Universe Splitter
cheapuniverses.com
cheapuniverses.com
The time of $1.99 quantum splitters, $0.99 iBeer, and $1.99 Lightsaber apps is long gone. Most of those apps didn't really do anything all that amazing, but looking back on it I think I miss when app stores were flush with "we could use the hardware to do this" rather than "we could get in-app purchases and subscriptions like this"
Not that there wasn't monetization as a goal back then, but just that there was a lot of weird paradigms being experimented on where we now have a solidly 10-year norm instead.
Popular folk art is dangerous.
So a bureaucracy was built.
Program or be programmed!
The same goes for Linux distro repositories, except there's less jank. I think there's something about Android that's hostile to creating quality software, maybe that it's so hard to make Android software at all that making it quality is just too much effort.
Edit: Found it. "Divided by infinity": https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/
The idea if quantum immortality was one of the first things I thought when I read about multiple universes.
I never did research on it an it was just a week ago that I heard this was "a thing" but it wasn't a sound theory, for all the reasons that wiki article mentions.
I guess, I wanted to live with the thought that it was possible, that's why I never researched about it.
Thanks for the link, I imagined that my life would become like in the story too, lol.
On the other hand, I tell myself that empirically it’s always only other people that die, never oneself.
Wouldn't that be all deaths? If "dying" is a single quantum event, then by the time it happens, death in the ordinary sense has been finalized.
We're not atomic particles. Even if I stand at ground zero at a nuclear explosion, I can't expect to be saved by some improbable malfunction of the bomb, because as instant as the explosion seems, I don't vanish instantly, even if it's faster than nerves can react.
Normal probability and physical law should apply until the bomb irretrievably has gone off and I'm almost completely vaporized. The only way to resurrect me would be to essentially recreate me from scratch, and a universe around me.
Maybe that's how reincarnation works.
There was a short story once without science fiction trappings, more fantasy/horror, where someone observes that the gravedigger in a small southern town always knows to dig a grave in advance. He asks what happens if the graves aren't dug, and he's told they have to be.
He plays a game of guessing who a grave will be for, but one day he's told that he'll never guess this time, and then he learns his parents were in a car crash. There's one grave, presumably for one or the other of them.
So he murders the gravedigger with his shovel, buries him in the grave that was dug for another, and both of his parents survive.
But then nobody in the town dies. His mother is paralyzed, and there's still hope, but then she has a stroke. And then there's a big fire. And nobody dies.
Finally, he takes the gravediggers tools, which have been inconspicuously following him around, and goes and digs all the needed graves.
The end of the story is that he's now old and worn out and looking forward to resting after spending many years as the new gravedigger.
(Looks at source code, finds HKCD random function..)
I guess that proves that in the alternate universe, Geneva is in Australia!
BTW, if you are into this sort of thing, I got this HDMI cable that lets you connect to a monitor on the "other side": https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B00KY2NKCO/
:)
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Aerfish.Un... [1] https://www.aerfish.com/
I'll probably remember the title tomorrow, if nobody beats me to it. It was a fairly disturbing story.
Say, fire an electron at a double slit with a detector in one of the slits, and kill yourself if the particle is not detected. Run the experiment 10,000 times, or 100,000,000 times - one copy of you will eventually be satisfied that in any probabilistic interpretation of QM this is not plausible, and all the other copies will be dead.
This works because the MWI predicts that any outcome that has non-0 probability according to the Born rule will be guaranteed to happen (it just "happens less" by some hard to define metric).
Personally I believe the entire notion is absurd, and that this type of thought experiment makes it clear, but still some like to be contrary.
I think MWI is appealing to a lot of people as part of the quiet, but ever-present undercurrent of "how can we make any sort of God totally unnecessary to the universe?" that science has, but if you think about it deeply enough, it becomes clear that MWI, if true, is unbelievably horrible. We'd all better hope it's not the correct interpretation.
Edit: Thanks for the link to the story. I had not read it or seen it before. Same principles for sure. I don't think it's a crazy extrapolation of MWI, I think it's the only logical outcome. I can put that opinion into more firm mathematical language but it's more than I can put into an HN comment, and I haven't typed it out anywhere else either, and it really is just that opinion, in more mathematical language.
Greg Egan also has a number of stories about people who rebelled against a "many worlds" universe by porting human cognition to run on "Quantum Single Processors," which would carefully isolate themselves from the universe until they had made a single decision across every possible timeline. This didn't prevent them from being "branched" by outside factors, but it at least gave them an approximation of free will.
So the main difference between someone like a Buddhist monk and a former US president with a taste for gold is one of choice. The monk acknowledges that all routes to living one's best life are possible so abstains from attaching to outcomes too strongly, while the former president asserts his ego to maximize a certain dimension like personal wealth at the expense of all the others. Too much choice and we risk being ungrounded, too little choice and we end up caught in a web of our own design.
There's a great scene on the show Vikings where Ragnar says:
Power is only given to those who are prepared to lower themselves to pick it up.
Really everything is possible, and we can use our will to sidestep into other realities. But from a framework of reincarnation and the multiverse, our choices can impose on the freedoms of others, so we should be mindful of the impacts of our decisions, because others are aspects of ourselves in another life.
I feel rather strongly that most of the world's problems like wealth inequality and war stem from overexertion of the ego. People constrain themselves into corners and then project their anxieties onto others to the point where it seems like nobody gets to live their best life.
Ain’t that the truth!
That said, Worm was an amazing story let down a bit by the ending.
If we assume that the universe is deterministic inside of itself except for quantum decisions, it seems reasonable to me that a structure on the outside of this universe would perform something like a Monte Carlo tree search (assuming that there is a "success condition" for a universe), and branches are only explored to some depth before being discarded. You could then - if you really had to - backtrack to an earlier known state and start exploring again.
In my general view, it's also likely that consciousness is only projected into branches once it's sufficiently established that they're reasonable to follow (I think consciousness might be expensive).
Some random ranting ...
1) Where is all of the mass/energy coming from? Why is it ok to throw all conservation laws out the window and double the universe whenever two quanta get too close to one another?
2) What's up with locality? Does the spilt somehow radiate outwards from the splitting event at the speed of light? Or do we end up with an instantaneous non-local forking of the universe?
To summarize some answers:
a) Energy is conserved by anyone performing an actual observation, therefore energy is conserved. (I suppose this is the 'shut up and calculate' answer.)
b) MWI worlds are actually entirely separate non-interacting universes that just happen to have the exact same history up to the moment of 'divergence.' Therefore energy is conserved.
(But why does world B exist in the first place, waiting around for this specific point of divergence? Are there just so many universes lying around that we're guaranteed to be able to find two that reflect both sides of a given coin flip? Or are the many-worlds realizable as the 'closure' of events from any given world-line?)
But I suppose all of this points at MWI being internally consistent but deeply unsatisfying. Any attempt to chase implications puts you in 'we can't answer why' territory.
a) If we’re proposing that we need an observer then this is certainly no simpler than the Copenhagen interpretation.
b) I fail to see how this works. There happen to be an infinitude of parallel worlds that only shows up to make individual calculations convenient. It doesn’t seem consistent that those universes would exist to make calculations convenient until the movement of “divergence” and then suddenly they no longer affect later calculations.
FWIW, the existence of infinite universes to justify calculations also strikes me as deeply unsatisfying...
But maybe the answer is that all universes are somehow represented by the wave function and I just don’t understand the implications. This might indeed be the case.
I tend to agree that this is deeply unsatisfying, regardless. Many worlds is interesting but also feels extremely far fetched. It honestly feels a little bit like “we don’t understand this yet, must be magic”.
We’ve invoked an extremely complicated phenomenon to answer a gap in our understanding. And maybe it’s true, but that’s what ancient astronomers thought about the wild paths planets took, too. “The math works out with circles in circles. Occam’s razor, amiright Ptolemy?”
Let's assume that we devise an experiment that we 100% prove would split the universe in 3 versions. Executing that experiments splits world 1 into world 1a, 1b, and 1c. Conservations laws will state that the total energy in world 1a == total energy in world 1b == total energy in world 1c == total energy in world 1.
Assume that you have a measurement device that is not "many world" aware, you can only measure the total energy in world 1 - before the experiment takes place - and - depending on which many world "version" you measure afterwards - the total energy in world 1a OR world 1b OR world 1c. According to the measurement device, conservation laws will be respected. Even tho the world was split.
Currently, all our measurement devices are not many world aware, and are only able to measure physical properties in one world version. This makes it extremely hard - impossible in fact - to fully prove that other universe exist in parallel. If we were able to build a measurement device that is able to have some kind of "total value across world 1a, 1b and 1c", that would be a game changer, and conservations laws would probably not apply for that device. So far we haven't been able to build one, so conservations laws are considered universal.
I assume that proponents of many worlds have an answer for this, though I don’t know what it is. I am doubtful that it’s “magic” or just “conservation does not apply”.
> conservations laws would probably not apply for that device
The law of conservation applies to the universe, not the measurement device.
Why would there be some possible realities and not others? Much cleaner to assume that all possible realities exist. Then when you ask, why is there not just nothing? You can answer, why would there be nothing rather than something? Is that not a special case? It is a special case and requires a cause to make it nothing rather than something. And so we arrive at the concept of the void. That which is not nothing but rather all potentialities simultaneously. True nothing and everything are very similar. What is the state of maximum disorder? A signal that is completely random. It's algorithmic complexity must be maximal. The program to describe it must be maximal and so within it, it contains all possible machines. All possible constructions, all universes. Nothing is everything and so it is not possible to have nothing, and so the universe exists. QED Where's my Nobel?
― Tom Clancy and Mark Twain
I don't see how "all cases" is any more likely than "one case".
Do you have to retain all the information? Perhaps a set of quantum events is more like a parameter into a function, and the return value is the universe state corresponding to that history. Yeah there's magical black box handwaving going on there but the point is when we literally have no idea, it's not entirely impossible that the quantum multiverse is sparsely populated and lazy loaded with nothing 'computed' into existence until it has to be.
EDIT: Mind, I'm not saying that it is this way. The validity of my proposal isn't the point. The point is that dismissing Many Worlds on the grounds of "too much information" involves assuming a lot of things we don't actually know.
This could be consciousness - in which case my theory applies again ('which branches do you apply the consciousness to?')
The second mistake is that you don't seem to understand Occam's razor - yes, it is a heuristic, to determine which theory to weigh as more likely, due to limited time and scientific resources. Furthermore, the idea behind it is that, all else being equal, including available evidence, you choose the simpler theory.
If you had evidence that differentiated the two, you wouldn't need Occam's razor.
The true situation is that the Schrodinger equation straightforwardly predicts a proliferation of worlds when you start from a low-entropy state. (Worlds in this interpretation are actually continuous blobs of amplitude, not discrete objects, which is why it makes sense that a partial differential equation like the Schrodinger equation can describe them. The prediction is that blobs will tend to spread out, split into smaller blobs, etc.) Early quantum physicists were disturbed by this, and added a collapse postulate claiming that the wave-function will sometimes spontaneously collapse, resulting in a single, linear world history rather than a branching one. To this day, spontaneous collapse has never been observed in an experiment.
Disclaimer: I have no background in physics at all. I saw this universe splitter and read "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" (Science-Fiction novella by Ted Chiang - the one mentioned in here), and thought hey that's fun.
In case of interest, Steven Levitt published their - albeit single-Universal - findings in "Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness"[^3]
[1]: https://www.freakonomicsexperiments.com/home/faqs/
[2]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
[3]: https://academic.oup.com/restud/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...
Or when a debugger hits a break point reality 2 can proceed with the execution until you are done investigating.
It could even act like a RAID backup in case a random bit flip causes one reality to crash.
Alas it would be quite wasteful to spend watts on hypotheticals...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
downloading any app (much less using it) results in billions of worlds .....
It's interesting to consider the implications of this line of thinking though; it seems like it would imply that causally-disconnected regions of spacetime (i.e. things outside of our light cone) are forever in a superposition of all possible quantum states, from our perspective, among other things.
Seems like the minimum editorializing to make your statement science and not religion, no?
So after every quantum experiment you get N copies of the world, one in which outcome A has happened, one in which B has happened, one in which outcome C has happened etc, and each of these evolves divergently from there on. Of course, there are trillions of trillions of trillions of "quantum experiments" happening in our immediate surrounding every second, so any one experiment in particular is not that important, but it helps to isolate.
So, instead of taking a decision, you use the app to rest easy that somewhere out there in the universal wave function, there is a copy of you that has taken the opposite decision.
IDK, I guess the whole speed of light thing is really silly too in a way, but that's provably true.
This just feels really nuts. I guess it's like... where do all of these universes live? I get that our universe expands into whatever, but that seems trivial compared to a theory where every single quantum action leads to a new universe.
If you think Max Tegmark is right, then the universe is just mathematics and space itself is a mathematical structure. Is there a limit on how many mathematical structures can exist?
if this thing is making my choices for me, then why not skip "the middle man" i.e. me?
I sense a rising humanity motion (like rationalism, or the englightnement or whaterver) towards letting the algorithms make all of our choices. The new absolute monarch is the Algorithm. The Kings are dead, long live the algorithms!?
disclaimer: as tha website is not serious but it does pretend to be, my own comment is also not entirely serious. Often difficult topics are better expressed through fiction (or partial fiction; fiction right now but maybe not later)
I fail to see the point, even if it is connected to some quantum device; it won't make any difference to me, whether my decision is made on a coin-toss or a wave-function collapse.
I can't imagine anyone using this app more than once.
Personally I don't think it makes any sense at all, although I have a mere batchelor's degree in physics so I'm not particularly well qualified to judge. I've never had a satisfactory answer to the simple emperor's new clothes question, which requires no knowledge of QM to ask, "If every outcome happens, in what sense is one outcome more probable than another?"
Because it is (experimentally, based on repeat trials), and QM furnishes us with the probabilities.
This is sometimes stated as "How do you get the Born rule?" but it's a simple and obvious question as soon as any sort of multiverse is proposed. I'm aware of the attempts to answer the question using decision theory but while they produce the right numbers they fail to provide a convincing justification for or interpretation of them (vs the simple, experimentally falsifiable frequentist view "if you repeat the experiment you'll see the frequencies approach these probabilities").
Well it is certainly up there in terms of quantum theory along with the Copenhagen interpretation, and some quantum physicists definitely believe this, so considering it is a joke app and mostly a thought experiment I think we can say these statements are accurate enough.
> I've never had a satisfactory answer to the simple emperor's new clothes question, which requires no knowledge of QM to ask, "If every outcome happens, in what sense is one outcome more probable than another?"
I've never had a satisfactory answer to how a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time with the competing Copenhagen interpretation - however I will leave this debate to researchers in quantum mechanics who understand the maths of quantum physics better than my knowledge of quantum dead cats.
There is also Quantum Bayseianism in which an outcome being more likely is due to that state being better at copying itself to neighboring states.
In all interpretations (including Copenhagen) the mapping from the unobservable wavefunction is taken as axiom (well, one could argue that Relational QM/Transactional interpretation avoids this, but just adds another axiom).
An alternative explanation with as much physical evidence as the Many Worlds (MW) interpretation (i.e., none) could be that we are, in fact, part of a simulation[0] and the "wave function" properties of quanta aren't "real" (what is "real" in a simulation?), but rather are artifacts of speculative execution[1] on the part of the CPU executing the aforementioned simulation.
The idea there being that all possible branches are followed, but only the [correct|selected|randomly arrived at|etc.] events are incorporated into "reality."
That, of course, raises a number of questions:
1. How is it that we can perceive such speculative branch execution from inside a simulation executing on such a CPU?
2. What mechanism (algorithm? [pseudo]-random number generation? lookup table?) would be used to determine "actual" outcome from executing all possible code branches?
3. Like the "Many Worlds" hypothesis, treating quantum uncertainty as an artifact of "speculative execution" of all possible branches of simulation code isn't testable (at least not as far as I'm aware). As such, how do we use the scientific method to identify the most likely scenario?
I'm not advocating the position that we do, in fact, live in a simulation. Nor am I advocating the MW, Copenhagen or even Pilot-wave interpretations.
Rather, my point is that none of these interpretations are "science" in the sense of having falsifiable hypotheses. Unless and until we have the appropriate concepts/technology to test such hypotheses, all are just speculation/metaphysics.
That said, I also think it's useful to examine and (where possible) investigate such hypotheses, as that might give us a better understanding of the universe(s) we occupy.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_execution
Edit: Clarified prose.
Quantum physicists don't agree on MW, Copenhagen, or weirder hidden-variable type theories. But very few of them are of the opinion that, say, the universe has obeyed the laws of physics until now by chance. It has exactly as much evidence as every other theory, but isn't favored by Occam's razor.
Someone favoring the Copenhagen interpretation would argue that the rest of the waveform is deadweight. Someone favoring MW would say collapse is. I don't know many hidden variable people, but maybe they think probabilities are just more elegant.
Not only are universes operating on each of these theories distinct, there are absolutely things we could discover that would push the balance! Bell's Theorem genuinely hurts the credibility of hidden variable theories. MW would be absolutely deranged without the notion of decoherence. If someone published a paper tomorrow showing why world measure translates into probabilities, I'd call that a big win for MW. If someone found a clever, non-decoherence reason for collapse, it would be a big win for the Copenhagen interpretation.
Regardless, such speculation is far from metaphysics. Overly theoretical? Perhaps. But Newton wasn't doing metaphysics when he proposed gravity, and he was shown to be basically right the instant a handful of elegant equations predicted the motion of the planets.