Re: "Last-minute" vs. "anticipatory" quantum immortality

From: Wei Dai <weidai.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 12 Nov 2003 22:02:19 -0500

On Wed, Nov 12, 2003 at 04:34:27AM -0500, Jesse Mazer wrote:
> Applied to quantum immortality, this "anticipatory" idea suggests it would
> not be as if the universe is allowing events to go any which way right up
> until something is about to kill me, and then it steps in with some
> miraculous coincidence which saves me; instead, it would be more like the
> universe would constantly be nudging the my first-person probabilities in
> favor of branches where I don't face any dangerous accidents which require
> "miracles" in the first place. Of course since this would just be a
> probabilistic effect, I might still occasionally face accidents where I had
> to be very lucky to survive, but the lower the probability there is of
> surviving a particular type of accident, the less likely I am to experience
> events leading up to such an accident.

If you believe this, would you treat terminally ill people as zombies,
since their consciousness should already have been "nudged" away from this
branch? What do you do when they protest that they are in fact not zombies?
Received on Wed Nov 12 2003 - 22:03:30 PST