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Do you accept in theory that, provided MWI is true, one can win a quantum lottery by committing suicide if one does not win? If yes, is that not a similar violation of causality? If no, why not? What's your model of what would happen?
Under MWI, you can win a lottery just by entering it; committing suicide is not necessary. Of course, almost all of you will lose.
All you're doing in quantum lotteries is deciding you really, REALLY don't care about the case where you lose, to the point that you want to not experience those branches at all, to the point that you'd kill yourself if you find yourself stuck in them.
That's the causality involved. You haven't gone out and changed the universe in any way (other than almost certainly killing yourself).
Replace "win a lottery" with "have a subjective probability of ~1 of winning a lottery".
That's wrong. If I found myself stuck in one, I would prefer to live; that's why I need a very strong precommitment, enforced by something I can't turn off.
Here's where we differ; I identify every copy of me as "me", and deny any meaningful sense in which I can talk about which one "I" am before anything has diverged (or, in fact, before I have knowledge that excludes some of me). So there's no sense in which I "might" die, some of me certainly will, and some won't, and the end state of affairs is better given some conditions (like selfishness, no pain on death, and lots of other technicalities).
I mean, younow would prefer to kill youthen.
As for your last paragraph, the framing was from a global point of view, and probability in this case is the deterministic, Quantum-Measure-based sort.
Not really. I prefer to kill my future self only because I anticipate living on in other selves; this can't accurately be described as "you really, REALLY don't care about the case where you lose, to the point that you want to not experience those branches at all, to the point that you'd kill yourself if you find yourself stuck in them."
I do care; what I don't care about is my measure between two measures of the same cardinality. If there was a chance of my being stuck in one world and not living on anywhere else, I wouldn't (now) want to kill myself in that future.
Ok, we sort of agree, then; but then your claim of "You haven't gone out and changed the universe in any way" seems weak. If I can change my subjective probability of experiencing X, and the state of the universe that's not me doesn't factor into my utility except insofar as it affects me, why should I care whether I'm "changing the universe"?
(To clarify the "I care" claim further; I'm basically being paid in one branch to kill myself in another branch. I value that payment more than I disvalue killing myself in the second branch; that does not necessarily mean that I don't value the second branch at all, just less than the reward in branch 1)
Saying that "one can" do something in MWI is misleading because there are many "ones". If you don't commit suicide, there is a "one" who won and other "ones" who lost; if you do commit suicide, there is a "one" who won and the others are dead. Committing suicide doesn't cause you to win because you would have won in one of the branches in either situation.
Well, OP's argument would have many "ones" as well. Every simulated copy of me should count at least as much as it counts in MWI.
I don't have a model which I believe with certainty, and I think it is a mistake to have one, unless you know sufficiently more than modern physics knows.
Why do you think that your consciousness always moves to the branch where you live, but not at random? Quantum lotteries, quantum immortality and the like require not just MWI, but MWI with a bunch of additional assumptions. And if some QM interpretation flavor violates causality, it is more an argument against such an interpretation, than against causality.
The thing I don't like about such way of winning quantum lotteries is that they require non-local physical laws. Imagine that a machine shoots you iff some condition is not fulfilled; you say that you will therefore find yourself in the branch where the condition is fulfilled. But the machine won't kill you instantly, so the choice of branch at time t must be done based on what happens at time t + dt.
Note that I said provided MWI is true.
I think that, given MWI, your consciousness is in any world in which you exist, so that if you kill yourself in the other worlds, you only exist in worlds that you didn't kill yourself. I'm not sure what else could happen; obviously you can't exist in the worlds you're dead in.
I don't see why; MWI doesn't violate locality.
You have a point; my scenario is different from that, but I guess it isn't obvious. So let me restate my quantum suicide lottery in more detail. The general case I imagine is as follows: I go to sleep at time t. My computer checks some quantum data, and compares it to n. If it doesn't equal n, it kills me. Say I die at time t+dt in that case. If I don't die, it wakes me.
So at time t, the data is already determined from the computer's perspective, but not from mine. At t+dt, the data is determined from my perspective, as I've awoken. In the time between t and t+dt, it's meaningless to ask what "branch" I'm in; there's no test I can do to determine that in theory, as I only awaken if I'm in the data=n branch. It's meaningful to other people, but not to me. I don't see anywhere that requires non-local laws in this scenario.
I don't have a model which I believe with certainty even provided MWI is true.
What happens if you die in a non-MWI world? Pretty much the same for the case of MWI with random branch choice. If your random branch happens to be a bad one, you cease to exist, and maybe some of your clones in other branches are still alive.
Non-locality is required if you claim that you (that copy of you which has your consciousness) will always wake up. Otherwise, it's just a twisted version of a Russian roulette and has nothing to do with quants.
At time t, the computer either shoots you, or not. At time t + dt, its bullet kills you (or not). So you say that at time t you will go to the branch where the computer doesn't kill you. But such a choice of a branch requires information at time t + dt (whether you are alive or not in that branch). So, physical laws have to perform a look-ahead in time to decide in which Everett branch they should put your consciousness.
Now, imagine that your (quantum) computer generates a random number n from the Poisson distribution. Then, it will kill you after n days. Now n = ... what? Well, thanks to thermodynamics, your (and computer's) lifespan is limited, so hopefully it will be a finite number -- but, look, if the universe allowed unbounded lifespan, it would be a logical contradiction in physical laws. Anyway, you see that the look-ahead in time required after the random number generation can be arbitrarily large. That's what I mean by non-locality here.
I deny that this is meaningful. If there are two copies of me, both "have my consciousness". I fail to see any sense in which my consciousness must move to only one copy.
I do not claim that. I claim that I exist in both branches, up until one of them no longer contains my consciousness, because I'm dead, and then I only exist in one branch. (In fact, I can consider my sleeping self unconscious, in which case no branches contained my consciousness until I woke up.)
Then many copies of my consciousness will exist, some slowly dying each day.
I don't have any look-ahead required in my model at all.
Can you dissolve consciousness? What test can be performed to see which branch my consciousness has moved to, that doesn't require me to be awake, nor have knowledge of the random data?
OK, now imagine that the computer shows you the number n on it's screen. What will you see? You say that both copies have your consciousness; will you see a superposition of numbers? I don't see how simultaneously being in different branches makes sense from the qualia viewpoint.
Also, let's remove sleeping from the thought experiment. It is an unnecessary complication; by the way, I don't think that consciousness flow is interrupted while sleeping.
And no, I'm currently unable to dissolve the hard problem of consciousness.
No, one copy will see 1, another 2, etc. Something like that will fork my consciousness, which has uncertain effects, which is why I proposed being asleep throughout. Until my brain has any info about what the data is, my consciousness hasn't forked yet. The fact that the info is "out there" in this world is irrelevant; the opposite data is also out there "in this world", as long as I don't know, and both actually exist (although that requirement arguably is also irrelevant to the anthropic math), then I exist in both worlds. In other words, both copies will be "continuations" of me. If one suddenly disappears, then only the other "continues" me.
There's a reason I included it. I'm more confident that the outcome will be good with it than without. In particular, if I'm not sleeping when killed, I expect to experience death.
But the fact that you think it's not interrupted when sleeping suggests we're using different definitions. If it's because of dreaming, then specify that the person isn't dreaming. The main point is that I won't feel pain upon dying (or in fact, won't feel anything before dying), so putting me under general anesthesia and ensuring the death would be before I begin to feel anything should be enough, in that case.
I meant just enough that I could understand what you mean when you claim that consciousness must only go to one path.
I think, the problem with consciousness/qualia discussions is that we don't have a good set of terms to describe such phenomena, while being unable to reduce it to other terms.
I mean, one of the copies would be you (and share your qualia), while others are forks of you. That's because I think that a) your consciousness is preserved by the branching process and b) you don't experience living in different branches, at least after you observed their difference. So, if the quantum lottery works when you're awake, it requres look-ahead in time.
Now about sleeping. My best guess about consciousness is that we are sort-of conscious even while in non-REM sleep phases and under anesthesia; and halting (almost) all electric activity in the brain doesn't preserve consciousness. That's derived from the requirement of continuity of experience, which I find plausible. But that's probably irrelevant to our discussion.
As far as I understand, in your model, one's conscious experience is halted during quantum lottery (i.e. sleep is some kind of a temporary death). And then, his conscious experience continues in one of the survived copies. Is this a correct description of your model?
In my model, all the copies have qualia. Put another way, clearly there's no way for an outside observer to say about any copy that it doesn't have qualia, so the only possible meaning here would be subjective. However, each copy subjectively thinks itself to have qualia. (If you deny either point, please elaborate.) Given those, I don't see any sense that anyone can say that the qualia "only" goes to a single fork, with the others being "other" people.
I agree with a, but I think your consciousness is forked by the branching process. I agree with b, assuming you mean "no one person observes multiple branches after a fork". I don't think those two imply that QL requires look-ahead.
What if I rephrased this in one-world terms? I clone you while you're asleep. I put you in two separate rooms. I take two envelopes, one with a yes on it, the other with a no, and put one in each room. Someone else goes into each room, looks at the envelope, then kills you iff it says yes, and wakes you iff it says no.
Do you think you won't awaken in a room with no in the envelope?
As long as we aren't defining consciousness, I can't really disagree that some plausible definition would make this true.
I don't.
Yes, but I also think conscious experience is halted during regular sleep. Also, should multiple copies survive, his conscious experience will continue in multiple copies. His subjective probability of finding himself as any particular copy depends on the relative weightings (i.e. self-locating uncertainty).
There is no "truth" as to which copy they'll end up in.
I think that I either wake up in a room with no in the envelope, or die, in which case my clone continues to live.
I find this model implausible. Is there any evidence I can update on?