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Nominull comments on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 01 December 2012 05:00AM

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Comment author: mwengler 01 December 2012 03:02:15PM -1 points [-]

Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) is favored by EY as having a shorter message than others.

However, the short-message version of MWI does not include a theory as to how my particular stream of consciousness winds up in one branch or another. So Copenhagen (wave function collapse) is a theory of what I will experience, MWI is not.

Further, I have always thought MWI motivated by the ideas behind Einstein's "God does not play dice with the universe." That is, a non-deterministic theory is no theory at all. And then, MWI, would be a theory without wave function collapse, so a theory with no randomness. But of course, it is NOT a theory of what a particular observer will experience. To go from MWI to a theory of what I will experience, it seems I still need to have a random function. I suspect some will answer, "no, there is one of you in every branch so MWI predicts you will experience it all, but in separate non-interacting branches. No randomness." To which I would reply, we still need a theory that accounts for my subjective experiences, how did this me, the one I actually wound up as, "choose" between the various branches. To me it would seem essentially theological to say that because some me I can't see, hear or interact with in any way experience all the other possibilities that there is no randomness in the universe. It sure seems random that I wound up experiencing this particular version, in the absence of a non-random theory of that.

Please take this as an invitation to educate me or discuss the conclusions I reach. I am interested in sorting out just what MWI really gains you when leaving Copenhagen, and as competing theories of my own personal experience, they both seem to have, essentially, a random choosing event at their core: one calls it wave function collapse, the other one tries not to talk about it.

Comment author: Nominull 02 December 2012 07:24:20AM 5 points [-]

Your mistake lies in using the word "I" like it means something. There is some mwengler-stuff, it has some properties, then there is a split and the mwengler-stuff is in two separate chunks. They both experience their "stream of consciousness" showing up in their particular branch, they both wonder how it is that they ended up in the one branch rather than the other.