Maudlin attempts to show that counterfactuals don't count, as it were, by bolting on vast universes of counterfactual-handling machinery to his already unfeasibly large thought experiment. The MWI does the same sort of thing for free, so if we assume it's the correct interpretation of QM we get a similar result without the same sort of mind-bogglingly large pieces of machinery, though at the cost of mind-boggling numbers of parallel universes.
If a system is deterministic, like a brain in the multiverse, then all the might-have-beens are unphysical, and hence not possible (e.g. "in branch 1234 zillion, I could have decided to have coffee, but instead I decided to have tea" - hence "coffee in branch 1234 zillion" is not physically possible). How can it make any difference to branch 1234zil that in branch 3456zil I *did* have coffee? None, according to QM, once they have ceased to interfere - which was way before I was even conscious of which hot beverage related decision I'd made (as I expect everyone here knows, we only become conscious of what we've "decided" to do some time after the decision has been arrived at unconsciously - at least according to experiments involving brain scans etc - and the relevant brain processes have ceased to interact long before then, on the quantum timescale). So this counterfactual - "coffee in branch 1234 zilion" - has no relevance to my consciousness in branch 1234 zilion, being physically impossible by virtue of not having happened - and by extension no "physically realised elsewhere, but not here" counterfactuals can have any influence on my consciousness. This is why I, at least, can't see the point of the damn things. (Although there is a version of me in branch 9876 zillion that may be able to.) -- 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/d/optout.
