Thanks, I see we already had a similar argument in the past.
I think there’s a bit of motte and bailey going on with the MWI. The controversy and philosophical questions are about multiple branches / worlds / versions of persons being ontological units. When we try to make things rigorous, only the wave function of the universe remains as a coherent ontological concept. But if we don’t have a clear way from the latter to the former, we can’t really say clear things about the parts which are philosophically interesting.
So much the worse for the controversy and philosophical questions. If anything, the name is the problem. People get wrong ideas from it, and so I prefer to talk in terms of decoherence rather than “many worlds”. There’s only one world, it’s just more complex than it appears and decoherence gives part of an explanation for why it appears simpler than it is.
Unfortunately, what I would call the bailey is quite common on Lesswrong. It doesn’t take much digging to find quotes like this in the Sequences and beyond:
This is a shocking notion; it implies that all our twins in the other worlds— all the different versions of ourselves that are constantly split off, [...]
Thanks, I see we already had a similar argument in the past.
I think there’s a bit of motte and bailey going on with the MWI. The controversy and philosophical questions are about multiple branches / worlds / versions of persons being ontological units. When we try to make things rigorous, only the wave function of the universe remains as a coherent ontological concept. But if we don’t have a clear way from the latter to the former, we can’t really say clear things about the parts which are philosophically interesting.
So much the worse for the controversy and philosophical questions. If anything, the name is the problem. People get wrong ideas from it, and so I prefer to talk in terms of decoherence rather than “many worlds”. There’s only one world, it’s just more complex than it appears and decoherence gives part of an explanation for why it appears simpler than it is.
Unfortunately, what I would call the bailey is quite common on Lesswrong. It doesn’t take much digging to find quotes like this in the Sequences and beyond: