I have some questions for people who think they believe in quantum worlds that split and join, and/or in "timeless physics".

Consider the sentence that you just read. The implication of such beliefs is that the person who started reading the sentence is not the same person who finished reading the sentence. According to the splitting quantum worlds idea, the person at the start would have split into many different people, who split into even more different people... by the time the sentence was finished. According to the timeless perspective, the person-moment who "began reading the sentence" and the person-moment who "finished reading the sentence" are fundamentally different entities, coexisting eternally in a universe where nothing actually changes.

Don't confuse this with the commonplace observation that every experience changes you a little bit. According to that "theory", first you exist, then you still exist but you're a little bit different, then you're still existing but you're even more different, and so on for the rest of your life. The metaphysics there is of one person changing over time.

The metaphysics in these avantgarde theories is of one person who becomes many, who become many^2, who become very many... or of disconnected person-moments, none of which actually changes, but all of which "feel like" they are changing. The important aspect, for my argument, is the denial of continuity: the person at the end of the sentence is literally not the person at the beginning of the sentence; not the same person changed, but a different being. That is a remarkable thing to believe - and "remarkable" is an understatement. (It resembles some well-known delusions.)

Or perhaps that is not what believers think? I don't know. Eliezer claims to believe in timelessness. He posts comments here, and presumably they take time to type out and submit; how does he reconcile this with his belief? As he goes through the motions, does he tell himself something like, "this 'change' is an illusion, this 'change' is an illusion, all that really exists is a set of unchanging Eliezers, frozen in different postures, which conceptually could be assembled into a causal sequence"?

As for many worlds that branch in time, it's a little harder to make the argument that the concept is radically at odds with experience; someone can say, yes, I agree that subjective time is like a line, but a branching world is like a tree, and my line is like one branch of the tree. In other words, it seems that someone who believes in splitting quantum worlds does not have to deny any of their experience, they just have to claim that stuff happened that they didn't feel and don't remember, namely the branching off of their other selves. Is this how many-worlds believers reconcile their beliefs with their experience? If so, then there are further stages to the critique, but before I go there, I want a better idea of what people are actually thinking.

Obviously I'm a skeptic about these positions, to put it mildly. So what I want to know is why people believe them, and how they reconcile their metaphysical position with the facts of their moment-to-moment experience. Is this even seen as a problem? Was there a time in your life when you struggled to make sense of the disparity? Did you take such a belief for granted, and then only later realize that it might be in contradiction with basic appearances? I am interested in hearing arguments and explanations, but also in anecdotes recounting episodes of philosophical worry and resolution - thoughts you had and how you reacted to them.