, 2014 at 04:19:01PM -0400, Jesse Mazer wrote: > > 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 >
Makes no sense to me. You do not "thicken the stack of universes", nor do you "increase the portion of the multiverse where good things happen". The Multiverse just is - proportions do not change because of choices of inhabitants. Rather, I think decision theory should be based on "what choices (of measurement) do I make such that the most likely outcome (that I observe) is 'good', and 'bad' outcomes are unlikely (to be observed)". David Deutsch seems to be badly conflating the static block multiverse picture with a dynamic einselectionist picture. Cue the obvious response from John Clark that "free will is meaningless noise", and so consequently is decision theory :). Cheers. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected] University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au Latest project: The Amoeba's Secret (http://www.hpcoders.com.au/AmoebasSecret.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
