I don’t quite understand what you’re confused about. Why would MWI make you start talking in anything but english?
If you flip a hypothetical fair random coin 1000 times, you’ll almost certainly get something around 500 heads and 500 tails. Getting anything like 995 heads would be rare.
The coin can be entirely nondeterministic in how it flips, and still be reliable in this regard.
Well, there’s no physical limitation against me speaking something other than my birth language. Using the coin analogy, my tongue position, lips position, and airflow out of my throat are the variables. Those variables, across all distributions, can produce any human word. Across infinity, there will be worlds where I’m speaking my birth language, and other ones that I’m not, for my next statement. MWI seems to me to eliminate the prior state from having an influence on the next state of my language machine. If all probabilities do occur in the MWI, I see the probability of me continuing to speak English to be the 995 heads case (which is still possible, I just see it as unlikely). I don’t think MWI “makes” me do anything, I just think the implication is that all possible worlds become reality. It really comes down to the prior state’s apparent lack influence; that’s what confuses me. Once that’s gone, I just see causality in human actions going out the window.
You’re confused about probability, causality in QM, and anthropics. (Note in particular that your objection can’t be particular to MWI, since even in a collapse theory, the wacky things could happen).
MWI seems to me to eliminate the prior state from having an influence on the next state of my language machine.
The current state of your brain corresponds to a particular (small neighborhood of) configurations, and most of the wavefunction-mass that is in this neighborhood flows to a relatively small subset of configurations (i.e. ones where your next sentence is in English, or gibberish, rather than in perfect Klingon); this, precisely, is what causality actually means.
Yes, there is some probability that quantum fluctuations will cause your throat cells to enunciate a Klingon speech, without being prompted by a patterned command from your brain. But that probability is on the order of 10^{-100} at most.
And there is some probability, given the structure of your brain, that your nerves would send precisely the commands to make that happen; but given that you don’t actually know the Klingon speech, that probability too is on the order of 10^{-100}.
The upshot of MWI in this regard is that very few of your future selves will see wacky incredibly-improbably-ordered events happen, and so you recover your intuition that you will not, in fact, see wacky things. It’s just that an infinitesimal fraction of your future selves will be surprised.
I don’t quite understand what you’re confused about. Why would MWI make you start talking in anything but english?
If you flip a hypothetical fair random coin 1000 times, you’ll almost certainly get something around 500 heads and 500 tails. Getting anything like 995 heads would be rare.
The coin can be entirely nondeterministic in how it flips, and still be reliable in this regard.
Well, there’s no physical limitation against me speaking something other than my birth language. Using the coin analogy, my tongue position, lips position, and airflow out of my throat are the variables. Those variables, across all distributions, can produce any human word. Across infinity, there will be worlds where I’m speaking my birth language, and other ones that I’m not, for my next statement. MWI seems to me to eliminate the prior state from having an influence on the next state of my language machine. If all probabilities do occur in the MWI, I see the probability of me continuing to speak English to be the 995 heads case (which is still possible, I just see it as unlikely). I don’t think MWI “makes” me do anything, I just think the implication is that all possible worlds become reality. It really comes down to the prior state’s apparent lack influence; that’s what confuses me. Once that’s gone, I just see causality in human actions going out the window.
You’re confused about probability, causality in QM, and anthropics. (Note in particular that your objection can’t be particular to MWI, since even in a collapse theory, the wacky things could happen).
The current state of your brain corresponds to a particular (small neighborhood of) configurations, and most of the wavefunction-mass that is in this neighborhood flows to a relatively small subset of configurations (i.e. ones where your next sentence is in English, or gibberish, rather than in perfect Klingon); this, precisely, is what causality actually means.
Yes, there is some probability that quantum fluctuations will cause your throat cells to enunciate a Klingon speech, without being prompted by a patterned command from your brain. But that probability is on the order of 10^{-100} at most.
And there is some probability, given the structure of your brain, that your nerves would send precisely the commands to make that happen; but given that you don’t actually know the Klingon speech, that probability too is on the order of 10^{-100}.
The upshot of MWI in this regard is that very few of your future selves will see wacky incredibly-improbably-ordered events happen, and so you recover your intuition that you will not, in fact, see wacky things. It’s just that an infinitesimal fraction of your future selves will be surprised.
Thanks, this really helps to clarify the picture for me.