jdgalt comments on Causal Universes - LessWrong

60 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 November 2012 04:08AM

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Comment author: Armok_GoB 28 November 2012 09:46:42PM 15 points [-]

It really seems you need to taboo "real" here, and instead ask some related questions such as:

which types of universes could observe which other types of universe (an universe which can observe you you can also, obviously, "travel" to)? Which universes could trade, in the broadest senses of the word, with which other universe? What types of creatures in which types of universes are capable of consistently caring about things in what types of universes?

Specifically it seems likely that your usage of "real" in this case refers to "things that humans could possibly, directly or indirectly, in principle care about at all.", which is the class of universes we must make sure to include in our priors for where we are.

Comment author: jdgalt 29 November 2012 04:39:05AM 1 point [-]

Whether the many-worlds hypothesis is true, false, or meaningless (and I believe it's meaningless precisely because all branches you're not on are forever inaccessible/unobservable), the concept of a universe being observable has more potential states than true and false.

Consider our own universe as it's most widely understood to be. Each person can only observe (past) or affect (future) events within his light cone. All others are forever out of reach. (I know, it may turn out that QM makes this not true, but I'm not going there right now.) Thus you might say that no two people inhabit exactly the same universe, but each his own, though with a lot of overlap.

Time travel, depending on how it works (if it does), may or may not alter this picture much. Robert Forward's <i>Timemaster</i> gives an example of one possible way that does not require a many-worlds model, but in which time "loops" have the effect of changing the laws of statistics. I especially like this because it provides a way to determine by experiment whether or not the universe does work that way, even though in some uses of the words it abolishes cause and effect.