Re: Parallel Universes

From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Feb 12 2003 - 02:27:55 MST

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    On Tue, Feb 11, 2003 at 05:50:46PM -0800, Lee Corbin wrote:
    > Anders writes
    >
    > > Note that the MWI also contains the unlikely worlds, including
    > > truly bizarre "hell spaces" where there is no order at all.
    > > But the probability of finding oneself in such a world is
    > > vanishingly small due to decoherence,
    >
    > Do you mean the same thing as: whereas there is some low probability
    > that I will find myself being tortured by Colombian Narco-dealers,
    > there is a vanishingly low probability that I will find myself in
    > a completely incoherent world (for one thing, I would suffocate
    > immediately)?

    Exactly. The worlds where object tunnel around randomly are highly
    improbably compared to the worlds where objects and people behave
    more or less as usual (Colombian narco-dealers are classical
    objects; in a too quantum world they would not have a market
    anyway.)

    > > The mass issue is not really an issue. When a system is in a
    > > superposition of states (let's say a 4 kg living cat state
    > > together with a 4 kg dead cat state in a Schrodinger box)
    > > the total mass doesn't increase to 8 kg.
    >
    > Quite right. And the way to see this is to imagine that a
    > sheaf of a thousand pieces of paper has bifurcated to two
    > sheets of five hundred pages each. In other words, universes
    > become distinguished.
    >
    > (Speaking about "splitting of worlds" sometimes has the
    > drawback of giving rise to notions of increase in quantity.)

    Yes, the MWI really doesn't say anything about that. Tegmark
    explained it nicely in the later part of the paper; the
    multiverse of the MWI is really just a single huge block of
    worlds dividing and merging. Of course, it may be that
    classical paths merge much less, their probability sustained
    by the inflow of lots of improbable chaos-worldlines that
    suddenly stop being crazy.

    -- 
    -----------------------------------------------------------------------
    Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
    asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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