But if you want to be a sensible non-crazy utilitarian in many worlds, you have to count utility as being proportional to the thickness or the weight of the individual worlds. You can’t just double the utility when you branch the wave function of the universe.
So if you are a super naive utilitarian who counted utility by just adding up the utility in all branches of the wave function, then clearly the best way to be a good person is just to duplicate the universe over and over again. To go into your basement and make quantum measurements so you make lots of different universes, however that’s possible. And that literally affects nobody in the world. No one’s life is changed by you in your basement measuring a bunch of spins of atoms and therefore branching the wave function of the universe.
So I would say, you need to back up and fix your utilitarian calculus. And the obvious way to do it is to say that not all universes are created equal just as we assign a probability measure to the outcomes of experiments in many worlds.
I think it’s bunk that we get to control the number of splits, unless your value function is really weird and considers branches which are too similar to not count as different worlds.
Come on people, the whole point of MWI is that we want to get rid of the privileged role of observers!
For what it’s worth Sean Carroll thinks the weights are needed
Thanks. Some of the relevant passages:
I think it’s bunk that we get to control the number of splits, unless your value function is really weird and considers branches which are too similar to not count as different worlds.
Come on people, the whole point of MWI is that we want to get rid of the privileged role of observers!
It’s unclear to me why this would be so weird
Not sure I agree.