Configurations like that may have amplitudes so small that stray flows of amplitude from larger worlds dominate their neighboring configurations, preventing any computation from taking place.
Even if such worlds do ‘exist’, whether I believe in magic within them is unimportant, since they are so tiny; and also there is no reason to privilege that hypothesis as something to react to, since the real reason we are discussing that world is someone else choosing to single it out for discussion.
Even if such worlds do ‘exist’, whether I believe in magic within them is unimportant, since they are so tiny;
Since there is a good deal of literature indicating that our own world has a surprisingly tiny probabilty (ref: any introduction to the Anthropic Principle), I try not to dismiss the fate of such “fringe worlds” as completely unimportant.
army1987′s argument above seems very good though, I suggest you look at his comment very seriously
Asteroid belt got all the atoms to make the cake from, the only issue is their arrangement, and they’re presently arranged in a specific configuration that is as unlikely—as low amplitude—as if they were arranged into a bunch of cakes. It’s just that the highly unlikely configurations that look like asteroids are far more numerous than ones that look like cakes (which is a property of the looks-like-cake function).
Basically, it’s a common fallacy to believe that coin toss sequence such as HHHHHHH is less probable than HTTHHTH. It isn’t, and if you were to throw a quantum coin in a quantum many-worlds universe, the world where it was all heads will have same amplitude as every other sequence’s world.
(Also, any “stray flows of amplitude” require non-linear Schrödinger’s equation, of a very very specific kind so that you don’t end up with essentially one world)
This strikes me as a strong claim, your post sounds quite certain about mangled worlds, but as far as I’m aware, it hasn’t actually been verified. Yes?
An aside: I was under the impression that this post is outdated by now, and the idea of Devil’s advocacy has been superseded by steelmanning, a term virtually not in existence until Luke popularized it in 2011.
Configurations like that may have amplitudes so small that stray flows of amplitude from larger worlds dominate their neighboring configurations, preventing any computation from taking place.
Even if such worlds do ‘exist’, whether I believe in magic within them is unimportant, since they are so tiny; and also there is no reason to privilege that hypothesis as something to react to, since the real reason we are discussing that world is someone else choosing to single it out for discussion.
Since there is a good deal of literature indicating that our own world has a surprisingly tiny probabilty (ref: any introduction to the Anthropic Principle), I try not to dismiss the fate of such “fringe worlds” as completely unimportant.
army1987′s argument above seems very good though, I suggest you look at his comment very seriously
Asteroid belt got all the atoms to make the cake from, the only issue is their arrangement, and they’re presently arranged in a specific configuration that is as unlikely—as low amplitude—as if they were arranged into a bunch of cakes. It’s just that the highly unlikely configurations that look like asteroids are far more numerous than ones that look like cakes (which is a property of the looks-like-cake function).
Basically, it’s a common fallacy to believe that coin toss sequence such as HHHHHHH is less probable than HTTHHTH. It isn’t, and if you were to throw a quantum coin in a quantum many-worlds universe, the world where it was all heads will have same amplitude as every other sequence’s world.
(Also, any “stray flows of amplitude” require non-linear Schrödinger’s equation, of a very very specific kind so that you don’t end up with essentially one world)
This strikes me as a strong claim, your post sounds quite certain about mangled worlds, but as far as I’m aware, it hasn’t actually been verified. Yes?
It’s a branch refutation; strongly refuted if mangled worlds is true (hence ‘may’) but somewhat more weakly refuted if it’s not.
An aside: I was under the impression that this post is outdated by now, and the idea of Devil’s advocacy has been superseded by steelmanning, a term virtually not in existence until Luke popularized it in 2011.