Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> This is the most immediate response of people to the QTI idea: even if it's true,
> what do I care if other versions of me survive in the multiverse if I'm going to die?
According to QTI you are not going to die in any universe because there
are no dead ends in the branching.
> The problem is, you can arbitrarily divide up the moments of your life and say that,
> for example, you were alive from 2:50 PM to 2:51 PM, then suddenly vanished
> from the universe (i.e. you were instantly and painlessly killed), then a perfect copy
> of you suddenly appeared at 2:51 PM and lived another minute. What would you notice
> if this happened? Would you worry about dying? I put it to you that this is precisely
I wouldn't mind being in the branch that experiences an uninterrupted
stream of consciousness, but I worry that instances of me in the
branches where I am supposed to commit suicide would be biased towards
not doing it, given enough time to think about it. As for the factoring
machine, it simply wouldn't work. You would experience just the
miraculous escape after the gun shot without having a solution to the
computationally hard problem.
> You would still end up dead in most worlds from a third person POV though, wouldn't
> you? That seems the main impediment to actually conducting a QS-type experiment (aside
Why would you care about the opinion of those observers left forever
behind...
> from the possibility that all this MWI stuff is just wrong, of course). Even in my scheme where
> there is just a possibility of death some calculations I have done suggest that if you could
> demonstrate that your success rate after many bets was better than chance to a statistically
> significant extent, your chance of dying would also have to be statistically significant. It's
> as if the multiverse is conspiring against us to prevent us from proving its existence!
No, it should be easy to make yourself experience a universe in which
you have convinced others using the ability to solve any number of very
difficult problems in case the machine worked, or just by being 2000
years old. But after you do manage to convince everybody, you would
shortly find yourself in a very lonely universe, so I guess that even
if you could prove QTI it would be in your best interest to keep it a
secret.
> Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sat Sep 16 2006 - 15:55:17 PDT