Nick: I don’t understand the connection to quantum mechanics.
The argument that I commonly see relating quantum mechanics to anthropic reasoning is deeply flawed. Some people seem to think that many worlds means there are many “branches” of the wavefunction and we find ourselves in them with equal probability. In this case, they argue, we should expect to find ourselves in a disorderly universe. However, this is exactly what the Born rule (and experiment!) does not say. Rather, the Born rule says that we are only likely to find ourselves in states with large amplitude. Also, standard quantum mechanics allows the probabilities to fall on a continuum. They aren’t arrived at by counting, so the whole concept of counting branches is not standard QM anyway.
(I don’t know whether you hold this view, but it is a common misconception that should be addressed at some point anyway.)
Nick: I don’t understand the connection to quantum mechanics.
The argument that I commonly see relating quantum mechanics to anthropic reasoning is deeply flawed. Some people seem to think that many worlds means there are many “branches” of the wavefunction and we find ourselves in them with equal probability. In this case, they argue, we should expect to find ourselves in a disorderly universe. However, this is exactly what the Born rule (and experiment!) does not say. Rather, the Born rule says that we are only likely to find ourselves in states with large amplitude. Also, standard quantum mechanics allows the probabilities to fall on a continuum. They aren’t arrived at by counting, so the whole concept of counting branches is not standard QM anyway.
(I don’t know whether you hold this view, but it is a common misconception that should be addressed at some point anyway.)