On 23 xxx -1, Marchal wrote:
> GSlevy wrote:
> >Clearly Jacques views the number of branches in the MW as absolute and
> >limited. If you do QS and trim a few branches you just end up with less
> >branches. The more stringent the QS conditions (winning a $1million or a
> >$1billion or having Elvis Presley come back to life) the smaller the number
> >of branches you end up in. And if you make the conditions too stringent you
> >may end up with nothing. No more of you.
>
> More or less OK. Jacques, do you agree with that understanding ?
> In fact there is no inconsistent world (let us hope). So, even with the
> relative infinite "branching" if you make the conditions too stringent you
> may end up with nothing too (or may be you get mad ...).
> In fact I am not sure Jacques M Mallah will agree. I am not sure
> Jacques accept you can survive even a QS with conditions not stringent
> at all.
I'm not going to elaborate on this now because I have a ton of
work. Instead of doing a rush job, I will lay out the case against QS in
a form suitable for a FAQ, which this list sorely needs, when I get the
time. No doubt someone will write up a case in favor of it and people can
be referred to the FAQ. This will have to serve when I unsubscribe.
Suffice it to say, though, that whether the number of branches is
finite or infinite makes little difference. The point is you lose measure
with a QS. Some people in the multiverse have more measure than others,
and measure is proportional to effective probability. If you deny this I
don't see how you can even explain why people descended from apes have
higher effective probability than those that form spontaneously.
> The problem is that Jacques M Mallah is computationnalist. I am afraid
> that this entails he has no other choice than to choose the relative SSA.
> Only by choosing a strong physicalist ontological principle AND by
> choosing a strong (and rather mysterious) link between consciousness and
> physical activity, will it be possible for him to get a "limited MW" in
> which branching is absolute. Such a link between consciousness and
> physical activity has been showed incompatible with mechanism (by myself
> in 1988, and independently by Tim Maudlin in 1989, precise reference in
> http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal.
Yeah right. I wanted to see this crackpot proof only because
(unlike QS) it does directly touch on my interests, but unfortunately it
was unreadable. So what's the idea of the "proof"? In English.
- - - - - - -
Jacques Mallah (jqm1584.domain.name.hidden)
Graduate Student / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate
"I know what no one else knows" - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum
My URL:
http://pages.nyu.edu/~jqm1584/
Received on Wed Jun 23 1999 - 12:24:56 PDT