4 ms·
I think there is a still more straightforward and robust argument against quantum immortality: The same reasoning predicts you can never fall asleep. If future
by tbabb 8y ago
I think there is a still more straightforward and robust argument against quantum immortality: The same reasoning predicts you can never fall asleep.
If futures where you are not conscious are inaccessible by the anthropic principle, then dreamless sleep cannot be in your future.
Most sleep is dreamless. At 4:00am this morning I will almost certainly be in this state. But being unconscious is not an experience I can have, so by the reasoning of quantum immortality, I should expect with certainty to find myself awake at 4:00am if there are any Everett universes where this is the case. And of course the same argument applies to every other moment of my entire life, and yet somehow I haven't been trapped in a state of wakefulness since the day I was born...
(If sleep is breaking the rules, the substitute it in with "temporary death" if you prefer. Why I am I allowed to "fork into" the branch where I die as long as I wake up later? How does the information about my eventual revival make it to the branching point, earlier in time? Or does the revived version of me exist with measure zero? These seem plain absurdities to me).
Think carefully about why many-worlds doesn't prevent you from sleeping. I think this leads to the correct answer.
I think of it in terms of a phase space diagram. You are conscious in some parts of phase space. Those regions of phase space have certain measures. You should expect to find yourself in parts of phase space with large measures, and not in the parts with small measures. Like this: [1]
In the diagram, increasing purple is "increasing probability consciousness." You should expect to find yourself in the purple area, not 10,000 years off the top of the diagram, deep in a white region. Quantum immortality supposes the latter, and that should be a self-evidently bad hypothesis.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/ETOqKs9.png https://i.imgur.com/ETOqKs9.png
- comex 8y agoI don't think that's accurate. The many worlds interpretation is fundamentally an interpretation of something unobservable; if there were a way for you to observe it (by noticing you haven't been able to sleep) and 'report back' to all/most universes, it wouldn't be an interpretation anymore. (If you did a quantum suicide experiment, you might be able to 'report back' to the subset of universes where you still exist, like in Permutation City. I'm not sure that would actually be a valid demonstration of many worlds – the classical equivalent is just "something unlikely happened", and you can justify that with the anthropic principle. But in any case, that's very different from reporting back to all universes.) As for the diagram… Even in a classical universe (or just a non-many-worlds one), if you set a mechanism to have a 50% chance of killing you, you should expect to 'find yourself' alive afterwards – in the sense that if you 'find yourself' anything, that anything can only be alive. It's just that you have an equal chance of not having any further conscious experience. That doesn't apply to sleep or even temporary death, since the resulting universe would still be observable by you at some point in the future. Now, even in a classical universe, there is a possible set of values under which participating in a 'suicide lottery' could be rational! That would be, "I fundamentally don't care whether I exist or not, but I do prefer existing while being rich to existing while being poor". The many-worlds interpretation just lets you amend that to: "I don't care whether I exist or not in 'my' future, as long as someone else identical to me exists in an alternate universe." There is no reason you must or should care about someone benefitting in an inaccessible universe just because they're (very) similar to you; but there is also no reason you must not. To whose benefit you strive is an arbitrary choice, after all.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y agoIf something is unobservable, and has no observable properties - in fact cannot have observable properties, by definition - it's metaphysics, not science.
- tbabb 8y agoQuantum immortality says something concretely different than what you're describing; it says that you always have a subjectively high probability of continued existence. By quantum immortality's reasoning, that is not the case under classical mechanics or non-Everettian quantum mechanics, where there are many situations where you have a conscious future with subjective probability of effectively zero. Of course I disagree with quantum immortality though I agree with Everett, and I think you are kind of restating my point: Finding outselves in the purple region is not surprising and is what we should expect. But quantum immortality as I believe it is usually stated does not require you to be ambivalent about non-existence like you say. It promises future existence, which I think is invalid.
- liberte82 8y agoOne day when we're able to use quantum technology to clone ourselves, we'll be able to test the theory. You split your consciousness into 1000 clones of yourself and kill 999 of them, do "you" always seem to end up in the one that survived?
- kaoD 8y agoI don't see how this refutes anything. You cannot experience being asleep, but what you experience is waking up, having been asleep. I find this consistent with the fact that approximately 100% of the time I experience is me being awake. Having been unconscious is also an experience with p>0. It's only having been dead where (as far as we know) p=0. Not temporary dead: dead, dead; since it's defined as having been conscious (even if on and off) and then never being conscious again. It's similar to being born: you don't experience anything before, but it's p=1 for you being born if you're experiencing it. It's not refuting anything, only changing the axioms.