Yup, that’s the best. I’d be happy to hear about the best you’ve seen, especially if you’ve seen better.
Why do you assume I would be inclined to one up the argument? The more natural interpretation of my implied inference is in approximately the reverse direction.
If the best argument against MWI that a self professed physicist and MWI critic has ever seen has absolutely zero persuasive power then that is rather strong evidence in favor.
I am new to this board and come in with a “prior” of rejecting MWI beyond the tiniest amount on the basis of, among other things, conservation of energy and mass. (Where do these constantly forming new worlds come from?) MWI seems more like a mapmakers mistake than a description of the territory, which manifestly has only one universe in it every time I look.
I was inviting you to show me with links or description whatever you find most compelling, if you could be bothered to. I am reading main sequence stuff and this is one of the more interesting puzzles among Less Wrong’s idiosyncratic consensi.
Here a subsequent discussion about some experimental test(s) of MWI. Also here a video dicussion between Scott Aaronson and Yudkowsky (starting at 38:11). More links on topic can be found here.
ETA
Sorry, I wanted to reply to another of your comments, wrong tab. Anyway.
Wikipedia points to a site that says conservation of energy is not violated. Do you know if it’s factually wrong or what’s going on here? (if so can you update wikipedia? :D)
Q22 Does many-worlds violate conservation of energy?
First, the law conservation of energy is based on observations within each world. All observations within each world are consistent with conservation of energy, therefore energy is conserved.
Second, and more precisely, conservation of energy, in QM, is formulated in terms of weighted averages or expectation values. Conservation of energy is expressed by saying that the time derivative of the expected energy of a closed system vanishes. This statement can be scaled up to include the whole universe. Each world has an approximate energy, but the energy of the total wavefunction, or any subset of, involves summing over each world, weighted with its probability measure. This weighted sum is a constant. So energy is conserved within each world and also across the totality of worlds.
One way of viewing this result—that observed conserved quantities are conserved across the totality of worlds—is to note that new worlds are not created by the action of the wave equation, rather existing worlds are split into successively “thinner” and “thinner” slices, if we view the probability densities as “thickness”.
Yup, that’s the best. I’d be happy to hear about the best you’ve seen, especially if you’ve seen better.
Why do you assume I would be inclined to one up the argument? The more natural interpretation of my implied inference is in approximately the reverse direction.
If the best argument against MWI that a self professed physicist and MWI critic has ever seen has absolutely zero persuasive power then that is rather strong evidence in favor.
I am new to this board and come in with a “prior” of rejecting MWI beyond the tiniest amount on the basis of, among other things, conservation of energy and mass. (Where do these constantly forming new worlds come from?) MWI seems more like a mapmakers mistake than a description of the territory, which manifestly has only one universe in it every time I look.
I was inviting you to show me with links or description whatever you find most compelling, if you could be bothered to. I am reading main sequence stuff and this is one of the more interesting puzzles among Less Wrong’s idiosyncratic consensi.
Here a subsequent discussion about some experimental test(s) of MWI. Also here a video dicussion between Scott Aaronson and Yudkowsky (starting at 38:11). More links on topic can be found here.
ETA Sorry, I wanted to reply to another of your comments, wrong tab. Anyway.
Wikipedia points to a site that says conservation of energy is not violated. Do you know if it’s factually wrong or what’s going on here? (if so can you update wikipedia? :D)
Q22 Does many-worlds violate conservation of energy?
First, the law conservation of energy is based on observations within each world. All observations within each world are consistent with conservation of energy, therefore energy is conserved. Second, and more precisely, conservation of energy, in QM, is formulated in terms of weighted averages or expectation values. Conservation of energy is expressed by saying that the time derivative of the expected energy of a closed system vanishes. This statement can be scaled up to include the whole universe. Each world has an approximate energy, but the energy of the total wavefunction, or any subset of, involves summing over each world, weighted with its probability measure. This weighted sum is a constant. So energy is conserved within each world and also across the totality of worlds.
One way of viewing this result—that observed conserved quantities are conserved across the totality of worlds—is to note that new worlds are not created by the action of the wave equation, rather existing worlds are split into successively “thinner” and “thinner” slices, if we view the probability densities as “thickness”.