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pragmatist comments on What false beliefs have you held and why were you wrong? - Less Wrong Discussion

28 Post author: Punoxysm 16 October 2014 05:58PM

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Comment author: pragmatist 18 October 2014 04:48:18AM 2 points [-]

In the pilot wave theory, the probability that you will witness yourself surviving the experiment after it is performed say 1000 times is really really small. In MWI that probability is close to 1 (provided you consider all future versions of yourself to be "yourself"). So if you witness yourself surviving the experiment after it is performed 1000 times, you should update in favor of MWI over pilot wave theory (if those are the two contenders).

Comment author: gjm 18 October 2014 03:16:38PM 6 points [-]

I am skeptical of the existence of any clearly definable sense of "the probability that you will witness yourself surviving the experiment" that (1) yields different answers for Everett and for Bohm, and (2) doesn't have excessively counterintuitive properties (e.g., probabilities not adding up to 1).

Probability that any you looking at the outcome of the experiment after 1000 runs sees you alive? 1, either way. Probability that someone looking from outside sees you alive after 1000 runs? Pretty much indistinguishable from 0, either way.

You only get the "probability 1 of survival" thing out of MWI by effectively conditionalizing on your survival. But you can do that just as well whatever interpretation of QM you happen to be using.

If I find myself alive after 1000 runs of the experiment ... well, what I actually conclude, regardless of preferred interpretation of QM, is that the experiment was set up wrong, or someone sabotaged it, or some hitherto-unsuspected superbeing is messing with things. But if such possibilities are ruled out somehow, I conclude that something staggeringly improbable happened, and I conclude that whether I am using Everett or Bohm. I don't expect to go on living for ever under MWI; the vast majority of my measure doesn't. What I expect is that whatever bits of my wavefunction survive, survive. Which is entirely tautological, and is equivalent to "if I survive, I survive" in a collapse-y interpretation.