Re: Quantum Suicide Bombing

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 12:47:54 +0200

Le 13-juil.-05, à 01:01, Charles Goodwin a écrit :



>> From: Fabric-of-Reality.domain.name.hidden [mailto:Fabric-of-
>> Reality.domain.name.hidden] On Behalf Of Lee Corbin
>>
>> I don't know what you even *mean* by "QS does not reduce the number
>> of worlds you experience", unless you mean that nothing that I can
>> do affects the number of worlds I can experience. (And I will not
>> discuss free will vs. determinism.)
>
> I *think* what this means is based on the QTI rule (or theorem or
> whatever)
> that *all* observer-moments have continuers. But I could be wrong.



It *is* a delicate matter. Recently Stathis Papaioannou, on the
everything-list, has made a theory where "to be in an alive state" is
represented by an observer-moment having at least one continuer (or
successor as he called them).
"to be (absolutely) dead" is represented by an observer-moment having
no successor (so that: to be dead = not to be alive, which is rather
natural for a platonist).
And at some point in a reasoning Stathis said that we die at each
instant.
This gives a theory where all transient (alive) observer moments have a
cul-de-sac successor. Of course an observer moment could have more than
one successor and some successor can be transient. In Stathis theory,
at first sight, to be immortal would consist in being forever in the
state of being able to die!

Now the problem with such a theory where there are cul-de-sac worlds
"everywhere" (I mean "accessible from all transient worlds") is that it
can be shown that there is no available notion of (relative)
probability bearing on accessible observer moments.

Probabilities reappears when we explicitly make abstraction of the
cul-de-sac worlds or observer-moments. It is the implicit default
assumption of probability: if you throw a dice you will not say the
probability of getting 6 is 1/7 giving that the possible results would
be getting 1, getting 2, getting 3, ... , getting 6, and dying!

Doing that abstraction changes the logic, and changes the possible
structure on the set of OMs.
With comp such a change logic can be justified logically once we
distinguish provability and truth, that is by taking into account
explicitly the incompleteness phenomenon. It is hard to say more
without being a tiny bit more technical. I will explain more on the
everything list.
The point is that quantum immortality or the more general (and older)
comp-immortality is *provably* a personal opinion bearing on first
person notions. But that is the case with any assertion that some
theory are *true*.

Bruno



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Wed Jul 13 2005 - 07:03:50 PDT

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