regarding QM and infinite universes

From: Danny Mayes <dmayes.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2004 20:54:33 -0400

I posted this today on the Fabric of Reality Yahoo Group, but would like
to get responses to it over here as well.


First, regarding the idea of magical universes or quantum immortality
for that matter, doesn't this assume a truly infinite number of
universes? However, if you start with the idea that the reality we
experience is being created by a mechanical/computational process,
isn't it more likely that the number of universes is just extremely
large? Why should we assume the "creator" (however you choose to
define that) has access to infinite resources? Also, everything that
makes up our universe appears to have finite characteristics (per QM),
so it seems like every possibility within the parameters of the
multiverse could be covered by an enormous, but not infinite range of
possibility.

My understanding of QM is that it describes possibilities (even if
vanishingly small) of bizarre things occurring in our everyday world.
For instance, I once read a book in which the author calculated the
possibility(incredibly small obviously) that our planet would suddenly
appear in orbit, fully intact, around another star. He argued that QM
allows for this possibility.

I think we are overlooking something here. It seems like there should
be a quanta of probabilty, just as there is (apparently) with time,
space, and matter. In other words, once the probability of something
happening falls below a certain threshold, it is not realized. Could
there be a Planck scale of probability? Does decoherence somehow keep
these strange events from occurring on a macro scale?

Also, it seems to me that the violation of other physical laws comes
into play in preventing many scenarios from taking place. For
instance, with quantum immortality, I understand the concept that if
there are infinite copies of me, there will always be one more
universe in which I survive another second. But the reality is that
there would seem to be a rate of diminishing return here. The
probability curve would have a point where it approaches zero, even as
the number of alternatives approached infinity.

Another way to resolve the immortality issue is to presume
consciousness survives death, but I will not remark on that further.

One thing that I think hurts the MWI as a theory is the misconception
among many that everytime a choice is made, the entire universe splits
in two, and there is a proliferation of all of these virtually
identical copies of universes out there somewhere. In reality there
is only one universe, and there is a proliferation of differences
being created. The only thing that matters are the recorded
differences, everything else remains unchanged. If you view our
reality as a virtual reality it is much easier to understand this
concept. For instance a program that predicts the weather doesn't
have to create an entirely new simulation for each outcome it
predicts- it can overlap the various possibilities in one simulation.
Received on Mon Jul 26 2004 - 20:58:11 PDT