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Thanks, that's really quite helpful. I take it then that the problem with Homunq's objection is that all the subsequent 'worlds' would have the same total reality fluid as the one in which he made the distinction, and so the 'splitting' wouldn't have any real effect on the total utility: $5 less for one person with reality R is the same disutility as $5 less for a [large number of] people with reality R/[large number]?
But maybe that's not right. At the end, you talked about 'how much reality fluid something has' as being a matter of how much something happens. This makes sense as a way of talking about events, but what about substances? I gather that substances like people don't see much play in the math of QM (and have no role in physics at all really), but in this case the questions seems relevant.
Your first paragraph is correct.
As for the second, well, substances are kind of made of colossal numbers of events in a convenient pattern such that it's useful to talk about the pattern. Like, I'm not falling through my chair over and over and over again, and I anticipate this continuing to be the case... that and a bunch of other things lead me to think of the chair as substantial.
Right, but I'm not something that happens. The continuation of me into the next second might be something that happens, and so we might say that this continuation have more or less reality fluid, but I don't know that the same can be said of me simpliciter. You might think that I am in fact something that happens, a series or pattern of events, but I think this a claim that would at least need some working out: one implication of this claim is that it takes time (in the way a motion takes time) to be me. But this is off the QM (maybe off the scientific) path, and I should say I very much appreciate your time thus far. I can't take it personally if you don't want to join me in some armchair speculation.
Your thoughts are things that happen. Whatever's doing those is you. I don't see the problem.
But it seems problematic to say that I am my thoughts. I seem to persist in time despite changes in what I think, for example. Afew days ago, I thought worlds were 'generated' on the MWI view. I now no longer think that. I'm different as a result, but I'm not a different person. I wasn't destroyed, or remade. (I don't mean this to be a point specifically about human personal identity, this should apply to animals and plants and maybe blocks of wood too).
To reiterate my concern in the grandparent, if my thoughts are a process that takes time (as they seem to be), and I am my thoughts, then it takes time to be me. Being me would then be something interruptible, so that I could only get half way to being me. This is at least odd.
I don't mean to suggest that this is a knock down argument or anything, it' not. It's little more than an armchair objection on the basis of natural language. But it's the sort of thing for which this theory should have an answer. We might just discover that the temporal persistance or identity of macroscopic objects is a physically incoherent idea (like identity based on having a certain set of atoms). But if we do discover something radical like that, we should have something to say to ward off the idea that we've just misunderstood the question or changed the topic. Again, thanks for your indulgence.
You are a 4-dimensional region of spacetime. What you normally call 'you' is a mutually-spacelike-separated cut of this 4-dimensional region, but the whole reason for calling this slice special is because of causal chains that have extent in time. For instance, your hand is considered yours because your brain can tell it what to do*. That causal chain takes time to roll out.
Do you think there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the kinds of things I can talk about via mutually-spacelike cuts (like arrangements, shapes, trombones, maybe dogs) versus the kinds of things I cannot talk about via mutually-spacelike cuts, like the motion of a fast-ball, Beethoven's Ode to Joy, or the life of a star? Processes that take time versus...I donno, things?
I ask because natural language and my everyday experience of the world (unreliable or irrelevant though they may be to the question of physical reality) makes a great deal of fuss over this distinction.
There is a distinction, and you just gave it - some things are defined by their processes, and some things are not. Imagine instantaneously reducing something to an arbitrarily low temperature and leaving it that way forever as a substitute for stopping time, and see if the thing still counts as the same thing (this rule of thumb is not guaranteed to apply in all cases).
A frozen human body is not a human. It's the corpse of a now-defunct human (will stay this way forever, so no cryonic restoration). So, the life - a process - is part of the definition of 'human'. BUT since it was done instantaneously you could say it's a corpse with a particular terminal mental state.
A trombone or triangle that's reduced to epsilon kelvins is just a cold trombone or triangle.
A computer remains a computer, but it ceases to have any role-based identities like 'www.lesswrong.com' or 230.126.52.85 (to name a random IP address). But, like the corpse, you can say it has a memory state corresponding to such roles.
Very interesting answer, thank you. So, for those things not defined by processes, is it unproblematic to talk about their being more or less real in terms of reality fluid?
Well, we haven't exactly nailed down the ultimate nature of this magical reality fluid, but I don't think that whether you define an object by shape or process changes how the magical reality fluid concept applies.
What's this "me" thing? Your thoughts are most likely reducible to an arrangement of neurons, their connections and electric potentials and chemical processes (ion channels opening and closing, Calcium and other ions going in and out of dendrites, electric potential rising and falling, electric impulses traveling back and forth, proteins and other substances being created, deposited and removed, etc.) Some of these processes are completely deterministic, others are chaotic, yet others are quantum-random (for example, ion channel opening and closing is due to quantum-mechanical tunneling effects). In that sense, your thoughts do take time, as it takes time for chemical and electrical effects to run their course. But what do you mean by "it takes time to be me"?
Let's drop the talk of people, that's too complicated. Really, I'm just asking about how 'reality fluid' talk gets applied to everyday things as opposed to 'happenings'. The claim on the table is that everyday things (including people) are happenings, and I'm worried about that.
Suppose 'being a combustion engine' meant actually firing a piston and rotating the drive shaft 360 degrees. If that what it meant to be a combustion engine, then if I interrupted the action of the piston after it had only rotated the drive shaft 180 degrees, the thing before me wouldn't be a combustion engine. At best it would be sort of half way there. The reason being that on this account of combustion engines, it takes time to be a combustion engine (specifically, the time it takes for the drive shaft to rotate 360 degrees).
If we did talk about combustion engines this way, for example, it wouldn't be possible to point to a combustion engine in a photograph. We could point to something that might be a sort of temporal part of a combustion engine, but a photograph (which shows us only a moment of time) couldn't capture a combustion engine any more than it could capture a piece of music, or the rotation of a ball, or a free throw or anything that consists in being a kind of motion.
But, at least so far as I know, a combustion engine, unlike a motion, is not divisible into temporal parts. If all happenings take time and are divisible into temporal parts, and if combustion engines are not so divisible, then combustion engines are not happenings. If they're not happenings, how does 'reality fluid' talk apply to them?
EDIT:
Really? That's fascinating, I have to look that up.
A combustion engine is deterministic. The behavior of a combustion engine is defined by the underlying physics. If properly designed, tuned and started as prescribed, it will cause the drive shaft to rotate a number of turns. A complete specification of the engine is enough to predict what it will do. If you design something that gets stuck after half a turn, it's not what most people would consider a proper combustion engine, despite outward appearances. If you want to use the term "reality fluid", then its flow is determined by the initial conditions. You can call this flow "motion" if you like.
I think you think I'm saying something much more complicated than what I'm trying to say. Nothing I'm saying has anything to do with prediction, design, determinism, (not that I know of, anyway) and I'm certainly not saying that 'reality fluid' moves. By 'motion' I mean what happens when you throw a baseball.
The distinction I'm trying to draw is this: on the one hand, some things take time and have temporal parts (like a piece of music, a walk in the park, the life-cycle of a star, or the electrochemical processes in a neuron). Call these processes. These are opposed, on the other hand, to things which so far as I can see, don't have temporal parts, like a trombone, a dog, an internal combustion engine, or a star. Call these fubs (I don't have a good name).
If reality fluid is a way of talking about decoherence, and decoherence talk always involves distinctions of time, then can we use reality fluid talk to talk about how real fubs are? We could if all fubs were reducible to processes. That would be a surprising result. Are all fubs reducible to processes? If so, is this an eliminative reduction (fundamentally, there are no fubs)? If not...well, if not I have some other, even weirder questions.
You seem to have a philosophical approach to this, while I prefer instrumental reductionism. If a collection of "fubs" plus the rules of their behavior predict what these fubs do at any point in time, why do you need to worry about some "temporal parts"? If you take an MP3 file and a music player and press "start", you will have music playing. If this time stuff sounds mysterious, consider Eliezer's timeless picture, where these fubs are slices of the flow. You can generalize it somewhat to quantum things, but there will be gaps (denied by handwaving MWIers, explicit in shut-up-and-calculate), hence the probabilistic nature of it.