Tips: figure out if MWI is correct before you start worrying about these things. The existential crisis that can be brought on by thoughts surrounding QTI and QTorment can induce suicide and other bizarre behaviour.
This is the reason that Jacques Mallah wrote a paper on the fallacy of quantum immortality, because he estimates the risk is too high that people will start dying over this interpretation.
Now as Mitchell Porter says, MWI got some problems, mainly the Born Rule and Preferred Basis, aswell as problems with having wavefunction realism in configuration space/relativity (prompting proponents of MWI such as Wallace to postulate Space-Time state realism) this is enough for the vast majority of physicists to reject MWI, even some of the early supporters like Weinberg has turned his back on the hypothesis.
But even if you do believe Many Worlds is true, you have to factor in another thing: we don’t know whether worlds branch or diverge.
Alastair Wilson and Simon Saunders have written about this, the math doesn’t decide, so we can’t know.
It could be that once two outcomes can occur you “branch” into both worlds, or it could be that we are already on 2 separate, but identical worlds and when two outcomes occur, only one occur in the branch you are already isolated on. If this is the case, then quantum immortality is falsified 100% bcause you will forever remain on a single branch until the end of time… This also solves the “incoherence” problem with probability and lets us keep our episteomology.
Last, but not least I want to raise some criticism of Yudkowsky and Tegmark for introducing such ideas as fact, when there are severe problems facing it. It may have caused a lot of suicides from mentally unstable people, existential crisis and people who just thought quantum roulette would be a good way to get a better life, people who don’t care about the overall measure.
All because of something that is highly speculative with seemingly insoluble problems.
I’m not sure how I am going to cite that, there has never been conducted a gigantic poll on this matter, but the fact that the leading “experts” in the field who are the only ones doing work on Everett says that it’s less than 10% (Deutsch’s new book Beginning of infinity) should be revealing enough.
Ah! But here’s the rub. Consider a physicist who thinks Everett—or anyone who published after, for that matter—nailed it. Is this person going to publish anything on that subject? No. They’re going to go off and work on some other physics topic. The experts are generally those who think there’s something wrong with what’s out there so far!
In my little corner of condensed matter, it looks a whole lot more popular than that. In two consecutive groups I’ve had occasion to say something like, “Well, think of what a ‘measurement’ IS—your detector, and then you, became entangled with what you were measuring” and not generated the slightest controversy. If you’re looking at QM that way, then anything beyond Everett is either a substantive physical prediction or making things more complicated than they need to be.
In live conversations on the actual subject, the only objections I’ve heard from physicists were on theological grounds and general unease (one each). I got a whole lot more objections from philosophers than physicists, and they practically taunted me over it.
As for Alastair Wilson—well, he can go and disagree, but the fact remains, QM is a field theory, so you can flip freely back and forth between branching and divergence views of it.
At APS march meeting I met another CM experimentalist—in quantum computing, no less—who ‘had no patience for’ (his words) any interpretations of QM; this lumped Bohm and MW in the same boat explicitly, with other unnamed interpretations implied. In response, the senior guy at the table said that he’d ‘gained some patience’ (his words) with MW once he heard a talk describing what it actually was, and after that it seemed pretty reasonable. This elicited a ‘huh’ and a facial expression I interpreted as ‘queue for reconsideration’. Not sure whether this was just to be polite.
Tips: figure out if MWI is correct before you start worrying about these things. The existential crisis that can be brought on by thoughts surrounding QTI and QTorment can induce suicide and other bizarre behaviour. This is the reason that Jacques Mallah wrote a paper on the fallacy of quantum immortality, because he estimates the risk is too high that people will start dying over this interpretation.
Now as Mitchell Porter says, MWI got some problems, mainly the Born Rule and Preferred Basis, aswell as problems with having wavefunction realism in configuration space/relativity (prompting proponents of MWI such as Wallace to postulate Space-Time state realism) this is enough for the vast majority of physicists to reject MWI, even some of the early supporters like Weinberg has turned his back on the hypothesis.
But even if you do believe Many Worlds is true, you have to factor in another thing: we don’t know whether worlds branch or diverge. Alastair Wilson and Simon Saunders have written about this, the math doesn’t decide, so we can’t know. It could be that once two outcomes can occur you “branch” into both worlds, or it could be that we are already on 2 separate, but identical worlds and when two outcomes occur, only one occur in the branch you are already isolated on. If this is the case, then quantum immortality is falsified 100% bcause you will forever remain on a single branch until the end of time… This also solves the “incoherence” problem with probability and lets us keep our episteomology.
Last, but not least I want to raise some criticism of Yudkowsky and Tegmark for introducing such ideas as fact, when there are severe problems facing it. It may have caused a lot of suicides from mentally unstable people, existential crisis and people who just thought quantum roulette would be a good way to get a better life, people who don’t care about the overall measure. All because of something that is highly speculative with seemingly insoluble problems.
Cite, please.
It’s a field. There’s no meaningful distinction here.
I’m not sure how I am going to cite that, there has never been conducted a gigantic poll on this matter, but the fact that the leading “experts” in the field who are the only ones doing work on Everett says that it’s less than 10% (Deutsch’s new book Beginning of infinity) should be revealing enough.
As for branching and divergence, Alastair Wilson and Simon Saunders disagrees: http://alastairwilson.org/
Ah! But here’s the rub. Consider a physicist who thinks Everett—or anyone who published after, for that matter—nailed it. Is this person going to publish anything on that subject? No. They’re going to go off and work on some other physics topic. The experts are generally those who think there’s something wrong with what’s out there so far!
In my little corner of condensed matter, it looks a whole lot more popular than that. In two consecutive groups I’ve had occasion to say something like, “Well, think of what a ‘measurement’ IS—your detector, and then you, became entangled with what you were measuring” and not generated the slightest controversy. If you’re looking at QM that way, then anything beyond Everett is either a substantive physical prediction or making things more complicated than they need to be.
In live conversations on the actual subject, the only objections I’ve heard from physicists were on theological grounds and general unease (one each). I got a whole lot more objections from philosophers than physicists, and they practically taunted me over it.
As for Alastair Wilson—well, he can go and disagree, but the fact remains, QM is a field theory, so you can flip freely back and forth between branching and divergence views of it.
At APS march meeting I met another CM experimentalist—in quantum computing, no less—who ‘had no patience for’ (his words) any interpretations of QM; this lumped Bohm and MW in the same boat explicitly, with other unnamed interpretations implied. In response, the senior guy at the table said that he’d ‘gained some patience’ (his words) with MW once he heard a talk describing what it actually was, and after that it seemed pretty reasonable. This elicited a ‘huh’ and a facial expression I interpreted as ‘queue for reconsideration’. Not sure whether this was just to be polite.