A trillion years from now you will be very powerful AI which also knows for sure that QI works.
So if in the next few months a planet-sized rock comes out of deep space at high velocity and slams into Earth, in which Everett branch will you survive? Which quantum fluctuation will save you?
Given a big world, we live in a simulation and we don’t; we’re simply unable to self-locate ourselves in the set of all identical copies. That’s one of the main points of of the post about modal realism that turchin linked to in the original post. Failure to see how this leads to survival in every scenario is due to not thinking enough about it.
A big world was presented here as one of the premises of the whole argument, so if you think that the conclusions drawn here are ridiculous, you should probably attack that premise. I actually think physicists and philosophers would be rather more reluctant to bite all the bullets shot at them and think of alternatives if they realized what implications theories like MWI and inflation have, and care more about valid criticisms such that we have no accepted solution to the measure problem (although it seems that most physicists think that it can be solved without giving up the multiverse).
The one where events happened exactly the same—and then you wake up.
Uncertainty doesn’t happen in the universe, after all. The universe isn’t uncertain about what it is; the observer is uncertain about what universe it is in.
So if in the next few months a planet-sized rock comes out of deep space at high velocity and slams into Earth, in which Everett branch will you survive? Which quantum fluctuation will save you?
Yes, in all branches where i am in simulation and wake up. The same “me” may be in different worlds.
Or in the universe where aliens will save me just a second before the impact.
Or I will be resurrected by another aliens based on my footprint in radiowaves.
There is no possible issue that cannot be resolved by an answer “you are in a simulation and the simulation just changed its rules”.
Given a big world, we live in a simulation and we don’t; we’re simply unable to self-locate ourselves in the set of all identical copies. That’s one of the main points of of the post about modal realism that turchin linked to in the original post. Failure to see how this leads to survival in every scenario is due to not thinking enough about it.
A big world was presented here as one of the premises of the whole argument, so if you think that the conclusions drawn here are ridiculous, you should probably attack that premise. I actually think physicists and philosophers would be rather more reluctant to bite all the bullets shot at them and think of alternatives if they realized what implications theories like MWI and inflation have, and care more about valid criticisms such that we have no accepted solution to the measure problem (although it seems that most physicists think that it can be solved without giving up the multiverse).
The one where events happened exactly the same—and then you wake up.
Uncertainty doesn’t happen in the universe, after all. The universe isn’t uncertain about what it is; the observer is uncertain about what universe it is in.
That’s a bit too deep for me.