Comment on They say in an infinite multiverse versions of you exist. Yet there's an infinity of fractional numbers between 1 and 2 with no whole number 3 between, so infinity can exist without every possibility.

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my_hat_stinks@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

I’m not sure how sound that reasoning is, it’s difficult to use intuition to determine whether one infinite set is bigger than another. Infinity is weird.

Say for instance you have two infinite sets: a set of all positive integers (1, 2, 3…) and a set of all positive multiples of 5 (5, 10, 15…). Intuitively you might assume the first set is bigger, after all it has five times as many values, right? But that’s not actually the case, both sets are actually exactly the same size. If you take the first set and multiply every value by 5 you have the second set, no need to add or remove any values. Likewise, dividing every value in the second set gives you the first set again. There is no value in one set that can’t be directly mapped to a unique value in the other, therefore both sets must be the same size. Pick any random number and it’s 5 times as likely to be in the first set than the second, but there are not 5 times as many values in the first set.

With infinitely many universes one particular state being a few times more or less likely doesn’t necessarily matter, there can still be as many universes with you as without.

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