{"id":1073,"date":"2013-08-29T05:00:26","date_gmt":"2013-08-29T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/?p=1073"},"modified":"2013-08-27T19:21:23","modified_gmt":"2013-08-28T02:21:23","slug":"measure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/2013\/08\/measure\/","title":{"rendered":"Measure"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a sufficiently large universe, everything that <em>can<\/em> happen happens <em>somewhere<\/em>, but it's clearly not an even distribution. Flip a quantum coin a hundred times, and there have to be <em>some<\/em> versions of you who see a hundred <a href=\"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/2013\/08\/plurals-of-coinflip-outcomes\/\">heads<\/a>, but they're so vastly outnumbered by versions of you who see a properly random-looking sequence of heads and tails that it's not worth thinking about: it <em>mostly<\/em> doesn't happen.<\/p>\n<p>When you write a computer program, or build a bridge, or just <em>think<\/em> something, we might prefer to take the viewpoint that you're not <em>creating<\/em> anything so much as you are <em>instantiating that pattern locally<\/em>, thereby increasing its measure in the multiverse: there might be other ways for that program, that bridge, that thought to come about somewhere, but it's getting some of its support from you.<\/p>\n<p><em>Decisionmaking<\/em> is about exerting some control over the distribution of measure over patterns in the multiverse: agent-like patterns select actions so as to allocate measure to their preferred patterns. Maybe there are <em>some<\/em> versions of me with an ice-cream cone that form by chance, or are deliberately created by alien civilizations investigating how humans respond to ice-cream, but if I get an ice-cream cone, it's <em>mostly<\/em> because humans evolved and then developed cultures which domesticated dairy cows and cultivated sugar and so on and so forth until eventually I was born and grew up and put effort into acquiring ice-cream. When you decide, you help determine the distribution of what happens to the sections of the multiverse that depend on copies of your decision\u2014<a href=\"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/2012\/12\/actually-personal-responsibility\/\">choose carefully<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a sufficiently large universe, everything that can happen happens somewhere, but it's clearly not an even distribution. Flip a quantum coin a hundred times, and there have to be some versions of you who see a hundred heads, but &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/2013\/08\/measure\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1073"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1076,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1073\/revisions\/1076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/zackmdavis.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}