From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Aug 03 2002 - 08:24:18 MDT
At 08:39 AM 8/3/02 +0000, Mitchell Porter wrote interestingly on my
suggestion:
>[i.e. could the migration of superintelligences into baby universes
>somehow quantum-mechanically suppress the probability of future
>Singularities?]
I appreciate your comments. This gets off topic, perhaps, but for the fun
of it all, I'll follow up your closing aside:
>suppose
>you had a quantum computer buried in a meteorite, i.e. (in many-worlds
>terms) suppose you had a coherent multiversal ensemble of them. And
>suppose that in some fraction of those worlds, the meteorite ends up
>falling into a baby universe just as it becomes causally separate
>from the parent universe. There's no real reason to think that that
>part of the ensemble would suddenly decohere from the rest. Instead
>you'd expect a gradual differentiation of the two sub-ensembles of
>meteorites, due to the different average environmental conditions
>they faced, leading to eventual decoherence.
In an attempt to clarify my original post, I thought of this gedanken,
which differs from the vanished meteorite but has some vague similarities:
Suppose a micro black hole could pass your two-slit apparatus as an
experiment is being conducted. Now this black hole had 1 chance in 2 (or in
5, or whatever) of doing so, because in our world it came past Jupiter, and
we know planetary orbits are chaotic, so in some contiguous MW universes
Jupiter is also where we see it but in many others it's not. Say in your
cosmos the hole misses you, having been flung out of the solar system, but
in half the other superposed universes that are otherwise identical (or
even in most of them) it whizzed in and gobbled up the test photons (and
perhaps the lab as well). Now what happens to the diffraction pattern? If
Deutsch's `QT-as-literal-truth' model is right, I think it looks rather
odd, but I'm not sure how exactly. Thinned out? Entirely suppressed? Or
exactly as usual, because the `black holes passes' strands decohered days
ago, at Jupiter?
Damien Broderick
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