MoreOn comments on Possibility and Could-ness - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 14 June 2008 04:38AM

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Comment author: soreff 19 December 2010 07:43:26PM 0 points [-]

Are there thermodynamic coin flips too? A coin flip where the outcome depends on whether a single particle of an ideal gas determines the coin flip, depending on whether it is in the left hand side or right hand side of a box? :-)

Comment author: MoreOn 19 December 2010 08:15:47PM *  1 point [-]

The bigger something is, the more predetermined it gets.

But I assume that whenever a classical coin is flipped, there was an earlier quantum, world-splitting event which resulted in two worlds

Then your classical coin is a quantum coin that simply made its decision before you observed it. The outcome of a toss of a real classical coin would be the result of so many quantum events that you might as well consider the toss predetermined (my post above elaborates).

Are there thermodynamic coin flips too?

The exact same goes for a thermodynamic coin flip, except a lot fewer quantum events determine the outcome of this one.

In both these cases, each quantum event would split worlds up. But given how many of them happen, each non-quantum coin toss creates 2^(that many) new worlds (here I'm naively assuming binary splits only). In how many of those worlds has the coin landed heads, and in how many has it laded tails? If 99.998% of your zombies in other worlds, as well as you in this one, had observed the coin landing heads, then the outcome was really close to predetermined.