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Will_Newsome comments on Aguirre, Tegmark, Layzer "Cosmological interpretation of quantum mechanics" - Less Wrong Discussion

11 Post author: cousin_it 11 January 2011 06:29AM

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Comment author: Will_Newsome 13 January 2011 02:17:40PM 0 points [-]

I've been yapping on about how the 'quantum' in quantum immortality is redundant in a spatially infinite universe for awhile now, and also gave a suggestion as to how something like this explained the Born rule. Fortunately I was rather inebriated at the time and thus don't remember the details. At any rate, these memes have been around for awhile, though people seem reluctant to take them seriously. These days it seems decision theoretic metaphysics is getting more interesting than physical cosmology, though. Exciting times in ultra-abstract-conceptual-playground land.

The interesting ideas come up when you try to determine what counts as a mind-computation (there are probably lots of them going on in your head, and without a coherent ontology of agency or universal induction approximations we have no way to order the infinite possible interpretations) and what counts as almost-identical (if you're instantiating a Bayesian inference approximation algorithm in this universe, is it almost identical to the equivalent algorithm in a universe with totally different physical constants but also with the DAG nature?). Throw in some stuff about the importance of relative causal significance and it starts becoming clear that it is unlikely that anything adds up to anything close to normality.

Comment author: cousin_it 13 January 2011 03:35:50PM *  1 point [-]

Your second paragraph seems to point at the mystery of subjective anticipation, aka probability. I had some ideas about that, but no conclusive answer. It does seem to be a very confusing problem.

the importance of relative causal significance

Please explain this phrase?