On 7/21/2019 12:30 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
On Sunday, July 21, 2019 at 1:18:16 PM UTC-5, Brent wrote: On 7/21/2019 1:09 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:I didn't say there was. I said */youse-self/* sees Moscow and Washington. "Youse-self" is second person /plural/. Brent Ok but no need of youse, the question is clear without it, if you accept frequency interpretation of probability as you should also for MWI, it's clear and meaningful.But does it have a clear answer? The MWI has it's own problems with probability. It's straightforward if there are just two possibility and so the world splits into two (and we implicitly assume they are equi-probable). But what if there are two possibilities and one is twice as likely as the other? Does the world split into three, two of which are the same? If two worlds are the same, can they really be two. Aren't they just one? And what if there are two possibilities, but one of them is very unlikely, say one-in-a-thousand chance. Does the world then split into 1001 worlds? And what if the probability of one event is 1/pi...so then we need infinitely many worlds. But if there are infinitely many worlds then every event happens infinitely many times and there is no natural measure of probability. Brent Sean Carroll is the multiple-worlds dude. He would have an answer. http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/06/30/why-the-many-worlds-formulation-of-quantum-mechanics-is-probably-correct/"The potential for *multiple worlds* is always there in the quantum state, whether you like it or not. The next question would be, do multiple-world superpositions of the form written [above] ever actually come into being? And the answer again is: *yes, automatically*, without any additional assumptions."
But then the question is how many worlds (the 1/pi problem) and how does probability come into it? Do we have to just assign probabilities to branches (using the Born rule as an axiom instead of deriving it)? And what about continuous processes like detecting the decay in Schroedinger's cat box? Is a continuum of worlds produced corresponding to the different times the decay might occur?
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