In applied quantum physics, you have concrete situations (Stern-Gerlach experiment is a famous one), theory gives you the probabilities of outcomes, and repeating the experiment many times, gives you frequencies that converge on the probabilities.
Can you, or Chris, or anyone, explain, in terms of some concrete situation, what you’re talking about?
I’ll take a stab at this. Suppose we had strong a priori reasons for thinking it’s in our logical past that we’ll have created a superintelligence of some sort. Let’s suppose that some particular quantum outcome in the future can get chaotically amplified, so that in one Everett branch humanity never builds any superintelligence because of some sort of global catastrophe (say with 99% probability, according to the Born rule), and in some other Everett branch humanity builds some kind of superintelligence (say with 1% probability, according to the Born rule). Then we should expect to end up in the Everett branch in which humanity builds some kind of superintelligence with ~100% probability, despite the Born rule saying we only have a 1% chance of ending up there, because the “99%-likely” Everett branch was ruled out by our a priori reasoning.
I’m not sure if this is the kind of concrete outcome that you’re asking for. I imagine that, for the most part, the kind of universe I’m describing will still yield frequencies that converge on the Born probabilities, and for the most part appear indistinguishable from a universe in which quantum outcomes are “truly random”. See my reply to Joel Burget for some more detail about how I think about this hypothesis.
In applied quantum physics, you have concrete situations (Stern-Gerlach experiment is a famous one), theory gives you the probabilities of outcomes, and repeating the experiment many times, gives you frequencies that converge on the probabilities.
Can you, or Chris, or anyone, explain, in terms of some concrete situation, what you’re talking about?
I’ll take a stab at this. Suppose we had strong a priori reasons for thinking it’s in our logical past that we’ll have created a superintelligence of some sort. Let’s suppose that some particular quantum outcome in the future can get chaotically amplified, so that in one Everett branch humanity never builds any superintelligence because of some sort of global catastrophe (say with 99% probability, according to the Born rule), and in some other Everett branch humanity builds some kind of superintelligence (say with 1% probability, according to the Born rule). Then we should expect to end up in the Everett branch in which humanity builds some kind of superintelligence with ~100% probability, despite the Born rule saying we only have a 1% chance of ending up there, because the “99%-likely” Everett branch was ruled out by our a priori reasoning.
I’m not sure if this is the kind of concrete outcome that you’re asking for. I imagine that, for the most part, the kind of universe I’m describing will still yield frequencies that converge on the Born probabilities, and for the most part appear indistinguishable from a universe in which quantum outcomes are “truly random”. See my reply to Joel Burget for some more detail about how I think about this hypothesis.