2008/12/30 kladko.domain.name.hidden <kladko.domain.name.hidden.com>:
> Lets assume, that Alice who believes in QI wants a certain probable
> event to happen, for instance win 1,000,000 in a casino. Alice then
> comes to a casino with a loaded gun and promises to herself, that she
> will kill herself if she does not win 1,000,000. You can even think
> about a suicidal lottery machine, which will automatically kill Alice
> if Alice does not win 1,000,000.
>
>
> Since Alice is immortal, there are two possivle outcomes
>
> 1). Alice wins 1,000,000 and the trigger is not pulled
> 2). Alice does not win 1,000,000, the trigger is pulled, the bullet
> goes through Alice's head without killing Alice
>
> Now although 1) is highly improbable 2) is much much more improbable.
>
> Due to the principle of the least improbability 1) is going to happen
> for a typical immortal - meaning that Alice wins 1,000,000
>
> If you accept that, you should accept that QI provides a way for
> immortals to influence the world by doing attempted suicides.
> Essentially, anything becomes possible for an immortal.
It's one thing to hope that QI saves you when it seems all options are
gone but another thing to deliberately shoot yourself in the head:
what if the theory is wrong? Some time ago I had the idea of using
your method to win at gambling but not leave a (third person, at
least) corpse. I would go into the casino with the lethal device in my
pocket and formulate the intention in my mind that if I lost, I would
kill myself. Now probably I wouldn't kill myself, even if I lost, but
formulating the intention would at least mean that in a minority of
worlds where I lost, I would kill myself. Therefore, I would be
eliminating some of the losing worlds in the multiverse, and biasing
my chances in favour of finding myself in a world; which over many (as
close to fair as possible) games would give me a net expected game.
But alas, it turns out when you do the calculations that my expected
gain is about proportional to the probability that I would actually
leave a corpse behind, which is what I wanted to avoid.
--
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Tue Dec 30 2008 - 09:42:50 PST