shokwave comments on A note on the description complexity of physical theories - Less Wrong

19 Post author: cousin_it 09 November 2010 04:25PM

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Comment author: humpolec 10 November 2010 03:07:36PM *  0 points [-]

That's the problem - it shouldn't really convince him. If he shares all the data and priors with external observers, his posterior probability of MWI being true should end up the same as theirs.

It's not very different from surviving thousand classical Russian roulettes in a row.

ETA: If the chance of survival is p, then in both cases P(I survive) = p, P(I survive | I'm there to observe it) = 1. I think you should use the second one in appraising the MWI...

ETA2: Ok maybe not.

Comment author: shokwave 11 November 2010 06:10:57AM 1 point [-]

I was actually going off the idea that the vast majority - 100% minus pr(survive all suicides) - of worlds would have the subject dead at some point, so all those worlds would not be convinced. Sure, people in your branch might believe you, but in (100 - 9.3x10^-302) percent of the branches, you aren't there to prove that quantum suicide works. This means, I think, that the chance of you existing to prove that quantum suicide proves MWI to the rest of the world, the chance is equal to the chance of you surviving in a nonMWI universe.

I was going to say well, if you had a test with a 1% chance of confirming X and a 99% chance of disconfirming X, and you ran it a thousand times and made sure you presented only the confirmations, you would be laughed at to suggest that X is confirmed - but it is MWI that predicts every quantum event comes out every result, so only under MWI could you run the test a thousand times - so that would indeed be pretty convincing evidence that MWI is true.

Also: I only have a passing familiarity with Robin's mangled worlds, but at the power of negative three hundred, it feels like a small enough 'world' to get absorbed into the mass of worlds where it works a few times and then they actually do die.

Comment author: humpolec 11 November 2010 07:08:50AM 0 points [-]

Sure, people in your branch might believe you

The problem I have with that is that from my perspective as an external observer it looks no different than someone flipping a coin (appropriately weighted) a thousand times and getting thousand heads. It's quite improbable, but the fact that someone's life depends on the coin shouldn't make any difference for me - the universe doesn't care.

Of course it also doesn't convince me that the coin will fall heads for the 1001-st time.

(That's only if I consider MWI and Copenhagen here. In reality after 1000 coin flips/suicides I would start to strongly suspect some alternative hypotheses. But even then it shouldn't change my confidence of MWI relative to my confidence of Copenhagen).