shminux comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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Which two out of the continuum of world then did you imply, and how did you select them? I don't see any way to select two specific worlds for which "relative thickness" would make sense. You can classify the worlds into "dead/not dead at a certain instance of time" groups whose measures you can then compare, of course. But how would you justify this aggregation with the statement that the worlds, once split, no longer interact? What mysterious process makes this aggregation meaningful? Even if you flinch away from this question, how do you select the time of the measurement? This time is slightly different in different worlds, even if it is predetermined "classically", so there is no clear "splitting begins now" moment.
It gets progressively worse and more hopeless as you dig deeper. How does this splitting propagate in spacetime? How do two spacelike-separated splits merge in just the right way to preserve only the spin-conserving worlds of the EPR experiment and not all possibilities? How do you account for the difference in the proper time between different worlds? Do different worlds share the same spacetime and for how long? Does it mean that they still interact gravitationally (spacetime curvature = gravity). What happens if the spacetime topology of some of the worlds changes, for example by collapsing a neutron star into a black hole? I can imagine that these questions can potentially be answered, but the naive MWI advocated by Eliezer does not deal with any of this.
That fails to answer the question- the Schroedinger equation isn't lorentz invariant (its not even fully Galilean invariant), so it can't tell you much about spacetime.
You can't just replace Schroedinger with Dirac or Klein-Gordon without leading inevitably to a field theory, which opens up new cans of worms.
A mental picture of thermodynamic irreversibility as a directed tree is indeed an appealing one. It becomes less appealing once your tree does not have any well-defined vertices or edges due to the issues I have outlined.
The SE is non-relativistic, so it has absolutely nothing to say about propagation in spacetime. It does not even describe emission or absorption, an essential part of decoherence. You have to go fully monty QFT to talk about signal propagation, but no one talks about MWI in the context of QFT, as far as I know.
In MWI [eigen]states correspond to worlds, so I don't know what it means. I also don't know what you mean by mergeable states.
This implies gravitational interaction between non-interacting worlds, so do they interact or don't they?
Feel free to quote... Just not his quantum consciousness speculations.