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cousin_it comments on Quantum Russian Roulette - Less Wrong
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Here's a funny reformulation of your argument: if you live in a quantum world where deaths are swift and painless, it makes sense to bet a lot of money on the assertion that you will stay alive. This incentivizes many other people to bet on your death and try hard to kill you. The market takes this into account, so your payoff for staying alive grows very high. Sounds like a win-win situation all around!
That said, at root it's just a vanilla application of quantum immortality which people may or may not believe in (the MWI doesn't seem to logically imply it). For a really mindblowing quantum trick see the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb tester. For a deeper exploration of the immortality issue, see Quantum suicide reality editing.
Interesting.
See also:
As I understand it, the only way to have a known-live undetonated bomb in this branch is to cause it to actually detonate it in other branches.
Sorta, but not quite, as the probability of it actually detonating can be brought as close to 0 as one likes (if I'm not mistaken).
Yes - I didn't mean all other branches.
The Elitzur-Vaidman is really amazing: more sophisticated than my scenario. However it is quite different and not directly related.
The Quantum suicide is much more similar, in fact my posting derived from an almost identical idea that I also posted on lesswrong. I got that idea independently when reading that thread.
The reason I find the quantum roulette thought experiment interesting is that it is much less speculative. The payoff is clear and the in can easily be motivated and performed by current technology.
Yes, that last point is important. Too bad we won't get volunteers from LW, because we're all kinda friends and would miss each other.
If we all did it together though, the worlds we left behind would be like some sort of geeky Atlas Shrugged dystopia. Heh.
:) We could still make the second experiment and if the numbers match, throw a party... ;)
I don't think my game is a simple reformulation of quantum immortality.
I don't even believe in quantum immortality. At least it is not implied in any way by MWI.
It is perfectly possible that you have increasing amounts of "quantum luck" in a lot of branches, but finally you die in each of the branches, because the life-supporting miracles increase your life less and less, and when they hit the resolution of time, you simply run out of them and die for sure.
If you think time is continuous, then think of the Zenon paradox to see why the infinite sum of such pieces can add to a finite amount of time gained.