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Lumifer comments on Lotteries & MWI - Less Wrong Discussion
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Under MWI I don't see any need to buy a lottery ticket -- there are enough other timelines where the other-you bought a ticket...
And of course, lotteries being revenue generators, the "friction" is rather large.
Not at all.
Are there? Wouldn't the number of timelines where other-yous buy tickets (and, thus, buy winning tickets) be increased if you are, in fact, willing to buy tickets yourself?
Not as far as I can see. Timelines fork -- every time you buy a ticket there's a timeline where you don't. And every time you don't there is a timeline where you do.
That seems to be an argument from infinity - that since 1/4 of an infinite number is exactly the same as 1/2 of an infinite number, there is no reason to prefer a set of timelines where 1/2 of you buy tickets to a set where 1/4 of you do.
You could also say that every time you approach a lottery counter, there's a timeline where you step all the way up to it and one where you don't; and once you've stepped up, there's a timeline where you make the actual purchase and one where you don't - and, thus, that for every 4 timelines where you start stepping towards a lottery counter, you only buy a ticket in one of them.
Basically, yes.
Under MWI everything that could happen actually does happen. This means that you can't change anything summed up across all timelines. You can only change things in one timeline, but when you do another timeline nets it out.
An important item here seems to be the 'can' in 'everything that can happen'; as opposed to things that /can't/ happen. If a meteor has been orbiting for millions of years in a course that leads it so that, tomorrow night, it lands on my house, there is very little that the various differences across the timelines can do so that it's not going to land on my house. Any timelines in which I'm anywhere near my house at that time - and that's going to be most of them - are ones where I'm going to end up dead. However you want to divvy up the timelines involved, there will be a greater proportion of them where I'm dead than I'm alive.
This is the same reasoning which leads to the conclusion that quantum suicide/immortality is a bad idea to try out; and that it's generally a good idea to maximize the swathe of timelines in which future-you remains alive and healthy. There may be a net sum to all those infinitesimal timelines when added up - but that sum isn't necessarily going to be '0'.
Since you can do only things which can happen, you actions are unable to change the set of things which will happen to multi-you across all timelines.
That's the predestination argument, isn't it? Whatever the choices available to multi-me are, it's impossible for me to compute them all, which provides sufficient uncertainty for something resembling free will to apply. I don't know whether any given future-me will even have the option to buy a lottery ticket, let alone what the consequences of making that choice one way or the other might be; and so I might as well treat any given timeline as one in which that version of me can make decisions which affect his particular future.
That's irrelevant in this context. What matters is that under MWI you don't make a choice, in different branches you make all choices possible for you. You can change things in a particular timeline, but you can't change the sum of everything in all timelines.
How confident are you that this conclusion, that MWI means choice is meaningless, is the correct interpretation of it? What odds would you be willing to wager on it? What evidence do you base it on?