Some commenters have recently expressed disturbance at the thought of constantly splitting into zillions of other people, as is the straightforward and unavoidable prediction of quantum mechanics.

Others have confessed themselves unclear as to the implications of many-worlds for planning: If you decide to buckle your seat belt in this world, does that increase the chance of another self unbuckling their seat belt? Are you being selfish at their expense?

Just remember Egan’s Law: It all adds up to normality.

(After Greg Egan, in Quarantine.[1])

Frank Sulloway said [2]:

Ironically, psychoanalysis has it over Darwinism precisely because its predictions are so outlandish and its explanations are so counterintuitive that we think, Is that really true? How radical! Freud’s ideas are so intriguing that people are willing to pay for them, while one of the great disadvantages of Darwinism is that we feel we know it already, because, in a sense, we do.

When Einstein overthrew the Newtonian version of gravity, apples didn’t stop falling, planets didn’t swerve into the Sun. Every new theory of physics must capture the successful predictions of the old theory it displaced; it should predict that the sky will be blue, rather than green.

So don’t think that many-worlds is there to make strange, radical, exciting predictions. It all adds up to normality.

Then why should anyone care?

Because there was once asked the question, fascinating unto a rationalist: What all adds up to normality?

And the answer to this question turns out to be: quantum mechanics. It is quantum mechanics that adds up to normality.

If there were something else there instead of quantum mechanics, then the world would look strange and unusual.

Bear this in mind, when you are wondering how to live in the strange new universe of many worlds: You have always been there.

Religions, anthropologists tell us, usually exhibit a property called minimal counterintuitiveness; they are startling enough to be memorable, but not so bizarre as to be difficult to memorize. Anubis has the head of a dog, which makes him memorable, but the rest of him is the body of a man. Spirits can see through walls; but they still become hungry.

But physics is not a religion, set to surprise you just exactly enough to be memorable. The underlying phenomena are so counterintuitive that it takes long study for humans to come to grips with them. But th...

koreatown

koreatown

koreatown

koreatown