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The Fabric of Reality 3. To interpret a superposed photon as being in two different "worlds" requires an idiosyncratic interpretation of "world". The superposition is only detectable through interference effects, which in turn means the two photons (or two states of the photon, depending on interpretation) are coherent. Most Many Worlds take the view that a quantum state does not count as a "world" until it decoheres. (But compare Lev Vaidman's discussion of worlds in MWI at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [2]. which implies that differences among MWI theorists about the use of the term 'world' are "only semantic".[3] ) 4. An interesting point which perhaps relies on the "coherent worlds" approach mentioned above.
The Fabric of Reality environment. Nearer to the Omega Point this transhuman enhanced-biology scenario gives way to a posthuman condition, because biology becomes untenable. Gravitational shearing and other extreme forces call for more durable substrates for human psychology. The brain is replaced by sturdy computational equivalents in virtual realities, protected from the Big Crunch and pushed in the final moments by unlimited computational cycles affording their posthuman residents the subjective experience of immortality.
The Fabric of Reality from junk DNA is that the former but not the latter is representative of a niche of replicators that extends across worlds. Indeed personal identity is inseparable from such a niche, which Deutsch picks out with the word "copies". A person is a set of copies in nearby parallel worlds. This comes out in his analysis of free will: I could have chosen otherwise is analysed as Other copies of me chose otherwise. And in the dnouement to a dramatic chapter that rehearses interference experiments from a multiverse viewpoint, he writes of his copies, "Many of those Davids are at this moment writing these very words. Some are putting it better. Others have gone for a cup of tea."
The Fabric of Reality of my copies see a coin spinning in a coin toss, but an instant later half my copies see 'heads' come up, the other half see 'tails'. A distinction between copies, versions, and variants is at work here. Variants of me need not see the spinning coin. Versions of me see it though some of them see 'heads' and some 'tails'. The multiple identical copies of me all see the spinning coin.
Time travel
The possibility of future-directed time travel is assured by Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says that an observer who accelerates or decelerates will experience less time than an observer who is at rest or in uniform motion. This time dilation could make an astronaut's flight very short and the duration on Earth very long, but such a trip to Earth's future would be irreversible as "no amount of time dilation can allow a spaceship to return from a flight before it took off". As for past-directed time travel, it is possible as a sort of sidestep from one universe to another, requiring a path between the two universes that is "hard-wired" into the structure of the multiverse. Whether such paths exist or not is an unresolved empirical question. If they were to exist and were to allow macro-objects like human beings to traverse them, time travel could occur without the grandfather paradox, because the time traveler would go to a point prior to the branching between his "home" universe and the universe in which he (the copy of him in the "away" universe) kills his grandfather (grandfather-copy). The multiverse hypothesis alone doesn't avoid the knowledge paradox, in which the time traveler goes to a point where he gives the collected works of Shakespeare to a hack writer, who seems to get "knowledge for free" that he uses to become the celebrated Shakespeare in that world. The Popperian epistemological strand of Deutsch's four-strand theory is invoked at this point. Just as life is understood as a trans-universe structure that is physically possible only through processes of natural selection, so too knowledge is understood as such a structure that is physically possible only through processes of rational problem-solving. Knowledge for free isn't possible in the multiverse when the multiverse is understood through Deutsch's emergentist Theory of Everything.
Notes
[1] When Shor's algorithm has factorized a number, using 10500 or so times the computational resources that can be seen to be present, where was the number factorized? There are only about 1080 atoms in the entire visible universe, an utterly minuscule number compared with 10500. So if the visible universe were the extent of physical reality, physical reality would not even remotely contain the resources required to factorize such a large number. Who did factorize it, then? How, and where, was the computation performed? [2] http:/ / plato. stanford. edu/ entries/ qm-manyworlds/ [3] Vaidman presents MWI as consisting of two parts, (i) a mathematical theory which yields evolution in time of the quantum state of the (single) universe, and (i) a prescription which sets up a correspondence between the quantum state of the Universe and our experiences. The concept of 'world' in MWI belongs to part (ii) of the theory and is not rigorously defined. Vaidman writes, "Part (i) is essentially summarized by the Schrdinger equation or its relativistic generalization. It is a rigorous mathematical theory and is not problematic philosophically. Part (ii) involves "our experiences" which do not have a rigorous definition. An additional difficulty in setting up (ii) follows from the fact that human languages were developed at a time when people did not suspect the existence of parallel worlds. This, however, is only a semantic problem." [4] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the Church-Turing thesis (http:/ / www. science. uva. nl/ ~seop/ entries/ church-turing/ #Bloopers). [5] Papineau, D. 'David Lewis and Schrdinger's Cat'. (http:/ / www. kcl. ac. uk/ ip/ davidpapineau/ Staff/ Papineau/ OnlinePapers/ LewisQM. htm) [6] Truth-Tracking and the Problem of Reflexive Knowledge (http:/ / pages. slu. edu/ faculty/ salernoj/ ReflectiveKnowledge. pdf) [7] Wallace, D. Everett and Structure. (http:/ / users. ox. ac. uk/ ~mert0130/ papers/ evstr. pdf)
External links
The Fabric of Reality paperback edition: ISBN 014027541X
License
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported //creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/