A much stronger argument for the chocolate cake would be that there must be some incredibly small probability that atoms would be come together by chance to form a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. However, all physical possibilities are real, according to the argument for many worlds. Therefore there is actually a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. It just happens to be very distant from our blob of amplitude.
A similar case: there must be a world where your arm transforms into a blue tentacle, even if this world has an incredibly small amount of amplitude. Granted that you don’t expect to see this happen, there is still a different version of Eliezer who does see it happen. Of course, as you have argued, he cannot explain it. But what do you think he says about it when people ask why it happened? Does he begin to believe in magic?
Therefore there is actually a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. It just happens to be very distant from our blob of amplitude.
The only way to interpret the determiners in “there is a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt” that complies with Egan’s Law refers to ‘our’ asteroid belt in this blob of amplitude.
Configurations like that may have amplitudes so small that stray flows of amplitude from larger worlds dominate their neighboring configurations, preventing any computation from taking place.
Even if such worlds do ‘exist’, whether I believe in magic within them is unimportant, since they are so tiny; and also there is no reason to privilege that hypothesis as something to react to, since the real reason we are discussing that world is someone else choosing to single it out for discussion.
Even if such worlds do ‘exist’, whether I believe in magic within them is unimportant, since they are so tiny;
Since there is a good deal of literature indicating that our own world has a surprisingly tiny probabilty (ref: any introduction to the Anthropic Principle), I try not to dismiss the fate of such “fringe worlds” as completely unimportant.
army1987′s argument above seems very good though, I suggest you look at his comment very seriously
Asteroid belt got all the atoms to make the cake from, the only issue is their arrangement, and they’re presently arranged in a specific configuration that is as unlikely—as low amplitude—as if they were arranged into a bunch of cakes. It’s just that the highly unlikely configurations that look like asteroids are far more numerous than ones that look like cakes (which is a property of the looks-like-cake function).
Basically, it’s a common fallacy to believe that coin toss sequence such as HHHHHHH is less probable than HTTHHTH. It isn’t, and if you were to throw a quantum coin in a quantum many-worlds universe, the world where it was all heads will have same amplitude as every other sequence’s world.
(Also, any “stray flows of amplitude” require non-linear Schrödinger’s equation, of a very very specific kind so that you don’t end up with essentially one world)
This strikes me as a strong claim, your post sounds quite certain about mangled worlds, but as far as I’m aware, it hasn’t actually been verified. Yes?
An aside: I was under the impression that this post is outdated by now, and the idea of Devil’s advocacy has been superseded by steelmanning, a term virtually not in existence until Luke popularized it in 2011.
A much stronger argument for the chocolate cake would be that there must be some incredibly small probability that atoms would be come together by chance to form a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. However, all physical possibilities are real, according to the argument for many worlds. Therefore there is actually a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. It just happens to be very distant from our blob of amplitude.
A similar case: there must be a world where your arm transforms into a blue tentacle, even if this world has an incredibly small amount of amplitude. Granted that you don’t expect to see this happen, there is still a different version of Eliezer who does see it happen. Of course, as you have argued, he cannot explain it. But what do you think he says about it when people ask why it happened? Does he begin to believe in magic?
The only way to interpret the determiners in “there is a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt” that complies with Egan’s Law refers to ‘our’ asteroid belt in this blob of amplitude.
Configurations like that may have amplitudes so small that stray flows of amplitude from larger worlds dominate their neighboring configurations, preventing any computation from taking place.
Even if such worlds do ‘exist’, whether I believe in magic within them is unimportant, since they are so tiny; and also there is no reason to privilege that hypothesis as something to react to, since the real reason we are discussing that world is someone else choosing to single it out for discussion.
Since there is a good deal of literature indicating that our own world has a surprisingly tiny probabilty (ref: any introduction to the Anthropic Principle), I try not to dismiss the fate of such “fringe worlds” as completely unimportant.
army1987′s argument above seems very good though, I suggest you look at his comment very seriously
Asteroid belt got all the atoms to make the cake from, the only issue is their arrangement, and they’re presently arranged in a specific configuration that is as unlikely—as low amplitude—as if they were arranged into a bunch of cakes. It’s just that the highly unlikely configurations that look like asteroids are far more numerous than ones that look like cakes (which is a property of the looks-like-cake function).
Basically, it’s a common fallacy to believe that coin toss sequence such as HHHHHHH is less probable than HTTHHTH. It isn’t, and if you were to throw a quantum coin in a quantum many-worlds universe, the world where it was all heads will have same amplitude as every other sequence’s world.
(Also, any “stray flows of amplitude” require non-linear Schrödinger’s equation, of a very very specific kind so that you don’t end up with essentially one world)
This strikes me as a strong claim, your post sounds quite certain about mangled worlds, but as far as I’m aware, it hasn’t actually been verified. Yes?
It’s a branch refutation; strongly refuted if mangled worlds is true (hence ‘may’) but somewhat more weakly refuted if it’s not.
An aside: I was under the impression that this post is outdated by now, and the idea of Devil’s advocacy has been superseded by steelmanning, a term virtually not in existence until Luke popularized it in 2011.