Sorry for the triple-post, but I’m hoping to make my position a bit clearer --
I don’t see why probabilities in many-worlds QM should produce any new mysteries that were not already present in ordinary functionalist philosophy. In functionalism, to turn a third-person view of the world into subjective anticipations, you need a criterion to determine whether the world implements a mind, and how many minds it implements, and/or to what degree. Once you have such a criterion, it should be straightforward to apply it to a branching quantum universe, and it doesn’t seem obvious a priori that this criterion would say the branching quantum universe implements the same number of minds for every one of the structures that we happen to call a “world” (if there’s even a reasonable way to decide when to call something one world and when to call something two worlds).
Mitchell Porter, I think, would say that the same problems of vagueness of existence/implementation/etc kill both functionalism and the MWI. I would say that the solution to these problems for functionalism will show us the way to a solution for the same problems in MWI, one that shows that we have to assign probabilities the Born way to begin with and not equally across worlds.
Sorry for the triple-post, but I’m hoping to make my position a bit clearer --
I don’t see why probabilities in many-worlds QM should produce any new mysteries that were not already present in ordinary functionalist philosophy. In functionalism, to turn a third-person view of the world into subjective anticipations, you need a criterion to determine whether the world implements a mind, and how many minds it implements, and/or to what degree. Once you have such a criterion, it should be straightforward to apply it to a branching quantum universe, and it doesn’t seem obvious a priori that this criterion would say the branching quantum universe implements the same number of minds for every one of the structures that we happen to call a “world” (if there’s even a reasonable way to decide when to call something one world and when to call something two worlds).
Mitchell Porter, I think, would say that the same problems of vagueness of existence/implementation/etc kill both functionalism and the MWI. I would say that the solution to these problems for functionalism will show us the way to a solution for the same problems in MWI, one that shows that we have to assign probabilities the Born way to begin with and not equally across worlds.