[ExI] Everett worlds

[spike at rainier66.com]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of
Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat
Sent: Sunday, August 16, 2020 2:58 AM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Cc: Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com>
Subject: [ExI] Everett worlds

>...I'm researching Everett's quantum mechanics again. Is there any
interpretation or variant of Everett that you are aware of where more than
one but not all Everett worlds are real?
For example, one could think that a new "real" world is spawned only when
there's an inconsistent time loop in a current real world (this seems to be
the case in Greg Benford's science fiction novel Timescape).
Or, one could think that Everett world's are selected according to some
reality criteria and only some (but not all) worlds are accepted.
Like in genetic programming, where many parallel evolutions are generated
but only some are selected for continuation.
Thoughts?
_______________________________________________



Hi Giulio,

Since you are thinking about this kind of thing, you are OK with the
mind-blowing aspects you encounter while frolicking on that particular and
peculiar philosophical playground.

As an offshoot to your idea, imagine a slightly modified Everett universe
where you have quantum branching and all that, but... not every possible
quantum branch is allowed, not even most of them, but only those which can
somehow cause what I will call spike convergence.  Spike convergence is
where many different quantum events can happen in arbitrary order, but they
all hafta somehow end up in an identical end state.

Consider a particle anti-particle pair which somehow borrows energy for a
Planck, goes a very short distance apart, comes back together, annihilate,
hand back the energy it borrowed, does it all in a short enough time and
small enough space to not hurt Dr. Heisenberg's feelings.  Wacky scenario,
ja?  But current theory tells us this happens skerjillions of times per
picosecond in every cubic nothing of space, constantly, and no one is the
wiser, because once those particles live and die, we have no way to know
they were ever there.  They were born, lived and died, left no will.  The
universe was in exactly the same condition before and after.  Their
pointless existence had no impact at all, because their future world
converged with the future that would have been there had not they ever
existed.

OK, is that kinda how you think about quantum mechanics?  Me too.

The only conditions that I know of where a quantum pair doesn't spike
converge is when one falls into the event horizon and the other heads on out
of town.  Dr. Hawking used that mechanism to explain why black holes
evaporate.  Damned if I understand how that wouldn't violate Dr.
Heisenberg's notion, but hey, the Brits and the Germans have been fighting
for a long time. 

Here's where I am going with all this: what if... the number of Everett
universes is not really infinite, but rather is unimaginably large and
finite?

In that scenario, only quantum branches allowed are those which somehow
converge with the others, such that there is ultimately one possible future
state, with maaaaany many paths to get there.  The present, with all its
many possible branches forms a kind of braided rope configuration sorta,
with skerjillions of strands, with a known far past (the pre-big bang
universe) and each strand representing a possible now but only one possible
future.  I think of it as a kind of quantum rope, with pointy ends.

Oy vey, words are not very good tools for describing what really needs
equations.

As a parting thought, consider this.  The universe is either open, closed or
exactly in-between.  Many physics fans here who are old have lived thru a
progression in our lives where the universe was widely thought to be closed.
That the end state is where the expansion eventually stops, convergence
begins, THE END is an enormous black hole where all matter and energy ends
up, with that end state identical to all other paths to that end state.  We
end up the same way we started, with no matter and no space and no time.  Oh
that is so sad.  

Then it became more popular to think there was all this missing matter or
something that somehow made the universe exactly flat, or some reason why
the universe must be exactly flat.  Then stuff keeps flying apart, and the
end game is heat death, which is not really a convergence: there are various
ways cold dark matter could be distributed in the final state, ja?

In 2011, Saul Perlmutter was given a Nobel in physics for convincing us
about the accelerating expansion of the universe, an open configuration,
which results eventually in the terrifying Big Rip scenario, equally sad
with the Big Crunch scenario, but that scenario is also convergence.
Reasoning: every Big Rip end state where all the matter is ripped to quarks
and the energy infinitesimally tenuous spread out over infinite space is
identical to every other Big Rip scenario, regardless of what path it took
or how it got there.

So sad was that Big Rip scenario, but it resulted in the funniest episode of
Big Bang Theory ever, where Sheldon expresses what plenty of us were feeling
deep inside, except for a different reason.  Ref: The Speckerman Recurrence,
season 5, episode 11.  I wet my diapers laughing at that one.  The writers
of that show were brilliant.

I met Saul Permutter in the flesh, nicest guy he is and a fine person, but I
do hope he is wrong.  We must stop inflation somehow.  The universe must be
exactly flat, somehow.

spike