RE: Narrow escapes

From: Charles Goodwin <cgoodwin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 17:23:30 +1200

> -----Original Message-----
> From: hal.domain.name.hidden [mailto:hal.domain.name.hidden.org]
>
> Suppose you almost cause a terrible accident. You are driving too fast
> down a quiet street and a child suddenly steps out. You swerve and manage
> to miss him. You drive on, nervous and anxious, and feeling
> very lucky that you did not hit and perhaps kill the child.
>
> It's all a matter of probabilities. In some universes you do hit him
> and in some you miss. By taking the action of driving recklessly, you
> increase the number of universes in which you kill the child.
>
> Suppose you cause a different accident. You drive into a crowd of
> 100 children and kill 20. Do you feel relief that 80 survived? No,
> you feel terrible that you have taken 20 children from the universe.
>
> The same feeling is appropriate in the first example, the narrow escape.
> You decreased the number of children in the multiverse by your actions.
> It is irrelevant that this instance of your consciousness happened to
> end up in a universe where nothing happened. The multiverse has been
> affected, the measure of that child has been reduced. You have killed
> children just as surely as in the second example where you drove into
> a crowd.
>
> In general, when you do something and you get lucky or unlucky with
> regard to the consequences, you shouldn't look too closely at the
> particular outcome you saw. Morally speaking your actions spread out
> through the multiverse. The fact that the results, good or bad, are
> not immediately visible to you does not decrease their reality.
>
> I don't think that this reasoning implies any differences in how we
> should make our decisions. We already base them on
> probabilites and the multiverse view retains probability based decision theory. However it
> does perhaps change how we should view the outcomes and the effects of
> what we do.
>
> Hal Finney

Hm....but according to the MWI all possible universes exist, including ones in which you aren't speeding, or aren't driving at all,
or someone else is, or some other person runs out in front of you, or doesn't. If you drive carefully are you merely ensuring that
elsewhere in the multiverse you aren't??? I'm not sure where this leads in probability terms, especially given an uncountable
infinity of universes branching off every second.

Not that I'm advocating dangerous driving.

Charles
Received on Sun Sep 09 2001 - 22:21:05 PDT