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gjm comments on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Whatever makes you think that your consciousness is in only one Everett branch? (And what do you think is happening on all those other branches that look so much like this one but that lack your consciousness?)
Surely the right account of this, conditional on MWI, is not that your consciousness is on a particular branch but that each branch has its own version of your consciousness, and each branch has its own version of your memory, and each branch has its own version of what actually happened, and -- not at all by coincidence -- these match up with one another.
What happens to your consciousness and your memories is much more like splitting than like collapse.
(It sounds as if you think that this ought to mean that you'd have conscious memories in one branch from other branches, but I can't see why. Am I missing something?)
I misunderstood what David Gerard was suggesting and took a long riff proposing an experiment to address something he wasn't saying.
The tricky part for me is the extremely clear conscious experience I have of being on only one branch. That there are other consciousnesses NEARLY identical to mine on other nearby Everett branches, presumably having the same strong awareness that they are on only one Everett branch and have no direct evidence of any other branch is clearer to me. MWI seems to truly be an interpretation, not a theory, with apparently absolutely no Popperian experiments that could ever distinguish it from wave function collapse theories.
You can upload a person into a quantum computer and do Schrödinger's cat experiments on them. If you have a computational theory of mind, this should falsify at least some informal collapse theories.