Hal Finney wrote:
>
>Jesse Mazer writes:
> > If you impose the condition I discussed earlier that absolute
>probabilities
> > don't change over time, or in terms of my analogy, that the water levels
>in
> > each tank don't change because the total inflow rate to each tank always
> > matches the total outflow rate, then I don't think it's possible to make
> > sense of the notion that the observer-moments in that torture-free
>minute
> > would have 10^100 times greater absolute measure. If there's 10^100
>times
> > more water in the tanks corresponding to OMs during that minute, where
>does
> > all this water go after the tank corresponding to the last OM in this
> > minute, and where is it flowing in from to the tank corresponding to the
> > first OM in this minute?
>
>I would propose to implement the effect by duplicating the guy 10^100 times
>during that minute, then terminating all the duplicates after that time.
>
>What happens in your model when someone dies in some fraction of the
>multiverse? His absolute measure decreases, but where does the now-excess
>"water" go?
In my model, death only exists from a third-person perspective, but from a
first-person perspective I'm subscribing to the QTI, so consciousness will
always continue in some form (even if my memories don't last or I am reduced
to an amoeba-level consciousness)--the "water molecules" are never created
or destroyed. For what would happen when an observer is duplicated from a
third-person perspective, it might help to consider the example I discussed
on the '"Last-minute" vs. "anticipatory" quantum immortality' thread at
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4841.html , where a person is
initially duplicated before a presidential election, and then depending on
the results of the election, one duplicate is later copied 999 times. All
else being equal, I'd speculate that the initial 2-split would "anticipate"
the later 999-split, so that 999 out of 1000 "water molecules" of the first
observer would split off into the copy that is later going to be split 999
times, so before this second split, OMs of this copy would have 999 times
the absolute measure of the copy that isn't going to be split again. I'm not
absolutely sure that this would be a consequence of the idea about finding a
unique self-consistent set of absolute and conditional probabilities based
only on a "similarity matrix" and the condition of absolute probabilities
not changing with time, but it seems intuitive to me that it would. At some
point I'm going to try to test this idea with mathematica or something,
creating a finite set of OMs and deciding what the possible successors to
each one are in order to construct something like a "similarity matrix",
then finding the unique vector of absolute probabilities that, when
multiplied by this matrix, gives a unit vector (the procedure I discussed in
my last post to you at
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m6855.html ).
Hopefully the absolute probabilities would indeed tend to "anticipate"
future splits in the way I'm describing.
So if this anticipatory idea works, then any copy that's very unlikely to
survive long from a third-person perspective is going to undergoe fewer
future splits from a multiverse perspective (there will always be few
branches where this copy survives though), so your conditional probability
of becoming such a copy would be low, meaning that not much of your "water"
would flow into that copy, and it will have a smaller absolute measure than
copies that are likely to survive in more branches.
Jesse
Received on Mon Jun 13 2005 - 15:08:04 PDT