Comment by seadan83
1 day ago
> And indeed the natural and inevitable progression of this world line is a machine world,
Would you mind clarifying your line of reasoning for suggesting this?
Second: quoting wikipedia - "The many-worlds interpretation implies that there are many parallel, non-interacting worlds."
If the multiple words are non-interacting, how could one world observe a large scale extinction event corresponding to the other world line departing? The two world lines are completely non-interacting, there would be no way to observe anything about the other.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation
It's the assumption that in our world, a machine civilization is an almost certain end. This might explain the Fermi paradox that we haven't seen other civilization in the universe: each builds an AI that decides to go radio offline for self-preservation.
As for MWI, I'm assuming that the world lines may split, or fork in Unix terms. What causes such splits is an open question. The splits cannot be detected with certainty, but can be guessed by side effects. Here I'm making another guess that inhabitants of MWI must be in one world line only, so when a split happens, inhabitants choose one of the paths, often unconsciously based on their natural likes and dislikes. But what happens to their body in the abandonded branch of MWI? It continues to exist mechanically for some short period of time, and then something happens to it, so it's destroyed, i.e. its entropy suddenly increases without the binding principle that has left this branch of MWI. In practice, one half of inhabitant would observe a relatively sudden and maybe peaceful extinction of the other half, while that other half simply continued their path in the other world line. And that other half will see a similar picture, but mirrored. Both halves will be left wondering what's just happened.
Could you explicitly explain that second question, regarding how we would experience a large scale extinction event from a different timeline?
I'm also curious about this assumption: "It's the assumption that in our world, a machine civilization is an almost certain end"
Let's say machine civilization is an intractable problem, NP complete, requires a million fold difficulty more than the travelling salesman problem - it might not be a good assumption. We are assuming therefore that the compute power will grow enough to solve the required problem. It's also a question too what a machine civilization would look like. Might it decide to just power itself off one day (or accidently?).
The Fermi paradox relies on some assumptions (I'm pulling these from wikipedia):
- Some of these civilizations may have developed interstellar travel, a step that humans are investigating.[12]
- Even at the slow pace of envisioned interstellar travel, the Milky Way galaxy could be completely traversed in a few million years.[13]
- Since many of the Sun-like stars are billions of years older than the Sun, the Earth should have already been visited by extraterrestrial civilizations, or at least their probes.[14]
These assumptions could readily not hold up. Perhaps interstellar travel is actually impossible. Or, it's not feasible. If it takes a million years to travel to the nearest star, let alone one that is inhabited - why do it? We would really have to assume a machine civilization at that point - which leads to another assumption that machines would care and/or be motivated enough to explore.
The last assumption, perhaps Earth was visited by a probe, but just 200 years ago. Even today, we don't detect nearly all asteroids, let alone something that might be relatively small. The assumption that we have not detected a visitation from another species is a pretty big assumption too.
I think you might be vastly overcomplicating it because I didn't think there had to be any sort of "conservation of branching" in the MWI. each nondeterministic event (of which unfathomable quantities take place every moment) generates an infinite number of branches so to even conceive of the total geometry of all the branching (e.g. all that could ever take place, truly) is a bit of a mindfuck, and that's probably okay and the way it was intended. It's supposed to be comforting to know that regardless of how bad reality seems, if we could navigate arbitrarily through the branching space/time/universes then there would be unimaginable infinities of joyful utopias to visit.