5 ms·
I 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 obse
by comex 8y ago
I 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?