For a low price, I can get an app for my phone endorsed by Sean Carroll that puts a photon in superposition and thus, splits the universe. The more I use the app, the more I flirt with bringing universes into reality where Hitler is resurrected and rises again or terrible natural disasters kill millions of people. The app is rated age 4 +. Quite a lot of responsibility for a kid.
There's got to be a misunderstanding, right? Many Worlds is about interpreting measurements and we don't need to attach all this baggage but nonetheless, the baggage gets attached, and it's not coming from non-physicists straying from their lanes.
some guy has done a good job culling good examples from physicists. It's a bit long, and I started losing him about 2/3's of the way through, but I t:
(taken from an interview)
Harris: But it’s still happening. So there was some [“minute”?] possibility that I might have picked this up and put it down and then picked up again and put it down and did that 75 times…
Carroll: Yep.
Harris: …to the consternation of everyone in the room.
Carroll: Hopefully the probability is low, but yes.
Harris: But if there’s a non-zero possibility of that, that happened somewhere. Right?
Carroll: Yes, that’s right.
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-------There were stories about him (Yakir Aharonov) when he used to be at Yeshiva University in New York, where he would walk into people’s offices in the philosophy department just in order to have something to do that evening, and say, “Describe a physical effect which is obviously impossible.” So people would say, “I don’t know, a man turns into an elephant,” or something, and Aharonov would go home and figure out a quantum mechanical way that this could happen. And this was the kind of exercise that lay behind many things that he discovered.
Tegmark: [brief chuckle] Exactly. Or I switch to talking French. … [skipping ahead about two minutes] … So if you have an infinite number of other regions equally big, and you roll the dice again in all of them, then you can calculate that if you go about a googolplex meters away, you will indeed end up with just what you described: a universe that’s extremely similar to this one except that one minute ago you all of a sudden decided to start speaking Hungarian instead.
I have to say this is the perfect explanation for any anomaly. If we can expect people to randomly speak Hungarian, then I don't see why we can't expect a being named Moroni to visit Joseph Smith. In fact, in some world out there, Joseph Smith is a prophet at Mormonism is true. Why not this world? I could wonder: whatever happens, couldn't it be true that what would seem as fanciful would somehow not be so fanciful within the world on instantiation? But then, I have to admit that in some worlds, such events would wind up as being viewed as confounding anomalies by the inhabitants while in other worlds, all would seem normal.Dan wrote: Maybe Tegmark knows French. Or maybe he meant that he would suddenly start speaking French despite not knowing that language. This is the more interesting option and the one I’ll assume he means us to imagine, particularly given the second bewildering scenario Tegmark asks us to imagine for Harris, who I’ll safely assume does not know Hungarian: “one minute ago you all of a sudden decided to start speaking Hungarian.”
Here we are now, as far as I’m concerned, well into a world of “worse.”
What I consider the worse are possibilities involving the spontaneous rearrangement of the parts composing a well-functioning human brain—often noted to be the most complex bit of machinery in the known universe—into some new, equally well-functioning human brain, but one of an entirely different character.