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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.

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 ...

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I think it's much cleaner to assume all possible realities exist - otherwise you have to account for the fact that some do not exist.

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?

It's like someone said: Occam's Razor only likes two numbers: zero and infinity. Any other number on anything needs evidence for why it's this number.

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”

― Tom Clancy and Mark Twain

This was said verbatim in a TED talk titled "Why does the universe exist"

Why would being "cleaner" make any difference for the likelihood of a theory? Isn't "clean" just a made-up concept that merely means "pleasant" to the human mind?

I don't see how "all cases" is any more likely than "one case".

Human intuition has been completely inconsistent with observed reality since relativity and QM were conceived. We should use other means to evaluate the Many Worlds idea.

Two questions I've long had about many worlds:

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?

Just an observation here. Our experience is within spacetime, but some discussions indicate there are processes outside of spacetime. Some say dark energy, for example, is the expansion of spacetime and not the motions of objects inside it. Maybe MW is not operating inside either, while conservation and locality are.

A little bit of googling reveals that I am not the only person to have this question.

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.

I’m very much a layperson in this context but those seem like nonsense answers.

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.

For (b), imagine a set S of all possible universes. Then the two universes that agree perfectly up to the chosen event and then diverge are certainly both in S. And since they are non-interacting, there's no problem with energy conservation.

FWIW, the existence of infinite universes to justify calculations also strikes me as deeply unsatisfying...

I don’t have any trouble with the two universes, conceptually. I have trouble with the infinite others. I don’t understand the idea that the two convenient universes are represented by the wave function, but the infinite inconvenient ones are not.

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?”

Regarding 1), you just need to think about conservation laws as being many worlds "blind".

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.

This is not an answer to the question. The implication from what you said is that the law of conservation of matter and energy is not true when applied to “universe splitting”. Which comes back to the original question. So where does it come from?

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.

> It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.

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.

Then my question is 'what defines "until it has to be"?'.

This could be consciousness - in which case my theory applies again ('which branches do you apply the consciousness to?')

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