Er, what evidence exactly am I supposed to be updating on?
The supplied evidence for 1 (“We value extra copies in other quantum branches”) seems feeble. Most people are totally ignorant of the MWI. Most people lived before it was invented. Quantum theory is mostly an irrelevance—as far as people’s values goes. If—astonishingly—evidence of wavefunction collapse was ever found, people would carry on caring about things much as before—without any breakdown of morality—despite the loss of practially everything in other worlds. That thought experiment seems to demonstrate that most people care very little about copies of themselves in other worlds—since they would behave much the same if scientists discovered that those worlds did not exist.
Maybe there are somewhere a bunch of people with very odd values, who actually believe that they really do value copies of themselves in other worlds. I can think of at least one fellow who thinks like that—David Pearce. However, if so, this hypothetical silent mass of people have not stood up to be counted here.
Er, what evidence exactly am I supposed to be updating on?
The supplied evidence for 1 (“We value extra copies in other quantum branches”) seems feeble. Most people are totally ignorant of the MWI. Most people lived before it was invented. Quantum theory is mostly an irrelevance—as far as people’s values goes. If—astonishingly—evidence of wavefunction collapse was ever found, people would carry on caring about things much as before—without any breakdown of morality—despite the loss of practially everything in other worlds. That thought experiment seems to demonstrate that most people care very little about copies of themselves in other worlds—since they would behave much the same if scientists discovered that those worlds did not exist.
Maybe there are somewhere a bunch of people with very odd values, who actually believe that they really do value copies of themselves in other worlds. I can think of at least one fellow who thinks like that—David Pearce. However, if so, this hypothetical silent mass of people have not stood up to be counted here.