Re: Quantum Immortality and Information Flow

From: Stathis Papaioannou <stathispapaioannou.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:07:49 +1100

>From the third person perspective, the annihilation of the 10^100 copies
could be seen as 10^100 dead ends. (In fact, when I originally proposed this
experiment, Hal Finney thought it represented the ultimate in mass murder.)
If I were one of the 10^100, however, I wouldn't be worried in the slightest
about the prospect of dying, because as long as at least one copy survives,
this guarantees that I survive. This may go again intuition, but if you give
up the notion of an immaterial soul, there is no reason why there should be
a one to one relationship between earlier and later versions of a person.

Stathis Papaioannou

>Le 11-déc.-05, à 11:58, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
>
>>You find yourself alone in a room with a light that alternates red/green
>>with a period of one minute. A letter in the room informs you that every
>>other minute, 10^100 copies of you are created and run in parallel for one
>>minute, then shut down. The transition between the two states (low
>>measure/ high measure) corresponds with the change in the colour of the
>>light, and you task is to guess which colour corresponds to which state.
>>
>>The problem is, whether the light is red or green, you could argue that
>>you are vastly more likely to be sampled from the 10^100 group. You might
>>decide to say that *both* red and green correspond to the larger group,
>>because if you say this 10^100 copies in the multiverse will be correct
>>and only one copy will be wrong. But clearly, this tyranny of the majority
>>strategy brings you no closer to the truth. If you tossed a coin, at least
>>you would have a 1/2 chance of being right.
>
>
>Yes but this is due to the "shut down". (if I got correctly your
>experiment).The probabilities can be taken only on the stories without
>dead-ends, and I guess you consider the shut down as sort of "absolute
>annihilation".
>I know this is hard to believe, but apparently we are "conscious" only
>because we belong to a continuum of infinite never ending stories ...
>
>I don't believe this, but then that's what the lobian machine's "guardian
>angel" G* says about that: true and strictly unbelievable.
>
>Do you accept that your argument won't go through if the shut down are
>deleted?
>
>Bruno
>
>http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
>

_________________________________________________________________
Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee®
Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Received on Mon Dec 12 2005 - 20:13:09 PST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Feb 16 2018 - 13:20:11 PST