Re: virus: real world?

Alex Williams (thantos@decatl.alf.dec.com)
Sat, 28 Dec 1996 22:17:27 -0500 (EST)


I have a pretty standard objection to this interpretation of the
Many-Worlds Hypothesis. See below.
> What it all boils down to is that according to physical evidence,
> reality
> depends on the observer; we can only consciously inhabit one of these
> parallel worlds at a time. This may have consequences for memetics,
> particularly if we consider that observations effect experimental
> results
> and that consciousness plays a role in reality.

Here's where I start having problems and the problems can be summed
elegantly.

Its wrong.

The MWH is summed up admirably well to this point, but the conscious
observer is given no privilidged frame under the hypothesis. In fact,
the MWH suggests there are a near infinitely many of you at any given
time, branched off from all the possible universi that had you as a
member or as a possibility. There are even universi in which all the
atoms in your body spontaneously translocated through quantum
tunneling to Tokyo, last week, and returned you today. Oh, its a rare
one, but they're all equally unique and rare.

And in every one of the universi in which you exist, you are
consciously contemplating this question. Unless, of course, its one
of the universi that exist where you aren't contemplating this
question. Each of those universi, where you are and aren't alike, can
trace its origin back to some shared previous point where you existed
and some quantum event in the universe split off possibility clones.

In short, whatever you happen to be observing is only privilidged by
the fact that you, at that very attosecond, are observing it. In the
next, a plethora of possibility clones have probably been spawned,
some seeing something slightly different maybe, some seeing the exact
same thing. Even most seeing the exact same thing. Just because one
sees a red flower and one sees a red flower in which one photon
bouncing off a leaf was reemitted just a wee bit later doesn't change
the fact that a quantum branching has occured and that neither are
privilidged to be seeing `the truth.'