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Risto_Saarelma comments on The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? - Less Wrong
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Starting with the assumption that this world-branch exists and has conscious people in it, there doesn't seem to be reason to believe that the different split-off branches would have less-conscious people in them, assuming they exist. For the other branches not to exist, there would need to be something special that privileges this one. I'm not sure what this would be like. The fact that we have ended up in the world-branch we have ended up doesn't seem very special, if the starting assumption is that all world-branches with people in them exist and have conscious people.
I'm pretty much basing my own intuition in algorithmic information theory. It's more complicated to define physics with the weird quantum stuff in them and then specify a single "real" world as the result of every quantum interaction, rather than to just define the physics with the weirdness, and not give any single world-branch a privileged status. Simple things are more likely than complex things.
One branch is priviledged : mine. It is an empirical fact.
It's all about existence.
I will repeat your argument with time, what seems wrong to me may appear more clearly :
"Starting with the assumption that the present instant exists and has conscious people in it, there doesn't seem to be reason to believe that different instants would have less conscious people in them, assuming they exist. For the other instants not to exist, there would need to be something special that privileges this one. I am not sure what this would be like".
That is a good argument indeed, but here is an empirical fact : only the present exists, other instants (past or future) do not exist.
That is exactly the same problem to me. The many-world just goes one step further by claiming than not only past and future events "exist" the same way that present exist, but also every alternative past/present/future. It does not account for existence.
Given this line of reasoning, should I still believe that people other than me in this world-line are conscious beings instead of p-zombies, given that I have the privileged conscious viewpoint?
Also, I wonder if the "only the present exists" notion could be made to get into relativistic trouble in a similar way as the "only this world-line exists" seems to end up in quantum mechanical trouble.
I can communicate with other people, therefore I assume they are conscious. It's an empirical evidence, which leads to an inter-subjective viewpoint.
From this inter-subjective viewpoint, we can all agree that only the present exists, and only this world.
The troubles we can get with scientific models are always of the same kind: it is an instantiation problem. Scientific models do not say anything about existence, they are only good at predictions.
Sorry for the flip reply, but shouldn't that rather be "only that"?
I think I get your idea about the difficulty of assuming the reality of unreachable states, but you seem to keep making ungrounded jumps from intuitions to assertions of certainty.
You're right, there is no certainty, but my jumps are not totally ungrounded. We all experience a flow of time in a single world, and the many-worlds interpretion does not really explains it.
It really does. At the level of everyday life branching explains our experiences exactly as well as a non-quantum explanation. When we happen to be using scientific apparatus our experience is better explained by MW.
It does not explain why we followed that path in the many world, not another one. Our experience is "better explain" > it is a good heuristic interpretation.
It doesn't explain that because that isn't what happened.
That is my experience. As far as I can know if something happened, that happened.
Is this really an empirical fact? How do you define the word "exists"?
Maybe it's not really an empirical fact, but then do you really think that past still "exist" and future already "exist" as well as present does ?
How to define existence ? That is the big question. What is reality ? Why has the past gone, and why isn't the future already there ? And why am I myself ?
I don't have answers, I only blame the many-world interpretation adepts to go straight to conclusions without addressing those deep questions, as if you could step into metaphysics starting only from a predictive mathematical model of reality.
Stepping into metaphysics from a predictive mathematical model of reality sounds like a step backwards to me!
I don't know if it is a step "backwards", as metaphysics encompass science. I would say it's a step outside. Anyway, that's what the many-world interpretation does in my opinion.
My position is very close to the position of Max Tegmark, Gary Drescher and other compatibilist B-theorists, so yes, I really really honestly believe that past and future exist as well as present does. At least in some sense of the word "exists", but this is not a cop-out, the sense I used it must be very similar to the sense you used it. There is another reasonable sense of the word "exists" (corresponding to Tegmark's frog's view), where only some of the past and present exists, and not too much of the future.
The point is, you have several choices about how to consistently formalize your vague statement, but whichever you choose, your "empirical fact" will be factually incorrect.
I really doubt it. how could you factually prove that the past or the future exist ?
Let's say my position is a very narrow version of Tegmark's view, and that I call "present" (with a certain thickness) the parts of the past and future that actually "exist".
First of all, I should have wrote "logically inconsistent", but "factually incorrect" sounded better. :) More importantly, it is possible that I misinterpreted what you wrote:
I interpreted this as a positive statement that an observer-independent present does actually exist, hundred percent. This is in contradiction with special relativity, as someone else already noted. Reading other comments from you in this thread, it seems like this is not what you meant. It is more like you choose the second option of my dichotomy: the frog's view instead of the bird's view. I have no problem with that.