Stephen, thanks for your thoughts on Eli's thoughts. I'm going to have to think on them further - after all these helpful posts I can pretend I understand quantum mechanics, but pretending to understand how conscious minds perceive a single point in configuration space instead of blobs of amplitude is going to take more work.

I will point out, though, that the question of how consciousness is bound to a particular branch (and thus why the Born rule works like it does) doesn't seem that much different from how consciousness is tied to a particular point in time or to a particular brain when the Spaghetti Monster can see all brains in all times and would have to be given extra information to know that my consciousness seems to be living in *this* particular brain at *this* particular time.

Finally: "it is a common misconception that should be addressed at some point anyway" - it appears to me that Robin's paper is based on this same misconception, or something like it: the Born rule (and experiment!) give one result while counting worlds gives another, therefore we have to add a new rule ("worlds that are too small get mangled") in order to make counting worlds match experiment. Whereas without the misconception we wouldn't be counting worlds in the first place. Do you think I'm understanding Robin's position and/or QM correctly?