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khafra comments on What independence between ZFC and P vs NP would imply - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: alexflint 08 December 2011 02:30PM

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Comment author: shminux 08 December 2011 06:06:06PM 5 points [-]

With MWI, this is incorrect - we do predict the outcome: all the branches.

The MWI gives an illusion of predictability ("Everything possible happens! We just don't see it because nearly all of it happens somewhere else to some other 'us'!"). Unfortunately, it can no more answer the question of which outcome an experiment will measure in "this world" than any other interpretation.

Even more unfortunately, and at a risk of a massive downvote, I hate to say it, but the MWI has become an official LW religion:

  • proclaimed to be true true by the founder: check

  • provides comfort to the masses: check

  • sets the group apart from others: check

  • impossible to falsify: check

  • makes one feel superior because of "deeper understanding of the world": check

Comment author: khafra 09 December 2011 02:11:19PM 4 points [-]

How does MWI provide comfort to the masses? Michael Vassar is hardly the masses, but it makes him extremely uncomfortable--he called Quantum Immortality the most horrifying idea he'd ever had to take seriously, and I agree.

Comment author: shminux 09 December 2011 04:58:34PM *  3 points [-]

I would think that most people would find the idea of living forever in some of the worlds at least somewhat comforting. It is even better than having an immortal soul: you get to live forever in the flesh, and you do not need to pay a tithe in any of the worlds.

That said, I was referring to something else, namely to the major discomfort of the essential unpredictability of any quantum experiment. In the MWI (or at least in some versions of it) the parallel worlds come into existence and sail apart as the decoherence takes hold and the off-diagonal contribution to the joint system/detector state decays away rapidly.

Everything seems predictable and some day maybe even computable. The only minor caveat is that you never get to observe these other worlds and bless your surviving copies with your dying breath (or receive the blessing of those gone before you).