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DanArmak comments on Quantum Non-Realism - Less Wrong
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"My curiosity doesn't suddenly go away just because there's no reality, you know!" Eliezer, I want to high-five you.
Does this "Many worlds" thing imply that there exists (in some meaningful sense) other worlds alongside us where whatever quantum events didn't happen here happened? (If not, or if this is a wrong question, disregard the following.)
What are the moral implications? If some dictator says "If this photon passes through this filter (which it can do with probability 0.5), I will torture you all; if it is absorbed, I will do something vaguely nice.", and the photon if absorbed, should we rejoice, or should we grieve for those people in another world who are tortured?
Should we try quantum suicide? I think I'm willing to die (at least once, but maybe not in a lot of worlds, my poor little brain can't grasp the concept of multiple deaths) to let one world know whether the MWI is true.
What about other events? A coinflip isn't really a quantum random event (and may even be not random at all if you know enough), but the coin is made out of amplitudes - are there worlds where the coin lands on the other side? We won WW2 by the skin of the teeth, are there any worlds where the Earth is ruled by Nazi Germany?
Disclaimer: I don't understand QM on a formal level. But here's what I got out of reading the Sequences and other LW discussions on the subject.
They exist, in a special sense of the word. Instead of arguing about definitions of existence, measure of reality, etc., let's talk about the experimental consequences. Which are: you're not going to interact with them ever again. They exist at most as much as people in our own branch who are outside our Hubble radius.
Should you still grieve for them? That's for you to decide, but I do make a suggestion: grief is in part a useful adaptation. It may help motivate you to prevent more future grief. If you cannot prevent future grief-causing events (because quantum torture branches will always keep splitting off, and to the extent you cannot influence their measure), then that grief is useless. Eliminating it (not grieving) makes you better off and no-one else worse off, so in such cases I suggest you do not grieve.
Again, there may well be good quantum theoretical arguments against quantum suicide. But here's a more practical one. Suppose it works. It has been suggested that it in the vast majority of the branches in which you survive, you do not survive unscathed: you survive hurt, reduced, as an invalid, etc. If you rig up a gun to shoot you, there are some branches where it fails to shoot entirely, but there are many more branches where it misses just enough that you live on as a cripple. Quantum suicide is dangerous like an outcome pump.
In principle, any world whose past evolution does not contradict the laws of physics exists as a branch.
Most people try to avoid the unpleasant implications by assigning significance to the weight of those branches. I find this a bit problematic when applied to branches that are not in our future: the Born probabilities govern the branch we expect to witness, but we don't understand why or how, so why should we say they govern some "reality measure" of branches we cannot interact with?