Christian_Szegedy comments on Quantum Russian Roulette - Less Wrong

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

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Comment author: cousin_it 18 September 2009 02:41:45PM *  9 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Christian_Szegedy 19 September 2009 02:28:36AM 0 points [-]

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.