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Comment by yters | Hacker News Reader

The problem with many worlds is why do I think I'm in a particular timeline? If many worlds is correct, there is no "I", there are many rapidly branching "I"s, which intuitively doesn't make sense. Of course, each "I" will have the perception of being the sole "I", but the overall view that there is no singular "I" is very counter to my self conception. I prefer to preserve intuitions over conjectures, so I count that as a strike against the many worlds interpretation.

So, it seems like both the Copenhagen and the many worlds interpretations of quantum physics are wrong, given a preference for non arbitrary reference point and preserving intuitions. Is there a reason that those two must be the only possible interpretations?

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> but the overall view that there is no singular "I" is very counter to my self conception

And the idea that the Earth being round and rotating around the sun is also very counter to my intuition.

Think of it this way. Instead of asking "Does this feel correct to me?", ask, "If this was correct, would I feel any different?"

It's definitely a mindfuck but I'm not sure if you can dismiss MWI based on that.

Everything that was intuitive was already discovered. That's why each new theory is harder to visualise than the previous one: newtonian physics, electromagnetism, relativity, quantum physics, etc.

>"I" is very counter to my self conception

it'a because of human nature, ego and self-worth. It's hard to accept that "I" might have many siblings living in different branches.

But perhaps those are valid constraints. Given that all of science is built from fundamental subjective perceptions, it seems inconsistent to extrapolate scientific theories that deny fundamental subjective perceptions.

There is a singular you, the one that is your time-line. There are also different versions of that in other timelines. But as you don't expect to feel the consciousness of the guy spatially next to you, the other parallel universe has also no influence on your conscious feeling of self.

This whole idea of observers just brings to mind things like culling in graphics rendering, perhaps that's what's happening

What is doing the culling?

Depends who you ask, I'd say God, others might say the computer we exist in and others might say The Universe

But in a quantum universe everything is an uncollapsed wave. It doesn't seem anything can cause the collapse to happen.

Observation causes collapse, so perhaps because the effect it has is negligible to the system of the universe there's simply no point 'rendering'/wave collapsing. Perhaps there is some other collapse mechanism to explain life before conscious observers, or perhaps quantum behavior emerged as time went on after the big bang, or perhaps there exists some kind of proto-conciousness.

I guess my question is if the conscious observers are themselves part of the universe, what caused their waveform to collapse? And what is the special 'observation' part of their material properties such that it can cause collapse? Why don't other material configurations cause collapse?

I'm inclined more towards a dualistic explanation than a material one. Perhaps a better word to describe these concious and proto-concious entities would be 'collapsing agents', 'collapsants' or something of the sort.

Interesting idea, where would the dualist agents exist?

I'd speculate that they exist as some unobservable component of reality, considering we see no hard evidence for it with our existing tools. I'm no expert on string theory, but as I understand it predicts a large number of dimensions, if we think of these as arrangements of data in memory, perhaps this information could be encoded there?

YES

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