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RobbBB comments on Mixed Reference: The Great Reductionist Project - Less Wrong
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I have had this question in my mind for ages. You say that these counterfactual universes don't actually exist. But, according to Many-Worlds, don't all lawful Universes actually really really exist? I mean, isn't there some amplitude for Mr. Oswald to not have shot Kennedy, and then you get a blob where Kennedy didn't get murdered?
I've been banging my head against a wall on this and still can't come to a conclusion. Are the decoherent blobs actually capable of creating multiple histories on the observable level, up here? It looks, to me, that they should be. I mean, if these particles have each an amplitude to "be" here and there, then there is some amplitude for the combination of all particles in the Universe to correspond to a completely different macro Universe.
On the other hand, that seems to also imply that there's some amplitude for things like President Kennedy being shot, and then suddenly his wounds closed and he was up and running again. And that doesn't sound okay at all.
So... I am very, very confused.
Abstractions like probability and number are constructed by us; they don't strictly exist, but it's useful to act as though they do, since they help organize our reasoning. It could be that by coincidence that some part of the Real World corresponds precisely to the structure of our modal or mathematical reasoning; for instance, the many-worlds interpretation of QM could be true, or we could live in a Tegmark ensemble. But this would still just be an interesting coincidence. It wouldn't change the fact that our abstractions are our own; and if we discovered tomorrow that a Bohmian interpretation of QM is correct, rather than an Everettian one, it would have no foundational implications for such a high-level, anthropocentric phenomena as probability theory.
Thinking in this way is useful for two reasons. First, it insulates our logical fictions from metaphysical skepticism; our uncertainty as to the existence of a Platonic realm of Number need not undermine our confidence that 2 and 2 make 4. Second, it keeps us from being tempted to slide down the slippery slope to treating all our fictions (like currency, and intentionality, and qualia, and Sherlock Holmes) as equally metaphysically committing.
Well, whether probability and number exist or not is moot. The point of fact is that when you look at any quantum system there is a probability of finding it in any given (continuous set of) state(s) equals the squared modulus of the amplitude for it to be in such state. As mr. Yudkowsky once put, and I paraphrase, "I still want to know the nonexistent laws that coordinate my meaningless Universe".
And my point is: assuming Quantum Physics is completely correct, without us adding the additional postulates, do all combinations of universes exist, superposed to each other? That is to say: is the quantum suicide limited to 50/50 strictly quantised experiments, or does our consciousness live on in a forever branching multiverse? Sort of.