Quantum ethics?

[Buckaroo]

Actually, this would essentially never be the case. The quantum differences are worlds where each quantum "measurement" or interaction that "collapses the wave function" turn out differently... ...But there would be no "quantum moment" to help you decide, or not, to ride the mountain bike out the back of the C130 cargo plane with a can of Mountain Dew in your hand. Oh, it might be theoretically possible that, say, a particular subatomic particle in your brain might, at that exact moment, disintegrate, causing electro-chemistry to alter slightly, reversing a decision if you were on the ragged edge of deciding, but that's a very contrived situation that statistically probably would never happen.

I don't think the split need necessarily happen at the point of the decision for this question to come into play. Let's say you were playing a Schrodinger's variety of Russian roulette, where the gun going off depended on the decay of a single atom of a sufficiently short-half-lived radioactive isotope. In this case, the split would happen not when you decided to play, but when the gun did, or did not, go off, which could be a substantial amount of time later. Isn't the basic point still valid?

It's also been suggested that having the entire universe split into quadrillions of copies every single microscopic instant of time, for every single of the 10^^60 particles in the universe (and every one of the far greater number of clones, remember!) would be the ultimate violation of Occam's Razor.

Max Tegmark has a pretty good rebuttal of this objection (one which has also bothered me about the MWH) here, on pg 24:

http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/toe.pdf

Whatever your take on Many Worlds, it's a fun article!

 

[Imaginative]

Hi Buckeroo

I love these types of discussions and having read the comments so far, would like to add my little contribution for perusal.
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The MWT could be self regulating and has a finite limit so as to avoid the following assumption:

“It's also been suggested that having the entire universe split into quadrillions of copies every single microscopic instant of time, for every single of the 10^^60 particles in the universe (and every one of the far greater number of clones, remember!) would be the ultimate violation of Occam's Razor.”

What I mean by this is that a plane full of people could get struck by lightning and crash, killing all those on board, whereas in other universes that didn’t happen and they landed safely or certain passengers cancelled their flight for some reason.

If this is typical of the possible scenarios that can be played out for any possible outcome then there will always be a certain percentage of possibilities that require the deaths of people or conscious entities to maintain the finiteness of MWT, i.e. the 90 to 10 percent ratio where what is left (10%) is allowed to carry on with their futures and expand the multiverse again but the other 90% is killed off, thus preserving MWT (disk space) for want of an analogy.

This still enables us to have free will; its just that there will be consequences that MWT makes use of to maintain its finiteness.

Hope this makes sense.