I'm confused here: You seem to be analyzing a troubleshooting process. How exactly did the troubleshooting process fail? I can see that there's some criticisms of what was done. But I don't see how this troubleshooting process resulted in disaster.
These are some very good links. I'm still digesting them. Thank you!
I've at least gave them all a once over (with the exception of Permutation City which awesome as it looks suffers from my general failure to incorporate fiction into my life) but definitely need to dig deeper. There's so much cool stuff out there that I'm still scratching the surface on.
Hans Moravec's Mind Children, I think comes closest to my argument. but stops short of stating that quantum suicide type scenarios might skew our understanding of physical law.
Anyways I'm just curious as to what else you've seen in a similar vein.
I get the sort of unrestrained woolly thinking that comes from a diet of too much insight porn and an overtrusting one's own ideas. Let me assure you that I don't particularly trust my suspicion here. My aim is to see if it is a good idea or not and if it is a good idea see how far it goes. I figure if someone can provide an extremely compelling argument as to why it's not true then that itself would probably be pretty interesting!
On the subject of quantum mechanics my intent is not to explain a mystery with another mystery fill it with secret sauce and revel in... (read more)
This is exactly the suspicion I have. The "real" physical laws could be quite different from the "experienced" physical laws. If this idea is correct physicists are only getting a small piece of the story of how the universe really operates.
It seems to me that this sort of behavior could (with sufficient refinement) provide an account for some of the more bizarre aspects of physical law. An obvious target is the counterintuitive statistics that make quantum mechanics so spooky.
It would also be place where physicsists could stuff their physics - extra degrees of freedom to explain the regularities we observe in nature. Perhaps instead of tiny curled dimensions... (read more)
Median expected behavior is simple which makes it easy to calculate.
As an electrical engineer when I design circuits I start off by assuming that all my parts behave exactly as rated. If a resistor says it's 220+10% Ohms then I use 220 for my initial calculations. Assuming median behavior works wonderfully in telling me what my circuit probably will do.
In fact that's good enough info for me to base my design decision on for a lot of purposes (given a quick verification of functionality, of course).
But what about that 10%? What if it might matter? One thing I do is called worst case analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolerance_analysis#Worst-case
This... (read more)
I'll dig a little deeper but let me first ask these questions:
What do you define as a coincidence?
Where can I find an explanation of the N 2^{-(K + C)} weighting?
I'm digging into this a little bit, but I'm not following your reasoning. UDT from what I see doesn't mandate the procedure you outline. (perhaps you can show an article where it does) I also don't see how which decision theory is best should play a strong role here.
But anyways I think the heart of your objection seems to be "Fragile universes will be strongly discounted in the expected utility because of the amount of coincidences required to create them". So I'll free admit to not understanding how this discounting process works, but I will note that current theoretical structures (standard model inflation cosmology/string theory) have a large amount... (read more)
A few brainstormy ideas:
Survival/Sustenance - Food/Water/Shelter/Safety
Humor - Jokes/Comedy
Intimacy - Feeling emotionally connected/Physical Affection/Proximity
Validation - Positive Feedback on emotions/feeling understood/feeling that one is good and one matters
I'm not quite grasping what you're trying to get it here. Please do elaborate and clarify!
When you say "It's irrelevant" and "it doesn't provide any useful information or anything that should guide your behavior" what are you referring to?
Choosing to go for chemo and jumping off a bridge should have different results, The difference between the two results would be the basis for the decision. I don't see how fragile universe hypothesis or MWI should undermine that.
As for the relevance of other timelines, I have four answers:
MWI allows for quantum interactions with other timelines which means they're directly relevant
MWI provides for multiple future timelines for me, despite the fact
I like to think about big questions from time to time. A fancy that quite possibly causes me more harm than good. Every once in a while I come up with some idea and wonder "hey, this seems pretty good, I wonder if anyone is taking it seriously?" Usually, answering that results at worst in me wasting a couple days on google and blowing $50 on amazon before I find someone who’s going down the same path and can tell myself. "Well, someone's got that covered". This particular idea is a little more stubborn and the amazon bill is starting to get a little heavy. So I cobbled together this “paper”... (read 1847 more words →)
So yeah. the gold standard is. of course. scientific prediction. My idea is very far away from such a thing! I actually do have some background in quantum mechanics (I have a physics minor :P) and at one point actually did have some understanding of Hamiltonian Operators and eigenstates and bra-ket notation. However that's a far cry from the sort of needed mathematics to really understand the implications of what I'm talking about (this is why they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing)! What I do have is enough knowledge to tentatively pose that my idea doesn't contradict what we've actually seen in experiments (so I... (read more)