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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread: January 2010 - Less Wrong
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I don't think you get a single outcome even from the best specified event-- you'd get a big sheaf of outcomes.
If you could see all the multiple futures branching off from the present and have some way of sorting through them, you could presumably make better choices than you do now, but it would still be very hard to optimize much of anything.
Okay - "suppose you could find out the single most probable outcome..."
Since we're talking about a continuous probability measure, I'm not sure if that's the right way to think about it. Perhaps it's best to think of a randomly chosen point from the probability measure that evolves from a concentrated mass around a particular starting configuration— that is, a typical history given a particular branching point.
One could always argue that since there is only a finite (even if unimaginably huge) amount of possible branching points, we're actually talking about a discrete probability distribution.
Your approach works, too.
How do you mean?
I'm talking about the fundamental physics of the universe. From a mathematical perspective, it's far more elegant (ergo, more likely) to deal with a partial differential equation defined on a continuous configuration space. Attempts to discretize the space in the name of infinite-set atheism seem ad-hoc to me.
Oh, right - I was under the impression that MWI would have involved discrete transitions at some point (I haven't had the energy to read all of the MWI sequence). If that's incorrect, then ignore my previous comment.