[SEQ RERUN] Zombie Responses

[MinibearRex]

Today’s post, Zombie Responses was originally published on 05 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):

A few more points on Zombies.

Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).

This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Zombies! Zombies?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.

Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.

[Luke_A_Somers]

Eliezer:

Stephen: You might argue that the Born rule is an extra postulate dictating how experience binds to the physical universe, particularly if you believe in a no-collapse version of quantum mechanics, such as many-worlds.

That is exactly right, Stephen.

And that’s why we have the mangled worlds hypothesis, developed by our very own Robin Hanson.

You merely need to postulate that components of the wavefunction can be interpreted as probabilities in some as-yet-undefined way. What the rule is then follows from the dynamics of QM and certain theorems of probability.

I discussed this in more detail here.