[ExI] Let's play What If.

[John Clark]

On Oct 27, 2010, at 12:04 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

> Under a many worlds view, a 1/million probability of being tortured
> amounts to you being duplicated (at least) a million times and
> 1/million of those copies being tortured. 

That is not entirely correct. Everett tried to get probabilities out of his theory by counting universes but he was not able to, nor has anybody after him managed to do it; that may mean that the number of universes is larger than the countable numbers like the integers and must be of a class of infinity larger than that, like the number of points on a line, or a class of infinity larger than that like the number of all possible clock faces, or something even bigger than that. Counting wouldn't work so Everett needed another way to assign probability that was mathematically consistent so that if you combined all the probabilities in all the branches concerning an event happening you get exactly 100%. Everett found something that worked and he claimed it was the only thing that would work, the square of the amplitude of the Schrodinger Wave function. This is called the "Born Rule", it had been discovered years before Everett and had been shown experimentally to accurately assign probabilities, but nobody knew why it worked. Everett said he knew why it worked. 

  John K Clark 


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