Critique of the quantum suicide experiment

[Delta Kilo]

This whole topic is a red herring. You don't need MWI to show that. Imagine you have an army of volunteers. At your command they go into individual sound-proofed rooms and start shooting themselves. Those lucky few who survive may well consider themselves invincible. This is no different from multiple copies of the same person in MWI. So what?

 

[Demystifier]

This whole topic is a red herring. You don't need MWI to show that. Imagine you have an army of volunteers. At your command they go into individual sound-proofed rooms and start shooting themselves. Those lucky few who survive may well consider themselves invincible. This is no different from multiple copies of the same person in MWI. So what?

Excellent point! But note that I have also presented two analogies in classical probability without many worlds. And your example also reinforces my central conclusion: Even if MWI is right, the suicide experiment cannot be used to prove it.

 

[Ken G]

This whole topic is a red herring. You don't need MWI to show that. Imagine you have an army of volunteers. At your command they go into individual sound-proofed rooms and start shooting themselves. Those lucky few who survive may well consider themselves invincible. This is no different from multiple copies of the same person in MWI. So what?

I think the key difference is that, you cannot use an army of volunteers to test MWI, we all agree there. You can only test it yourself! And for that, you need no army at all, you just need one gun, and a few bullets. If you're still here after that, MWI is clearly right, and so is the QS interpretation of MWI that there is such a thing as "me" that forks along with the experimental outcomes. I don't recommend you try this, because I don't think you will make it. That's because I think MWI and QS cannot both be right-- they are having a little fight over the meaning of "me." MWI must reject the entire concept of "me", because I'm forking all the time, yet only perceive one of me, so the whole "me" concept is a kind of illusion in MWI (a weird kind of illusion that passes every test, which is not normally what we call an illusion). But QS invokes the same "me" concept that MWI just destructed, to argue that "I" will survive the suicide. So banking on not ending your existence is like betting that two different horses will win the same race.

 

[Delta Kilo]

If you're still here after that, MWI is clearly right, and so is the QS interpretation of MWI that there is such a thing as "me" that forks along with the experimental outcomes.

I don't see how is it going to prove anything at all except that I am one lucky son-of-a-gun.

 

[Ken G]

In QS, you will eventually be 1000 years old. I think that will tell you something.

 

[Ken G]

To follow up on that last point, my contention is that QS is not a ramification of MWI, indeed it is incompatible with MWI. If QS is true, then the following will be the future of whoever is reading these words: You will live to 200, and medical science will start to do tests on you. They will not find anything unusual about you, other than that you are a statistical anomaly. When you reach 300, you will begin to know that QS was correct, and still no one else will be able to treat you as anything but an oddity-- nothing useful will be learned about the aging process by studying you because you are not like other people, you are very highly statistically outlying. Also, your quality of life will probably be awful-- you'll crave death but none comes. When you reach 500, you will have long since given up on your fate-- you already know QS was right, and that virtual immortality is your destiny, indeed the ultimate destiny of all conscious beings. What is not clear is whether you will still possesses the mental faculties to appreciate all this-- this is one of the many things QS is vague about, what counts as "you surviving."

The reason this is not what will actually happen to you is that QS makes additional assumptions about who "you" are that are not compatible with either QM or MWI. QS imagines that "you" are any future thing that can trace a continuous history to your current state here and now, reading this. But MWI says that there would then be very many "yous" a second from now, but it fails to find any particular connection between all those "yous". It has no important or significant way to even distinguish those "yous" from anybody else in the world, other than the nearness of their memories. Is what "I" am simply defined by my memories? If I have temporary amnesia, I'm not "me" any more, but I will be again when my amnesia subsides?

Whatever "I" am is not a question answered by MWI, and so the assumption about how it would work that is made by QS has nothing to do with MWI. The ramifications of QS are more absurd than MWI, so they must not be compatible with each other.

 

[bobonumbnuts]

This idea that you are immortal (in fact the only immortal in your experience of the universe) is completely idiotic, you were in a state of non existence prior to your birth which is the equivalence of being dead. To claim that it is impossible to return to that state of non existence by means of some quantum loophole is paradoxical and smells of Kurzweillian BS.