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cousin_it comments on MWI, weird quantum experiments and future-directed continuity of conscious experience - Less Wrong
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Quantum immortality seems to predict that you can't go to sleep because the conscious phase must go on and on. So it must be wrong. But I don't know where exactly.
Or perhaps it only predicts that you will never observe being asleep.
Consider a person who plans to sleep from midnight to eight AM, but will stay up all night if a quantum coin comes up heads. At 11 PM the previous night, the person is awake no matter what, and the coin could be destined to come up either value. At 1 AM, only the people in the universes where the coin came up heads are still having conscious experiences, so they have some evidence that the coin came up heads. At 9 AM, everyone in both universes is having conscious experiences again, and a conscious observer is equally likely to have memories of the coin coming up heads or tails.
Really, all quantum immortality should be able to tell you is that at any moment you are having subjective experience, you are in a universe where events have proceeded in such a way as to keep you awake. So far, it's been startlingly accurate on that account :)
(you should be able to prove quantum immortality with a quantum random number generator and a bunch of sleeping pills. Too bad the proof will only work for a few hours.)
so, you hook the pills up to a random number generator: if it outputs 00000000000 you get the placebo, if it outputs anything else, you get sleeping pills. Then check to see if you are awake an hour later. But if you did find yourself still awake, you would remember it in the morning, so the proof would last forever. But since I have already experienced sleep - and lots of it recently - I can conclude that the experiment would almost certainly conclude the boring way.
I suppose "you will experience a string of increasingly unlikley events that seem to be contrived just to keep you alive." would have to include the possibility that you lose consciousness for a long time and then regain it.
But in the morning, there'd no longer be a link between the existence of your subjective experiences and the unlikely quantum event; you'd be having subjective experiences no matter how the quantum event turned out.
That makes it equivalent to the example where you commit quantum suicide fifty times, survive each time, and then ask another person in the same universe what their belief in quantum immortality is. Since that person saw an unlikely event (you surviving), but it was equally unlikely with or without QI (because your survival is not linked to their current subjective experience) that person can only say "Well, something very unlikely just happened, but it has no bearing on QI."
Same is true of yourself in the morning. Because you'd be having the subjective experience no matter what, all you know in the universe where you stayed up all night was that an unlikely event happened that was equally unlikely with or without QI.
(I'm assuming here that experience doesn't have to be continuous to be experience, and that I am the same person as I was before the last time I went to sleep).
In the morning the experiment's a priori unlikely outcome would be evidence that something strange was going on involving subjective experience and probability; though perhaps something distinct from QI.
This is a common thought that seems to occur to a lot of people.
The flaw is that, when you go to sleep, you will wake up later. The situation is not analogous to quantum suicide.
Quantum immortality asks us what future experiences could plausibly be considered "mine". In the roulette case, only worlds where I survive have such experiences.
But in the insomnia case, there are future experiences that are "mine" in both the worlds where I remain awake, and the worlds where I fall asleep. The fact that those experiences are not simultaneous is irrelevant.
What implements the considering?
Philosophers.
That's probably why I stay up so late at night ;-0
Google tells me that my argument isn't new: even Wikipedia had a short paragraph on "quantum insomnia" sometime ago, though it's gone now.
If there are any believers in quantum immortality around here, I'd really like to hear their responses.
Quantum immortality does not predict that you will not sleep any more than it predicts that you will not observe someone else's death. There is a subjective experience of having been asleep, and a subjective experience of observing someone else's death, but not a subjective experience of having died.
The reason I don't trust quantum immortality is that I expect that whatever explains the Born probabilities will be a problem for a subjective experience continuing indefinitely in a quantum branch of vanishing measure.
If you flip a quantum coin 1000000 times, you will get into equally improbable branches. I don't see how your suggestion would work without any symmetry breaking.
Consider Robin's idea of World Mangling which, if true, would explain the Born probabilities. The idea is that a quantum branch with small measure could be "mangled" by a branch with larger measure, and that branches with smaller measure are more likely to further decohere into branches small enough to be mangled.
If this were true, then we would assign each of 2^1000000 branches split by your quantum coin flips equal probability of experiencing sufficient further decoherence to be mangled. But, the symmetry of our map is our ignorance, not the absence, of asymmetry in the territory. The effects of the different coin flip results could cause different rates of decoherence, that causes some branches to split faster and actually get mangled. And I would not want to be alive in only those branches.
Thanks. Very interesting indeed. This is the first comment so far on this topic that seems to have a chance of providing logical evidence against the viability of the game.
[EDIT] AFAICT, the mangled world hypothesis also suffers from the mathematical ugliness issues as the single world interpretation: nonlinear, nonlocal discontinuous action. Of course, you can assume that for the sake of eliminating quantum roulette type scenarios, but it makes the theory much uglier.
Believers? What sort of belief do you mean? I believe it works. But I also think it's a terrible idea. 90% chance of me being dead. 90% of quantum-goo me being dead. Whatever.
That reminds me of the movie version of The Prestige, where the Hugh Jackman character perngrf graf bs pbcvrf bs uvzfrys juvyr cresbezvat n gryrcbegngvba gevpx, ohg rafherf gung bar bs gurz qvrf rnpu gvzr. Ng gur raq ur vf xvyyrq, juvpu ur pbhyq rnfvyl unir ceriragrq ol nyybjvat n srj pbcvrf gb yvir.
So yes, let's not be profligate with our probability space.
What could "being me being dead" possibly mean?
Thanks, edited.
Quantum-goo maximization. Hmmm...
I remember reading some very convincing arguments of Eliezer why filling the multiverse with our copies is a wrong objective.
Which would be relevant if we were considering copies. We aren't. It's us. Just us.
We are considering giving ourselves a significant chance of being dead. If Sfor's (rather well presented) explanations and accompanying skull imagery are not sufficient to demonstrate that this is a bad thing, it may help to substitute death for, perhaps, a 9/10 quantum determined chance of being given bad arthritis in our right knee. We can expect a 90% of experiencing mild chronic pain after the quantum dice are rolled and a 10% chance of experiencing the more desirable outcome. Then, we can decide whether we prefer being put to death to a sore knee.
The pain is real pain. The death is real death. They don't stop being bad things just because quantum mechanics is confusing.
If many-worlds quantum uncertainty leads you to make different decisions than you would when exposed to other kinds of uncertainty then it is probably far safer to assume quantum collapse. Sure, it may make you look silly and your decision making would be somewhat complicated by the extra complexity in your model. But at least you'll refrain from doing anything stupid.