Re: Quantum Immortality and Information Flow

From: Saibal Mitra <smitra.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 27 Nov 2005 15:23:37 +0100

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jonathan Colvin" <jcolvin.domain.name.hidden>
To: <everything-list.domain.name.hidden>
Sent: Sunday, November 27, 2005 05:49 AM
Subject: RE: Quantum Immortality and Information Flow


> Saibal wrote:
> > The answer must be a) because (and here I disagree with
> > Jesse), all that exists is an ensemble of isolated observer
> > moments. The future, the past, alternative histories, etc.
> > they all exist in a symmetrical way. It don't see how some
> > states can be more ''real'' than other states. Of course, the
> > universe we experience seems to be real to us while
> > alternative universes, or past or future states of this
> > universe are not being experienced by us.
> >
> >
> > So, you must think of yourself at any time as being randomly
> > sampled from the set of all possible observer moments.
>
> <delurk>
>
> I'm not sure how this works. Suppose I consider my state now at time <N>
as
> a random sample of all observer moments. Now, after having typed this
> sentence, I consider my state at time <N + 4 seconds>. Is this also a
random
> sample on all observer moments? I can do the same at now <N+10>, and
so-on.
> It seems very unlikely that 3 random samples would coincide so closely. So
> in what sense are these states randomly sampled?

It's a bit like symmetry breaking. You have an ensemble of all possible
observer moment, but each observer moment can only experience its own state.
So, the OM samples itself.

There exists an observer moment representing you at N seconds, at N + 4
seconds and at all possible other states. They all ''just exist'' in the
plenitude, as Stathis wrote. The OM representing you at N + 4 has the
memory of being the OM at N. Subjectively the OMs experience time evolution,
even though the plenitude itself doesn't have a time evolution at the
fundamental level.


Although it is a bit strange to think about time evolution in this way, it
is necessary to resolve paradoxes you get when contemplating doubling and
suicide experiments. It is precisely in these cases that our naive notion of
time evolution breaks down.


Saibal
Received on Sun Nov 27 2005 - 10:31:36 PST