More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make far more sense than common sense does. We must take them seriously, not merely as pragmatic foundations for their respective fields but as explanations of the world.
It may seem odd that this suggestion – that we should try to form a rational and coherent world-view on the basis of our best, most fundamental theories – should be at all novel or controversial. Yet in practice it is. One reason is that each of these theories has, when it is taken seriously, very counter-intuitive implications. Consequently, all sorts of attempts have been made to avoid facing those implications, by making ad hoc modifications or reinterpretations of the theories, or by arbitrarily narrowing their domain of applicability, or simply by using them in practice but drawing no
...more
For this book is not primarily a defence of these theories: it is an investigation of what the fabric of reality would be like if they were true.
They are ‘parallel’ in the sense that within each universe particles interact with each other just as they do in the tangible universe, but each universe affects the others only weakly, through interference phenomena.
If, according to the simplest explanation, an entity is complex and autonomous, then that entity is real.
If a substantial amount of computation would be required to give us the illusion that a certain entity is real, then that entity is real.
Thus a single cosmic-ray strike on a single DNA molecule will in general cause a large range of different mutations to appear in different universes.
If you have a ticket for last week’s lottery, but have not yet found out whether you have won, the outcome is still open from your point of view, even though objectively it is fixed.
When we make a choice, we change the future from what it will be in universes in which we choose differently. But in no case does any particular snapshot in the future change. It cannot change, for there is no flow of time with respect to which it could change. ‘Changing’ the future means choosing which snapshot we will be in; ‘changing’ the past means exactly the same thing. Because there is no flow of time, there is no such thing as changing a particular past snapshot, such as one we remember being in.
