Posted: Mar 13, 2011 4:27 pm
John P. M. wrote:Wow, I'm honored that you bothered to type all that over my quip remark.
Transferring that to what the thread was about then, there's no point in 'quantum jumping', because you wouldn't be able to gain anything from those other versions, that you didn't already do here.
Well, I suppose there would be, if you could do it (which you can't): you would just have to make sure you "jumped" to vserions of yourself which were different enough to tell you something interesting, but not so different enough that what they did would be irrelevant. The "further" you jumped across possible worlds, the more different the lives of the different versions would become, as they would have diverged from you further in the past. The closest versions of you would live in worlds in which just one particle is in a different place. Other versions of you, more distant but still very nearby would be just like you, except they would have taken their last breath 0.00001 seconds earlier, or would be standing 0.00001 metres nearer to the TV. As you went further across "possibility space", you would encounter increasingly different versions, with histories that diverged from yours further back. Eventually, you would encounter versions with histories that diverged before you were born - eventually with different DNA, and at at this stage it starts to become debatable when they stop being "versions of you". This is clearly all very strange and the best way of making sense of it is to give that man your money.