![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(For those not entirely familiar with it, the "Many-worlds interpretation" is a view where every random event causes a new universe to split off — see the "parallel universes" so beloved by cheesy sci-fi.)
"One good example of this is the Quantum Suicide "experiment" that some proponents of the Many-Worlds Interpretation claim (I think jokingly) could actually be used to test the MWI. The way it works is, you basically run the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment on yourself– you set up an apparatus whereby an atom has a 50% chance of decaying each second, and there's a detector which waits for the atom to decay. When the detector goes off, it triggers a gun, which shoots you in the head and kills you. So all you have to do is set up this experiment, and sit in front of it for awhile. If after sixty seconds you find you are still alive, then the many-worlds interpretation is true, because there is only about a one in 1018 chance of surviving in front of the Quantum Suicide machine for a full minute, so the only plausible explanation for your survival is that the MWI is true and you just happen to be the one universe where the atom's 50% chance of decay turned up "no" sixty times in a row."
Super Mario World vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics, Mechanically Separated Meat, 3 Feb 2008
(The Super Mario World video is quite good, as well.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
There are some interesting problems involving consciousness, (meaning, in this case, the perception which I know I have and assume you have). Bluntly, without us to percieve it, the universe's existence becomes trivial, it's no more there than any other conceivable mathematical pattern.
Does this mean that I/you am/are cosmologically important? Yes, but only because 'importance' is predicated and assigned by me/you. Our definition of 'reality' is assigned in a similar manner*. This universe is only 'real' to us due to our existence in it, and the style in which we percieve it.
There's still the question of why I'm in this perceiver and you in that, and who bothered to turn on the lights so that anything at all would perceive from an internal perspective. Like, it's obvious that self-awareness is useful for a variety of genetic functions, but do we really only see out of our eyes because we say we do? Does consciousness reduce to believing yourself to be conscious (in the external perspective)? If so, I still shouldn't be seeing out of me, I should be just saying that I do.
* I'm something of an anti-realist, I don't believe that there's anything special or fundamental about the matter of the universe, it's all just patterns, and mysteriously, mathematical concepts**
** Mysteriously, because where are the concepts processed? Internally? In another universe?***By some sort of vaguely God-like thing?***
*** "It's turtles all the way down"
**** Thinking about God-like things in this context does give religion (e.g. Christianity version 13c variant 5) to have any further credence than it had or didn't already. It still says nothing about the vaguely God-like thing, and certainly doesnt clarify whether he/she/it disapproves of coveting, onanism etc.
From:
no subject
Does the universe dream? 8^)
From:
no subject
From:
no subject