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Jordan comments on MWI, weird quantum experiments and future-directed continuity of conscious experience - Less Wrong
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I agree. I also think this is why Christian stated in his problem setup for Quantum Russian Roulette that the participants are put into a deep sleep before they are potentially killed. If the method of death is quick enough, or if you aren't conscious when it occurs, then you shouldn't be shunted into any alternative world-lines.
No method is quick enough. At any time t some event can prevent someones subjective experience in some very large set of world-lines. But what you can't do is spin a quantum wheel at time t and then kill everyone else at t+1. From the subjective experience of the players either the causal connection between the roulette wheel and the killing mechanism would fail or the killing mechanism would fail. If you got lucky the failure you'd experience would happen early- but chances are you'd experience everything right up until the last possible plank-length of time (or wake up afterward).
Is there a method of killing which, according to quantum probability, either kills someone outright or leaves them relatively undamaged?
I think the real question is whether the chance of being saved damaged is significantly higher than just being damaged without playing the game. For example if you get into a car, you have a relatively high probability to get out damaged. If you get below that threshold, then you don't take any extra risk
Lets say Smith is standing with a gun aimed at his head. The gun is aimed at his head is attached to a quantum coin with a 50% chance of flipping heads. If if flips heads the gun will go off. All this will happen at 8:00.
If we examine the universal wave function at 8:05 we'll find that in about 50% of worlds Smith will be dead(1). Similarly in about 50% of the worlds the gun will have gone off. But those sets of worlds won't overlap. There will be a few worlds where something else kills Smith and a few worlds where the gun doesn't. And if you look at tall the worlds in which Smith has conscious experience at 8:05 the vast majority would be worlds in which Smith is fine. But I don't think that those proportions accurately reflect the probability that Smith will experience being shot and brain damaged because once the gun is fired the worlds in which Smith has been shot and barely survived become the only worlds in which he is conscious. For the purposes of predicting future experience we don't want to be calculating over the entire set of possible worlds. Rather, distribution of outcomes in the worlds in which Smith survives should take on the probability space of of their sibling worlds in which Smith dies. The result is that Smith experiencing brain damage should be assigned almost a 50% probability. This is because once the gun is fired there is a nearly 100% chance that Smith will experience injury since all the worlds in which he doesn't are thrown out of the calculation of his future experiences. (2).
This means that unless the killing method is quantum binary (i.e. you either are fine, or you die) the players of quantum Russian roulette would actually most likely wake up short $50,000 and in serious pain (depending on the method). Even if the method is binary you will probably wake up down $50,000.
(1) I understand that quantum probabilities don't work out to just be the fraction of worlds... if the actual equation changes the thought experiment tell me, but I don't think it should.
(2) My confidence is admittedly low regarding all this.
I don't agree with your calculation.
The probability of winning the money over suffering injuries due to failed execution attempt is P=(1/16)/(1/16+15/16*epsilon) where epsilon is the chance that the excution attempt fails. If epsilon is small, it will get arbitrarily close to 1.
You should not be worried as long as P<Baseline where Baseline is the probability of you having a serious injury due to normal every day risks within let's say an hour.
That is the probability that an observer in any given world would observe someone (Contestant A) win and some other contestant (B) survive. But all of these outcomes are meaningless when calculating the subjective probability of experiencing an injury. If you don't win the only experience you can possibly have is that of being injured.
According to you calculations if a bullet is fired at my head there is only a small chance that I will experience being injured. And you calculations certainly do correctly predict that there is a small chance another observer will observe me being injured. But the entire conceit of quantum immortality is that since I can only experience the worlds in which I am not dead I am assured of living forever since there will always be a world in which I have not died. In other words, for the purposes of predicting future experiences the worlds in which I am not around are ignored. This means if there is a bullet flying toward my head the likelihood is that I will experience being alive and injured is very very high.
How is you calculation consistent with the fact that the probability for survival is always 1?
You experience all those world where you
You have the same in everyday life. You experience all those worlds where you
There is no difference. As long as the ratio of the above two probabilities is bigger than the ratio of the ones below, you don't go into any extra risk of being injured compared to normal every day life.
You agree that the probability of survival is 1 right? My estimation for the probability of experiencing injury given losing and surviving is very high (1-epsilon). There is a small chance the killing mechanism would not do any harm at all but most likely it would cause damage.
It follows from these two things that the probability of experiencing injury given losing the game is equally high (its the same set of worlds since one always experiences survival). The probability of experiencing injury is therefore approximately 1-epsilon (15/16). Actually, since there is also a very tiny possibility of injury for the winner the actual chances of injury are a bit higher. The diminishing possibilities of injury given winning and no injury given losing basically cancel each other out leaving the probability of experiencing injury at 15/16.
Wrong: it is epsilon 15/16.
You are confusing conditional probability with prior probability.
For all readers: If you've read this exchange and have concluded that I'm really confused please up-vote Christian's comment here so I can be sure about needing to correct myself. This has been one of those weird exchanges where I started with low confidence and as I thought about it gained confidence in my answer. So I need outside confirmation that I'm not making any sense before I start updating. Thanks.
Quick death is fine. I just wanted to put up a realistic scenario which is very gentle and minimally scary.
It is more plausible to be able to struck death in a deep sleep without your noticing. If I say, you get struck by a lighting, then your first reaction would have been: "OUCH!".
But if you get sedated by some strong drug then it's sounds much more plausible to be a painless "experience".