Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by int_19h 2830 days ago
This all hinges on a bunch of essentially random metaphysical choices that you have made. For example, what does it even mean for there to be a "single me"? I would argue that in the many worlds interpretation, once a fork happens, the other observers are not "me" anymore. So there's no contradiction between the experience of a "single me", and multiple copies - each copy has its own "single me" experience.
1 comments

I never said that there was a contradiction. I simply said that theory is suggesting a reality at odds with my experience. That does not mean it is a contradiction. It means that my experience is not a faithful representation of reality.

And that's fine, but the idea that this is simpler than a theory which says my experience is a reasonable reflection of reality, is not. Occam's razor is not about number of equations, it is about what is simplest. I experience a single "me". A theory which supports that experience directly and obviously is simpler than a theory which does not.

This is particularly true when the "extra" equations are simple and obviously a part of the other equations.

But it's not at odds with your experience. It's an odds with "your" experience, where you arbitrarily redefined "your" (not that the conventional definition is any more rigorously defined, mind you...).

The reason why this all gets so convoluted is simply because it exposes how much we rely on terms and concepts that are defined very fuzzily, and often aren't even defined at all, but just accepted for granted as if everyone means the same by them. And then it turns out that we don't, which should really come as no surprise.