Hi.
I'm a fiction writer and while I strive towards rationalism in my daily life, I can also appreciate many non-rational things: nonsensical mythologies, perverse human behaviors, and the many dramas and tragedies of people behaving irrationally. My criteria for value often relates to how complex and stimulating I find something... not necessarily how accurate or true it may be. I can take pleasure in ridiculous pseudo-science almost as much as actual science, enjoy a pop-science theory as much as deep epistemology, and I can find a hopelessly misguided person to be more compelling and sympathetic than a great rationalist.
However, conveniently, it often turns out that the most interesting stories, the most mind-bending concepts, and the most impressive acts of creativity are born of rationalist thinking rather than pure whimsy. And so I can have my cake and eat it too, because the posts at LW are as likely to create the sensation of mental expansiveness that I associate with great fiction (or, I suspect, compelling theology) while also attempting to be, uh, you know, less wrong.
So it's fun to be here. And if it helps me think and experience the world more clearly and critically... that's gravy.
Recently I've been working on several sci-fi writing projects that involve topics that are discussed at LW. One is about the development of AI and one about the multi-world interpretation. Neither project is 100% "hard sci-fi," however I would ideally like them to be not totally stupid... since I think plausibility and accuracy often produce narrative interest--even if plausibility and accuracy are not, in of themselves, objectives. After doing a lot of research on the topics, I still have many questions. It seems to me that the LW community might be the best place to get clear, smart, informed answers in layman's terms.
I'll fire away with a couple questions and see what happens. If this works out, I'll probably have a lot more...
(I wasn't sure if these ought to be a comments at And the Winner Is... Many World If so, I can re-post there.)
In the MWI its often suggested that anything that could have happened will have happened. Thus, quantum immortality, etc. But this often puzzles me. Just because there are infinite worlds, why should there be infinite diversity of worlds? You could easily create infinite worlds by simply moving a single atom around to an infinite number of locations... but those worlds would be essentially identical. If Everett's chance of surviving each year is 100 - 1% for every year he lives, then wouldn't that mean his chance of being dead at 100 is 100%? Wouldn't that mean he's dead in all worlds? If you send an infinite number of light photons through the double slit their infinite possible locations on the wall are extremely limited. Couldn't the many worlds of the MWI resemble infinite photons being sent through the a double-slit experiment? Infinite in number, but extremely constrained in result?
Is it possible, within the MWI, to have a situation where all but one world experiences some event? E.g. event X happens at time 2 in world 2, time 3 in world 3 and so on so that X appears at some time in every world except world 1. Now say that X is a Vacuum Decay event... wouldn't that mean it is possible to only have ONE viable, interesting world even within the MWI?
David Deutsch, in The Fabric of Reality, claims that a quantum computer running Shor's Algorithm would be borrowing computational power from parallel worlds since there isn't enough computational power in all of our universe to run Shor's Algorithm. Does anyone know what would be happening in the worlds that the computer is borrowing the computational power from? Would those worlds also have to have identical computers running Shor's Algorithm? Or is there some more mysterious way in which a quantum computer can borrow computational power from other worlds?
Is there any hypothetical, theoretical, or even vaguely plausible way for an intelligent being in one world to gain information about the other worlds in the MWI? Interference takes place constantly between particles in our world and other worlds; is there any way to for this interference to be turned into communication or at least advanced speculation about the other worlds? Or is such a notion pure fantasy?
Thanks in advance! If anyone can answer any of these or redirect me to resources inside/outside of LW, I'd be grateful.
Cheers,
MW
Thanks for the answers, Pragmatist. I'm still fairly confused. But I'll read more in the sequence and elsewhere. I appreciate the effort/time.