The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford Landmark Science)

by Roger Penrose

Another viewpoint, also logical in its way, but providing a picture no less strange, is that of many worlds, first publicly put forward by Hugh Everett III (1957). According to the many-worlds interpretation, R never takes place at all. The entire evolution of the state-vector – which is regarded realistically – is always governed by the deterministic procedure U. This implies that poor Schrödinger’s cat, together with the protected observer inside the container, must indeed exist in some complex linear combination, with the cat in some superposition of life and death. However the dead state is correlated with one state of the inside observer’s consciousness, and the live one, with another (and presumably, partly, with the consciousness of the cat – and, eventually, with the outside observer’s also, when the contents become revealed to him). The consciousness of each observer is regarded as ‘splitting’, so he now exists twice over, each of his instances having a different experience (i.e. one seeing a dead cat and the other a live one). Indeed, not just an observer, but the entire universe that he inhabits splits in two (or more) at each ‘measurement’ that he makes of the world. Such splitting occurs again and again – not merely because of ‘measurements’ made by observers, but because of the macroscopic magnification of quantum events generally – so that these universe ‘branches’ proliferate wildly. Indeed, every alternative possibility would coexist in some vast superposi...

Many worlds theory rebutt