Dynamically, I think the problem is that for everything you try that would render your world “distant” in the configuration space, it naturally tends to make your world smaller and more vulnerable, too. The worlds mangling yours aren’t close, it’s just that, collectively, they’re so much larger than yours, that even very tiny stray amplitude flows from them can mangle you.
@Goplat: In Bohm’s theory, the amplitude distribution has to be real because it affects the course of the particles. But the amplitude distribution itself is not affected by the particles. So any people encoded in the amplitude distribution—which can certainly compute things—would have no way of knowing the particles existed.
Rather a late comment… but this response to Goplat reminds me of one of David Lewis’s arguments for modal realism. Namely, he argues that “merely possible” people have exactly the same evidence that they are “real” as we do (it all looks real to them), and hence we ourselves have no evidence that we are “real” rather than merely possible.
An objection to this is “No! Merely possible people DON’T have evidence that they are real, because they don’t exist. They don’t have any evidence at all. They WOULD have the same evidence that we do if they DID exist, but then of course they WOULD be real.”
A similar objection is that the wave function amplitudes can’t do any real computation (as opposed to possible computation) unless they have real particles to compute with. So any people who find themselves existing can infer (correctly) that they are made out of real particles and not mere amplitudes.
It always amuses me that the particle motions in Bohm’s theory are described as “hidden variables”. Rather to the contrary, they are the ONLY things in the theory which are NOT hidden (whereas the wave function pushing the particles around is...)
Dynamically, I think the problem is that for everything you try that would render your world “distant” in the configuration space, it naturally tends to make your world smaller and more vulnerable, too. The worlds mangling yours aren’t close, it’s just that, collectively, they’re so much larger than yours, that even very tiny stray amplitude flows from them can mangle you.
@Goplat: In Bohm’s theory, the amplitude distribution has to be real because it affects the course of the particles. But the amplitude distribution itself is not affected by the particles. So any people encoded in the amplitude distribution—which can certainly compute things—would have no way of knowing the particles existed.
Rather a late comment… but this response to Goplat reminds me of one of David Lewis’s arguments for modal realism. Namely, he argues that “merely possible” people have exactly the same evidence that they are “real” as we do (it all looks real to them), and hence we ourselves have no evidence that we are “real” rather than merely possible.
An objection to this is “No! Merely possible people DON’T have evidence that they are real, because they don’t exist. They don’t have any evidence at all. They WOULD have the same evidence that we do if they DID exist, but then of course they WOULD be real.”
A similar objection is that the wave function amplitudes can’t do any real computation (as opposed to possible computation) unless they have real particles to compute with. So any people who find themselves existing can infer (correctly) that they are made out of real particles and not mere amplitudes.
It always amuses me that the particle motions in Bohm’s theory are described as “hidden variables”. Rather to the contrary, they are the ONLY things in the theory which are NOT hidden (whereas the wave function pushing the particles around is...)