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OrphanWilde comments on False vacuum: the universe playing quantum suicide - Less Wrong
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Comments (49)
Your response implicitly rejects quantum immortality/quantum suicide. My comment is predicated on an assumption of these things.
No it doesn't.
Yes it does. Quantum immortality, for example, is a semi-ideological statement of belief that you -can't- get personally entangled with your death; whatever information you have to believe you're dying will simply turn out to be false, no matter how improbable.
Right, so measuring it no matter how far in advance will always show that the world-destroying event won't happen. It doesn't matter when you entangle with it.
(Or at least that's the version that all your surviving versions will end up remembering)
What measure have the doomed, then?
I mean, imagine building such a detector, and seeing your oncoming doom. I'm not sure how much reassurance the thought that other copies of you who didn't see their doom will continue on would provide you; they're not you, you're the you stuck in a doomed universe. In two months, you will simply cease to be. You can't even warn the other you's to shut down their machine; not only do you know you are doomed, you know that countless other you's will be trapped in the same dilemma.
Yeah but doesn't this expose an inconsistency in your view of quantum suicide? At least there's some really counterintuitive things if you look at it that way - like, that you should refuse to acquire some data, or that if faced with "doom in ten months or doom now" you would prefer the "doom now" - I think any theory that acts so at odds with the rest of reason has to be doing something wrong.
Personally, I simply expect to never find myself in the situation where my doom is inevitable, and it's paid off so far.
If I find myself in the doomed branch, I'll say "yes this sucks for me, but I am merely a negligible fraction of the future that past-me was responsible for, so I still maintain that his decision was the right one".