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Originally posted by serenity
The biggest problem with a multiverse theory is explaining consciousness, because you can come up with all the equations you want to say when the universe splits, how it splits, and whatever but it comes down to this question: why do we experience _this_ reality. I mean, assuming that splitting is involved, there's an infinite number of ourselves being created every moment, yet our consciousness chooses to follow one path and continuously at that.
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I don't see the problem: from any one world-line's perspective, the universe continues back continuously forever.
Thus, to any consciousness, reality seems on the surface to be a single thread.
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In quantum mechanics, this is usually called 'many-minds' or 'many-worlds,' and the theory does very well in empirical predictions but falls into some problems when trying to explain why the splitting happens and how we experience it.
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Under many-universes, the splitting doesn't actually happen. Rather, things "rotate" out of phase with each other to a larger and larger degree. They never completely get out of phase, but they get close enough to completely out of phase that you can no longer detect the "almost right-angle" parts of the multiverse. When it becomes indistinguishable from background QM noise, it is in practice unreachable/uncommunicateable with.
The
Wikipedia entry on many-worlds QM interpritation is a good read.
The interesting thing about the MW interpritation is that many of the properties of QM fall out naturally without having to invent axioms. I've seen a paper that seemed to imply you can pull this off without relying on many-worlds, but I didn't read it enough to describe how she pulled it off.