private_messaging comments on Against Devil's Advocacy - Less Wrong

28 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 June 2008 04:15AM

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Comment author: more_wrong 31 May 2014 02:41:27AM 0 points [-]

Even if such worlds do 'exist', whether I believe in magic within them is unimportant, since they are so tiny;

Since there is a good deal of literature indicating that our own world has a surprisingly tiny probabilty (ref: any introduction to the Anthropic Principle), I try not to dismiss the fate of such "fringe worlds" as completely unimportant.

army1987's argument above seems very good though, I suggest you look at his comment very seriously

Comment author: private_messaging 31 May 2014 05:28:36AM *  2 points [-]

Asteroid belt got all the atoms to make the cake from, the only issue is their arrangement, and they're presently arranged in a specific configuration that is as unlikely - as low amplitude - as if they were arranged into a bunch of cakes. It's just that the highly unlikely configurations that look like asteroids are far more numerous than ones that look like cakes (which is a property of the looks-like-cake function).

Basically, it's a common fallacy to believe that coin toss sequence such as HHHHHHH is less probable than HTTHHTH. It isn't, and if you were to throw a quantum coin in a quantum many-worlds universe, the world where it was all heads will have same amplitude as every other sequence's world.

(Also, any "stray flows of amplitude" require non-linear Schrödinger's equation, of a very very specific kind so that you don't end up with essentially one world)