bokov comments on On Being Decoherent - Less Wrong
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Probably not. Copies of bokov are pretty rare in the universe (one every 10^(10^29) meters), but copies of bokov together with a correct copy of the whole observable universe have got to be vastly rarer. Only one out of every
(insanely huge number)would see the same night sky you do.In general, you're not guaranteed to see any particular pattern more than once, or for the pattern of repetition to be particularly neat. The pigeonhole principle says that with an infinite number of pigeons placed into a finite number of slots, at least one of the slots needs to contain more than one pigeon (in fact, one or more of them needs to contain an infinite number of pigeons). But it doesn't say that all of the slots need to be filled more than once.
Eventually you have to return to a point you have been before, but the cycle need not encompass all the possibilities. For example an infinite string of the numbers 0-5 could go as follows 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 0, 5, 0, 5, 0, ...
Not necessarily, because the number of "possible" images (a continuous infinity, equivalent to R^R) is not smaller than the number of possible "zoom" positions (a smaller continuous infinity equivalent to R).
You're not guaranteed to see any particular pattern, as I said, and in fact conway's game of life has "garden of eden" configurations, which can't be obtained by running the cellular automaton from any possible starting position. So you don't even go through all the "theoretically possible" states before cycling.
But, in the case Eliezer mentioned, I think it's fairly reasonable to assume that there is in fact a copy of you somewhere out there, assuming the world is infinite, because of things like quantum "randomness" and thermal noise that give each section of space an independent chance of spontaneously manifesting pretty much any configuration of matter, and those chances add up to "certainty" after an infinite number of chances.
What if slots are not discrete and the contents of each location are a function of previous contents of all locations within its light-cone?
I must say, this twin thing sounds cool and all but I'm starting to think maybe it's too strongly stated.