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 d...
Imagine that the universe is approximately as it appears to be (I know, this is a controversial proposition, but bear with me!). Further imagine that the many worlds interpretation of Quantum mechanics is true (I'm really moving out of Less Wrong's comfort zone here, aren't I?).
Now assume that our universe is in a situation of false vacuum - the universe is not in its lowest energy configuration. Somewhere, at some point, our universe may tunnel into true vacuum, resulting in a expanding bubble of destruction that will eat the entire universe at high speed, destroying all matter and life. In many worlds, such a collapse need not be terminal: life could go one on a branch of lower measure. In fact, anthropically, life will go on somewhere, no matter how unstable the false vacuum is.
So now assume that the false vacuum we're in is highly unstable - the measure of the branch in which our universe survives goes down by a factor of a trillion every second. We only exist because we're in the branch of measure a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of... all the way back to the Big Bang.
None of these assumptions make any difference to what we'd expect to see observationally: only a good enough theory can say that they're right or wrong. You may notice that this setup transforms the whole universe into a quantum suicide situation.
The question is, how do you go about maximising expected utility in this situation? I can think of a few different approaches: