[ExI] Shadows and the concept of self

[Giulio Prisco]

Hi John. When Richard and I wrote this essay in 2005, Everett's was my favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics. Now I'm not so sure.

However, today I wouldn't change much of what I wrote. In particular, I still think that "while Everett‘s Relative State formulation of quantum mechanics makes a lot of sense, its popular interpretation as “Many Worlds” (MWI) should be taken only as a simple pictorial device useful for a first understanding of the theory... perhaps since reality is One Big World too complex for our minds to process efficiently, we use a simplified representation as Many (small) Worlds for our processing."

In other words, thinking of splitting and recombining worlds is a simplified way to describe a reality that is much more complex than our concept of "world." Many Minds comes closer, but it's still a simplification - I think the many minds are shadows of One Mind. Having now studied Everett's original papers and those of DeWitt, Wheeler's etc., I suspect Everett himself wouldn't disagree.

Decoherence seems to explain why we don't see [alive + dead] superpositions of cats, but it doesn't provide a mechanism for the selection of [alive] or [dead]. In fact, decoherence pioneers like Zeh and Zurek seem to support Everett's views.

I am writing a new essay with thoughts on my interpretation of Everett's interpretations, with plenty of links. In the meantime, I recommend reading Peter Byrne's biography:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-many-worlds-of-hugh-everett-iii-9780199552276

--
Giulio Prisco
https://giulioprisco.com/
giulioprisco at protonmail.ch

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [ExI] Shadows and the concept of self
Local Time: March 31, 2017 10:53 PM
UTC Time: March 31, 2017 8:53 PM
From: johnkclark at gmail.com
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>

On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 10:59 AM, Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> wrote:

https://turingchurch.net/shadows-and-the-concept-of-self-d01ff65ce9f9

I do take issue with one thing you said:

"
The MWI says that after the act of observation (measurement) the universe is split in two branches where the first has [cat dead] and [observer who remembers having seen the cat dead],
"

There is only one reason I'm a fan of the MWI,
unlike the other quantum interpretations it doesn't have to explain what a measurement or a observation is because they have nothing to do with it. MWI says everything that can happen does happen, and both a dead and live cat can happen. When the universe splits you split right along with everything else, and one
Giulio
sees a living cat and another equally real Giulio sees a dead cat. When the universe splits they stay split unless the 2 universes somehow become identical again; that's not going to happen if the change is made in a large macroscopic object like a cat, but if the only difference between 2 universes is which slit one photon went through then it is possible to arrange things so the 2 universes become identical again, and then the universes would merge back together into one. That's why we see weird quantum effects in the 2 slit experiment but not in large things like cats.

John K Clark
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