Re: Any hope for Higgo?

From: Gilles HENRI <Gilles.Henri.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 20 May 1999 10:13:23 +0200

> And there's the proof of my above statement.
> Wei Dai has previously argued that the 'quantum suicide' crowd
>really just had a weird sense of morality regarding measure, rather than a
>wrong view of the math. I think the above proves that not to be the case:
>since Higgo now thinks that being old would be evidence of QTI, that
>proves that he does believe that the predictions of QTI would not be the
>standard predictions of QM as Wei and I understand it.
> I find it incredible that Higgo can state that being old would be
>statistical evidence for QTI, since one would not expect that without
>QTI, but still not realize that being young is statistical evidence
>against it.
Jacques, I agree with James.
1) if you find yourself very old, this is no rigorous evidence for any
theory. However you should choose the explanation following the maximum of
likelihood criterium, i.e. the theory in which the probability of being
very old in some world is maximum. This probability if 1 in MWI, and very
tiny in conventional QM. So the fact of being very old should be considered
as a very strong, although not absolute, evidence for MWI. In the same way,
the thousands of experimental confirmations of QM are very strong pieces of
evidence for QM, but not rigorous proofs (which do not exist).
2) Predictions of MWI, and thus QTI, are NOT the same as with standard QM.
They are very close to it as long as you restrict yourself to events which
you are actually surviving, which is the case of all known experimental
confirmations of QM of course.
2) The fact of being young is not a statistical evidence against QTI,
because the number (or the measure) of worlds where you are young is
actually much larger than that where you are old. If you choose randomly a
point between the x axis and the exponential curve y=exp(-x), most of your
points will lie at x of the order of 1, although there exist an infinite
number of points with x as large as you want. If you think that being young
is statistical evidence
against it, you should also think that your existing is a statistical
evidence against MWI, because the measure of worlds where you do not exist
is much larger.

Gilles

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Gilles HENRI

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Received on Thu May 20 1999 - 01:18:18 PDT