Re: How does this probability thing work in MWI?

From: Juergen Schmidhuber <juergen.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 14:38:00 +0100

Fritz Griffith:

>for every split in which we are favored to follow a certain world, there
>exists another world of equally real people who assumed they would follow
>the same path, who instead ended up in the so-called unlikely world.
>Because the people in both worlds are equally real, there is no way
>to say that we are more likely to follow either path; rather, between
>this single-split example, the chance would be 50/50 as to which world
>we would end up in. It would be arrogant to assume that we would have
>to be the people in the more probable world. Considering all possible
>worlds, we are back to the drawing board - the chance of us actually
>being in a world that isn't chaotic is pretty much nonexistant.
>Let me know if and why this doesn't make sense.

I am just repeating the same thing again (from the 97 paper): according to
UTM theory chance is not 50/50 because of the universal prior. There are
no real "splits" - there are just many different algorithms yielding
identical results for some time, then continuing with different outputs.
Given the universal prior, whenever there is a "split" the continuation
corresponding to the shorter algorithm is more likely. Roughly speaking,
probably the algorithm for your universe will compute the simplest future
split sequence compatible with past data.

Juergen
Received on Wed Nov 17 1999 - 05:46:50 PST