From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Nov 09 2002 - 09:31:10 MST
I asked myself what it might be like to experience a
bifurcation, according to my own interpretation of
what they would be like. Specifically I was wondering
why and how an original would experience a
continuation of his sense of self in one continuation
of himself but not in the other.
Imagine a "bifurcation chamber," which houses the
futuristic technology necessary to create two versions
of a single person. It has an entrance door on one
side and two exit doors on the other side. A person
who walks into this chamber instantly becomes two
people, Person-A and Person-B, each of whom then walk
out of one of the two exits. Both Person-A and
Person-B would experience a continuation of self and
rightly believe himself to be a continuation of the
original Person. Now here is the question: the
original himself would experience a continuation of
his experience as he walks into and out of the
chamber, but clearly he will not experience himself as
walking out of *both* doors. He will experience
himself to walk out of either exit A or exit B. What
determines whether it will be exit A or exit B?
I scratched my head a bit before realizing that this
is essentially the same question we face when
considering the Many World's Interpretation of QM. In
MWI, multiple copies of the observor branch off into
alternate universes with each measurement. If it were
possible in MWI for universes in the multiverse to
partially "overlap," such that an alternate
continuation of oneself from an alternate universe
could move into one's own universe, then this process
would appear in our universe to be a forking procedure
no different from those we've been discussing here.
So then the answer to the question of what determines
if one will experience exiting from exit A or B in my
thought experiment above is the same as the answer to
the question of what determines one's own personal
measurement in MWI. In MWI, if you flip a fair
(quantum) coin, you will experience it to come up
either heads or tails, (let us say heads). An
alternate continuation of you will experience it
coming up tails in an alternate universe of the
multiverse. Why did you experience heads rather than
tails? Was there anything deterministic about this
outcome? The answer is that it was non-deterministic;
your destination universe was decided by a purely
probabalistic process, the same kind of probabalistic
processes that determine measurement outcomes in
conventional QM. If the destination universes for an
observer in MWI were not determined by probabalistic
processes then the laws of probability would break
down in this universe.
So then the original in my thought experiment above
would have an equal probabality of experiencing
himself as walking out of either exit A or exit B, and
he would have no way to predict which door ahead of
time. As he walked out his exit, he would see the
other person walking out of the other exit. That other
person would appear to him something like an
identical-twin, indistinguishable from an alternate
continuation of himself from another universe in a MWI
multiverse. They would then each go on to live
separate lives, developing increasingly separate
personalities, much in the same way as would two
continuations of oneself living in alternate
universes.
It occurs to me also that if MWI is true, and if it
should ever become possible to access or manipulate
alternate universes, (a very big if!), then that
MWI-based technology would perhaps be the basis of a
human bifurcation technology. If MWI is true then the
multiverse is already doing to the hard of work of
making multiple continuations of ourselves... our
problem would be that of retaining or returning those
continuations to this universe.
-gts
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