On 11 June 2014 05:43, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I knew someone - gosh, it was almost 25 years ago! - who believed that >> we can choose our future from the ones made available by the MWI. > > > OK, you chose to go down branch X, but if MWI is true then in some other > worlds you chose to follow branch Y; and in all worlds you made the choice > you did for a reason in which case it was rational and deterministic or you > made the choice for no reason in which case it was random. Roulette wheel > or cuckoo clock, take your pick. >
The point of the discussion is the suggestion that we can somehow choose to send our 1p experience into a particular branch and not into another one (or into one more often than the other one, when the Born rule says they should come out as 50-50). It isn't the choice mechanism that's in question here (on which I agree with you - but that's something for the free will thread). You might be faced with some uncontrollable-by-you future event and hope for a particular outcome (your horse wins the race, say, or your bet on whether an atom is measured as spin-up or spin-down comes off the way you wanted). This is like a dilute form of quantum suicide in which you don't actually die in the other branch, you just get an unfavourable outcome. Some have suggested we can influence these matters somehow (Russell did, if I understood him correctly). To sharpen up this apparent paradox we consider Alice and Bob who want different outcomes, and who both survive in all future branches. Is there any way Bob can experience his desired outcome, and Alice hers, more often than one might expect simply from counting up the futures in which Alice's preferred event A happens, and Bob's preferred event B happens? Personally I can't see how this could be possible, so I am eagerly awaiting clarification. -- 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.
