[extropy-chat] Mangled Worlds

[Dirk Bruere]

On 2/24/06, Robin Hanson <rhanson at gmu.edu> wrote:
>
> At 09:33 PM 2/23/2006, Hal Finney wrote:
> > > http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn8766.html
> >... The scary part is the possibility that the mangled worlds actually
> allow
> >a moment of existence before everyone in them is killed.  These mangled
> >worlds are forking off from the "main" branches at every instant.  By
> some
> >arguments, they are enormously more numerous than the main-branch worlds.
> >If so, it's very likely that our next instant of experience will be death
> >in a mangled world.  One would hope that these deaths are instantaneous.
> >But it's also possible that they are not, ...
> >Meanwhile the main branches carry on, oblivious.  The mangled worlds
> >would be like sparks thrown off from the main branches, brief but
> >far more numerous than the main branch worlds themselves.  The most
> >common experience for each individual, no matter how long he has lived,
> >would be sudden, violent death, repeated at every instant of his life,
> >an almost infinite number of times.
>
> I'm not sure you have the details right, though I don't think you
> will find the right details
> much more comforting.   Mangled worlds are not small because they are
> mangled,
> they become mangled as they become too small.   At each



That rather suggests that there is a 'graininess' to the multiverse and that
it cannot be subdivided infinitely. What evidence for that exists? It also
implies some kind of non-linearity in QM. Experimentally nothing has been
discovered to within (IIRC) about 1 in 10^26

Dirk
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