On 6/21/2019 4:57 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Sat, Jun 22, 2019 at 4:42 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 6/21/2019 12:04 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 4:26 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything
List <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
To disconfirm MWI you'd have to observe statistics far from
the expected value,
To make my point more strongly, that is the wrong way round.
Observation of statistics far from the expected value is what
would be required to confirm MWI. The fact that we don't observe
such results is the strongest possible case against MWI!
How can that be when MWI predicts that observing statistics far
from the expected value is improbable.
MWI predicts that all sequences exist with unit probability.
And that you observe any given sequence with probability 1/2^n (just
like CI). And almost all those sequences will be close to the Born rule
(just like CI).
One can argue that the probability that one will find oneself in a
branch that is far from the Born probabilities is low only by assuming
that one is located in a branch by selecting from a uniform
distribution over all branches -- so that one has equal probability of
being in any branch. There is no reason to suppose that any such
random selection from a uniform distribution occurs.
It's the same as assuming the Born rule. You could say there's no
reason for it in CI...except that it works. Actually there may be a
deeper reason, since Gleason's theorem shows it's the only way to assign
a consistent probability measure on Hilbert space of three or more
dimensions.
From the first person point of view, after all, the probability is not
known in advance.
I'm not sure what "known" means in that. If you toss a coin to you
"know in advance" the probability of heads in 1/2?
which is why Tegmark proposed his machine gun suicide experiment.
Which confirms nothing except that Tegmark believes in MWI.
Quantum suicide cannot convince anyone other than one's self that
MWI is true.
Exactly why it's not convincing as a thought experiment.
Everyday experience does not confirm this, since we do not meet
people several hundred years old -- every one dies at their
appointed time. The quantum suicide experiment has been run
billions of times, always with null results.
Yes, I have thought this is good evidence against MWI; although
these ancient people would be so rare there might not be even one
on most branches of the world, so I'm not sure it's a decisive
argument.
People a million years old would presumably be rare on our branch.
Yes, they might be so rare there is none. But since each person lives
almost all of their life being much older than everyone around them
(given MWI), how is it that we are exceptional and seem to be living
with people our age?
But would you not expect a range of people with life spans extended by
several tens of years above the average life expectancy? There would
be a tailing distribution that extended to much older persons than we
currently observe.
No. Death wouldn't necessarily be a Poisson process, it could still
have a rate parameter that rises with age as it actually does for humans.
And why should old persons be the test. Why not any extremely
unlikely event. In your viewpoint the occurence of an unlikely
event is evidence for MWI, while the failure of unusual events to
occur is evidence against MWI. Yet it's a commonplace that
unlikely events occur all the time.
Not all unlikely events are governed by quantum probabilities. Most
are just due to good old classical chance.....
That's not really clear to me. "Good old classical chance" is just
quantifying ignorance. At a fundamental level there must be either
inherent chance, QM, or determinism.
Brent
Bruce
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