They talk about changes spreading out, perhaps gradually. ISTM that some changes aren't going to propagate very far or very fast. So the universe is full of bubbles in which there are a lot of local branches and I guess spaces in which they don't make enough difference to spread, or not much... Which sounds more like your source contol system, well, sort of.
On 21 January 2014 14:56, Pierz <pier...@gmail.com> wrote: > A second question/thought on MWI. MWI proposes that the entire universe > splits at the point of wave collapse, or rather that it is continually and > infinitely splitting with every possible quantum state. This has been > understandably criticised as a vastly extravagant explanation. A whole > universe, or even infinity of universes, for every quantum interaction > seems a high price to play to eliminate the weirdness of wave collapse. Yet > it seems to me that we can still get the explanatory benefits of MWI > without this extravagance by seeing the situation slightly differently. > > I'll explain by analogy. I'm a coder. In the old days I used to back up my > work by making a complete copy of it and putting it in an archive folder. > Nowadays I use git, a source control system that keeps track of the history > of my code and allows me to revert back changes to an earlier point in > time. Depending on how often I "commit" my work, I can have an arbitrarily > fine level of versioning. If git was stupid, it would copy my whole code > repository every time I committed a change, and my disk would rapidly fill > up. It would also be impossible to merge the work of another programmer > working on the same code base because the system would only have complete > individual snapshots. It would have no information about *what* changed > between snapshots. But git is smarter than that. It records only what I > changed in each commit. Thus I don't have to worry about my disk filling > up, and I can happily merge someone else's changes - just so long as we > don't both try to change the same line of code. > > To think that in MWI, a *whole other universe* is created when a binary > quantum event occurs is like imagining the multiverse works like my old > backup system. One thing changed, so if I want to keep a record of the > earlier state, I have to copy *everything*. This is the way that Deutsch > seems to talk about the situation. But it makes more sense to me to think > of it as like git. If the universes diverged by only bit of information, > that one bit is the only thing that is "recorded" so to speak. When the > spin of a particle is measured here on earth, causing the universe to > split, there is no need at this point to think that there are suddenly two > Plutos, one for each spin state. What does Pluto know about the change? > Later, this one bit change will ramify out, causing divergent information > flows in the two "universes" which will eventually lead (possibly? > necessarily?) to two completely different universes. But to the extent that > any region of one universe is identical to a region of another universe in > the multiverse, shouldn't we regard those regions as belonging to one and > the same universe, merely with the potential to differentiate from one > another? > > In other words, we're better off thinking about locally branching > information flows than an infinite filo-pastry of universes. We can still > answer the question of where the computations of a quantum computer take > place - they occur in a multi-dimensional local information space. Each > calculation line that contributes to the final result occurs on its own > information thread as it were, but it does not require a whole universe to > occur in. > > Maybe this economical view is the way MWI theorists actually do see the > situation? If so, I wish they'd talk that way. It makes the theory a lot > easier to swallow in my view. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
