Jaques, try reading what Max wrote, then post a better reply.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jacques M. Mallah [SMTP:jqm1584.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: 04 December 1998 00:59
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: quantum suicide = deadly dumb
>
> On Thu, 26 Nov 1998, Gilles HENRI wrote:
> > Jacques, your sentence " if you are a typical Bob, you are 50% likely to
> > die" has not the same meaning as in common life. As all worlds where you
> > don't exist have no signification for you, you can say by anthropic
> > principle that you (i.e. at least one of your possible future) are sure
> to
> > continue to live in a world where you survived suicide, unless the
> quantum
> > probability of this event is strictly zero. You are not sensitive to the
> > fact that you exist only in a very small fraction of the possible
> Universes.
>
> There certainly seems to be a lot of confusion about the anthropic
> principle, for some reason.
> What the anthropic principle is, in the formulation that makes
> sense, is a better version of the Copernican principle. It states that we
> should assume our conscious observations to be typical; effectively, drawn
> at random from the set of all such conscious observations that exist.
> Obviously, in regions of space or time in which there are no
> conscious observations, we will not find ourselves there.
> Perhaps your confusion is as follows: how should we count multiple
> instances in which the same observation occurs, as one observation or as
> many, for the purpose of finding the probabilities?
> But the answer is clear: as many. It makes no difference whether
> observations are the same or not. Indeed, if the answer were 'one', then
> the effective probabilities for each observation in quantum mechanics
> would be equal, instead of depending on the wavefunction.
> So when some Bobs die, the total measure decreases, and the
> fractional measure of Bobs decreases. There is really no difference
> between the MWI and non-MWI in this respect. If your life is so painful
> that you'd rather not exist than live, commit suicide; otherwise, don't.
>
> Max Tegmark wrote:
>
> > Here's a brief comment on the issue of
> > whether the MWI implies subjective immortality.
> > This has bothered me for a long time, and a number of people have
> > emailed me about it after the Guardian and New Scientist articles came
> out.
> > I agree that if the argument were flawless, I should
> > expect to be the oldest guy on the planet,
> > severely discrediting the Everett hypothesis.
>
> Good. You realize that the observational evidence disproves
> quantum immortality.
>
> > However, I think there's a flaw.
> > After all, dying isn't a binary thing where you're either dead or
> > alive - rather, there's a whole continuum of states of progressively
> > decreasing self-awareness. What makes the quantum suicide work is
> > that you force an abrupt transition.
> > I suspect that when I get old, my brain cells will gradually give out
> > (indeed, that's already started happening...)
> > so that I keep feeling self-aware, but less and less so, the final
> > "death" being quite anti-climactic, sort of like when
> > an amoeba croaks. Do you buy this?
>
>
> No way. It's a desperate attempt to save a very bad idea, and it
> shows. I can't blame you for wanting to, but what I really respect is
> when someone admits he made a mistake.
>
> - - - - - - -
> Jacques Mallah (jqm1584.domain.name.hidden)
> Graduate Student / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate
> "I know what no one else knows" - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum
> My URL: http://pages.nyu.edu/~jqm1584/
Received on Fri Dec 04 1998 - 01:40:06 PST