This website, the app's visual design, and that old plastic-chromed iPhone all harken back to a simpler time when there were funny one-off apps just for the hell of it.
The time of $1.99 quantum splitters, $0.99 iBeer, and $1.99 Lightsaber apps is long gone. Most of those apps didn't really do anything all that amazing, but looking back on it I think I miss when app stores were flush with "we could use the hardware to do this" rather than "we could get in-app purchases and subscriptions like this"
Not that there wasn't monetization as a goal back then, but just that there was a lot of weird paradigms being experimented on where we now have a solidly 10-year norm instead.
I don't even enjoy surfing the app stores nowadays. Anything resembling fun feels like a trap. Either an app with a hidden agenda, or an attempt to rope you into a subscription. Or some otherwise ad filled jank. Just not fun anymore. That goes for most anything with a CPU, really.
I bought this App when was mentioned by Sean Carroll in one of his talks/podcast about quantum computing. And because of that, I really thought that they did something that was founded in quantum physics. Not that it was really important, but it was cool to say "see, now it's contacting LHC to shot another photon The only think that I'm sorry about is that with every change of iPhone I've lost the track of what Universe I am!
On that topic, I can highly recommend a Sci-Fi novella called "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" by Ted Chiang (the movie Arrival is based on one of his other novels). Concerns a device that also splits the universe, but allows a limited amount of information transfer between the two splits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...
There’s a short story out there about a device that can actually do this and then let you stay in contact with your alternate self for a while to see how things turn out. Fascinating stuff.
There's another short story out there which assumes that when you die in one branched universe, you survive in another. So in your subjective experience, you always survive, no matter how low the chances. But eventually your survival requires stranger and stranger events to occur. After a thousand years, your subjective experience becomes utterly implausible, and yet there you are. But you may not like the universe in which you survive that long. Which is too bad, because you can't subjectively die.
I'll probably remember the title tomorrow, if nobody beats me to it. It was a fairly disturbing story.
It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.
If we assume that the universe is deterministic inside of itself except for quantum decisions, it seems reasonable to me that a structure on the outside of this universe would perform something like a Monte Carlo tree search (assuming that there is a "success condition" for a universe), and branches are only explored to some depth before being discarded. You could then - if you really had to - backtrack to an earlier known state and start exploring again.
In my general view, it's also likely that consciousness is only projected into branches once it's sufficiently established that they're reasonable to follow (I think consciousness might be expensive).
I think it's much cleaner to assume all possible realities exist - otherwise you have to account for the fact that some do not exist.
Why would there be some possible realities and not others?
Much cleaner to assume that all possible realities exist.
Then when you ask, why is there not just nothing? You can answer, why would there be nothing rather than something? Is that not a special case? It is a special case and requires a cause to make it nothing rather than something.
And so we arrive at the concept of the void. That which is not nothing but rather all potentialities simultaneously. True nothing and everything are very similar.
What is the state of maximum disorder? A signal that is completely random. It's algorithmic complexity must be maximal. The program to describe it must be maximal and so within it, it contains all possible machines. All possible constructions, all universes.
Nothing is everything and so it is not possible to have nothing, and so the universe exists.
QED
Where's my Nobel?
Human intuition has been completely inconsistent with observed reality since relativity and QM were conceived. We should use other means to evaluate the Many Worlds idea.
> It seems like retaining the information about all possible universes is kind of nonsensical; the volume of data is just too large.
Do you have to retain all the information? Perhaps a set of quantum events is more like a parameter into a function, and the return value is the universe state corresponding to that history. Yeah there's magical black box handwaving going on there but the point is when we literally have no idea, it's not entirely impossible that the quantum multiverse is sparsely populated and lazy loaded with nothing 'computed' into existence until it has to be.
EDIT: Mind, I'm not saying that it is this way. The validity of my proposal isn't the point. The point is that dismissing Many Worlds on the grounds of "too much information" involves assuming a lot of things we don't actually know.
The "split universes" is the new science fiction that took the world by storm. It is an unproven hypothesis that satisfies the psychological needs of people who want to dream of a world that behaves according to their wishes.
Unless you yourself have a good and detailed understanding of quantum mechanics, and have solved the Schrodinger equation for many different systems, I'd recommend not assuming that the physicists who proposed many worlds did so out of some psychological need to have the universe look like a branching tree.
The true situation is that the Schrodinger equation straightforwardly predicts a proliferation of worlds when you start from a low-entropy state. (Worlds in this interpretation are actually continuous blobs of amplitude, not discrete objects, which is why it makes sense that a partial differential equation like the Schrodinger equation can describe them. The prediction is that blobs will tend to spread out, split into smaller blobs, etc.) Early quantum physicists were disturbed by this, and added a collapse postulate claiming that the wave-function will sometimes spontaneously collapse, resulting in a single, linear world history rather than a branching one. To this day, spontaneous collapse has never been observed in an experiment.
My understanding is that the reason why the multiverse hypothesis (Everett interpretation) is popular with physicists is it simplifies the equations without losing predictive power. They actually have to add terms for the Copenhagen interpretation. I admittedly don't know the math well, but I think suggesting that it satisfies psychological needs is not generally accurate -- if anything, I think the average person finds the idea uncomfortable. Rather, it has legitimate explanatory and predictive power.
Most likely true, but that doesn't mean it is useless. Adherents to the split universe religi...er...theory might be more content with their lives, experience less anxiety, etc..
Disclaimer: I have no background in physics at all. I saw this universe splitter and read "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" (Science-Fiction novella by Ted Chiang - the one mentioned in here), and thought hey that's fun.
Nice one! Back in 2012 I built the (now defunct) Freakonomics Experiments site[^1] that used had the same A vs. B premise using John Walker's HotBits[^2] from Switzerland.
In case of interest, Steven Levitt published their - albeit single-Universal - findings in "Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness"[^3]
How about a RealityOS with duplicate copies ready to be split. When a user faces an A/B options, realities 2, 3, and 4 can go ahead and execute A, B, and cancel so that when the user makes their choice the winning reality is put in focus and the diffs copied to the rest. You could even hover over a button and watch where it ends up. Like pre-fetching from browsers.
Or when a debugger hits a break point reality 2 can proceed with the execution until you are done investigating.
It could even act like a RAID backup in case a random bit flip causes one reality to crash.
Alas it would be quite wasteful to spend watts on hypotheticals...
If the single photon simultaneously bounces off the partially-silvered mirror and goes through it, you're not going to get an answer to a binary question from this experimental set-up.
if this thing is making my choices for me, then why not skip "the middle man" i.e. me?
I sense a rising humanity motion (like rationalism, or the englightnement or whaterver) towards letting the algorithms make all of our choices. The new absolute monarch is the Algorithm. The Kings are dead, long live the algorithms!?
disclaimer: as tha website is not serious but it does pretend to be, my own comment is also not entirely serious.
Often difficult topics are better expressed through fiction (or partial fiction; fiction right now but maybe not later)
[+] [-] RistrettoMike|4 years ago|reply
The time of $1.99 quantum splitters, $0.99 iBeer, and $1.99 Lightsaber apps is long gone. Most of those apps didn't really do anything all that amazing, but looking back on it I think I miss when app stores were flush with "we could use the hardware to do this" rather than "we could get in-app purchases and subscriptions like this"
Not that there wasn't monetization as a goal back then, but just that there was a lot of weird paradigms being experimented on where we now have a solidly 10-year norm instead.
[+] [-] fortyseven|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ggasp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|4 years ago|reply
Popular folk art is dangerous.
So a bureaucracy was built.
[+] [-] karamanolev|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ExtraE|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verytrivial|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] songeater|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sam_goody|4 years ago|reply
(Looks at source code, finds HKCD random function..)
[+] [-] operator-name|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aj7|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] realYitzi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkage|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Aerfish.Un... [1] https://www.aerfish.com/
[+] [-] gorkish|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jdefelice|4 years ago|reply
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/691/transcript
[+] [-] lionheart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekidd|4 years ago|reply
I'll probably remember the title tomorrow, if nobody beats me to it. It was a fairly disturbing story.
[+] [-] h0l0cube|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series)
[+] [-] asicsp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jetbooster|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] curvilinear_m|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tazjin|4 years ago|reply
If we assume that the universe is deterministic inside of itself except for quantum decisions, it seems reasonable to me that a structure on the outside of this universe would perform something like a Monte Carlo tree search (assuming that there is a "success condition" for a universe), and branches are only explored to some depth before being discarded. You could then - if you really had to - backtrack to an earlier known state and start exploring again.
In my general view, it's also likely that consciousness is only projected into branches once it's sufficiently established that they're reasonable to follow (I think consciousness might be expensive).
Some random ranting ...
[+] [-] plutonorm|4 years ago|reply
Why would there be some possible realities and not others? Much cleaner to assume that all possible realities exist. Then when you ask, why is there not just nothing? You can answer, why would there be nothing rather than something? Is that not a special case? It is a special case and requires a cause to make it nothing rather than something. And so we arrive at the concept of the void. That which is not nothing but rather all potentialities simultaneously. True nothing and everything are very similar. What is the state of maximum disorder? A signal that is completely random. It's algorithmic complexity must be maximal. The program to describe it must be maximal and so within it, it contains all possible machines. All possible constructions, all universes. Nothing is everything and so it is not possible to have nothing, and so the universe exists. QED Where's my Nobel?
[+] [-] imglorp|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasha0663|4 years ago|reply
Do you have to retain all the information? Perhaps a set of quantum events is more like a parameter into a function, and the return value is the universe state corresponding to that history. Yeah there's magical black box handwaving going on there but the point is when we literally have no idea, it's not entirely impossible that the quantum multiverse is sparsely populated and lazy loaded with nothing 'computed' into existence until it has to be.
EDIT: Mind, I'm not saying that it is this way. The validity of my proposal isn't the point. The point is that dismissing Many Worlds on the grounds of "too much information" involves assuming a lot of things we don't actually know.
[+] [-] coliveira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c1ccccc1|4 years ago|reply
The true situation is that the Schrodinger equation straightforwardly predicts a proliferation of worlds when you start from a low-entropy state. (Worlds in this interpretation are actually continuous blobs of amplitude, not discrete objects, which is why it makes sense that a partial differential equation like the Schrodinger equation can describe them. The prediction is that blobs will tend to spread out, split into smaller blobs, etc.) Early quantum physicists were disturbed by this, and added a collapse postulate claiming that the wave-function will sometimes spontaneously collapse, resulting in a single, linear world history rather than a branching one. To this day, spontaneous collapse has never been observed in an experiment.
[+] [-] overgard|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lnanek2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ossyrial|4 years ago|reply
Disclaimer: I have no background in physics at all. I saw this universe splitter and read "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" (Science-Fiction novella by Ted Chiang - the one mentioned in here), and thought hey that's fun.
[+] [-] interleave|4 years ago|reply
In case of interest, Steven Levitt published their - albeit single-Universal - findings in "Heads or Tails: The Impact of a Coin Toss on Major Life Decisions and Subsequent Happiness"[^3]
[1]: https://www.freakonomicsexperiments.com/home/faqs/
[2]: https://www.fourmilab.ch/hotbits/how3.html
[3]: https://academic.oup.com/restud/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...
[+] [-] CollinEMac|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbomacrae|4 years ago|reply
Or when a debugger hits a break point reality 2 can proceed with the execution until you are done investigating.
It could even act like a RAID backup in case a random bit flip causes one reality to crash.
Alas it would be quite wasteful to spend watts on hypotheticals...
[+] [-] mcguire|4 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/5hVmeOCJjOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv5FYrOthvE
[+] [-] Taniwha|4 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
downloading any app (much less using it) results in billions of worlds .....
[+] [-] habitmelon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LinAGKar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inetsee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] operator-name|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasha0663|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smoyer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsedlm|4 years ago|reply
if this thing is making my choices for me, then why not skip "the middle man" i.e. me?
I sense a rising humanity motion (like rationalism, or the englightnement or whaterver) towards letting the algorithms make all of our choices. The new absolute monarch is the Algorithm. The Kings are dead, long live the algorithms!?
disclaimer: as tha website is not serious but it does pretend to be, my own comment is also not entirely serious. Often difficult topics are better expressed through fiction (or partial fiction; fiction right now but maybe not later)