Scott Aaronson's cautious optimism for the MWI

calef

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103

Eliezer's gung-ho attitude about the realism of the Many Worlds Interpretation always rubbed me the wrong way, especially in the podcast between both him and Scott (around 8:43 in http://bloggingheads.tv/videos/2220). I've seen a similar sentiment expressed before about the MWI sequences. And I say that still believing it to be the most seemingly correct of the available interpretations.

I feel Scott's post does an excellent job grounding it as a possibly correct, and in-principle falsifiable interpretation.

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1103

I feel Scott's post does an excellent job grounding it as a possibly correct, and in-principle falsifiable interpretation.

Sure I can accept that I might have overestimated how well you should've been able to interpret my post.

Solipsism vs Realism is indeed a metaphor. If you are saying what I think you are saying, then it is quite equivalent.

I do not think that your example of a diagonal line is the same as overlap vs non-overlap at all. In overlap vs non-overlap the ontological differences matter. In a overlapping world, if you are shot, you are guaranteed to survive in another branch, so QI has to be true. In non-overlap, if you get shot, you just die. There is no consciousness that continue on in another branch that it was never connected to...

Also it makes away with the incoherence problem, which is HUGE if you are in the "Born Rule can be derived from decision-theoretic camp".

It is metaphysics, I've already said this in the first post. There is no experiment that can ever distinguish either, just like no experiment can ever tell us if solipsism or realism is true. But obviously (assuming MWI is right) one of them are, only one, not both.

I think 5 of those papers are directly about non-overlap vs overlap, and I can't remember which makes the point best right now, so read any of them you'd like. Or you can read Simon Saunders paper which was in a chapter of the Many Worlds? 2010 book here: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lina0174/chance.pdf

Ah, I see. "Metaphysics."

By which you mean "taking human morality and decision-making, which evolved in a classical world, and figuring out what decisions you should make in a quantum universe."

Would you agree that overlap vs. non-overlap cannot be answered without looking inside humans, and in fact has little to do with the universe apart from a few postulates of quantum mechanics? For some reason I thought we were talking about the universe.

Anyhow, I think Shane Legg had a nice paper on porting utility functions, though of course hu... (read more)