SforSingularity comments on Quantum Russian Roulette - Less Wrong

6 Post author: Christian_Szegedy 18 September 2009 08:49AM

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Comment author: SforSingularity 18 September 2009 01:06:04PM 2 points [-]

MWI is morally uninteresting, unless you do nontrivial quantum computation.

I think that the intuition at steak here is something about continuity of conscious experience. The intuition that Christian might have, if I may anticipate him, is that everyone in the experiment will actually experience getting $750,000, because somehow the word-line of their conscious experience will continue only in the worlds where they do not die.

I think that, in some sense, this is a mistake, because it fundamentally rests upon a very very strong intuition that there exists a unique person who I will be in the future. This is an intuition that evolution programmed into us for obvious reasons: we are more likely to act like a good Could-Should-Would agent if we think that the benefits and costs associated with our actions will accrue to us rather than to some vague probability distribution over an infinite set of physically realized future continuations-of-me, with the property that whatever I do, some of them will die, and whatever I do, some of them will be rich and happy.