qmotus comments on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory - Less Wrong

5 Post author: lisper 26 February 2016 02:00AM

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Comment author: qmotus 08 March 2016 09:12:47AM 0 points [-]

(This comment is a reply to another branch of this discussion as well.)

Yes, God will be able to see that there is a you that survived the process and went on to live the life of Riley. But whether or not you will be able to see that is a very open question

I disagree. To keep things simple, let's suppose that the bullet, if it hits, really will kill the participant with practically 100% certainty and will do so practically immediately (I'll come to this a bit later). In that case the only outcome the participant can expect to experience, and that they will experience with certainty, is that the gun didn't fire. This is exactly what happens if you take the mortal's-eye-view; God, as you mentioned, will notice that elsewhere in the multiverse, the participant did get hit. Now, whether the participant cares about their loved ones or the copies that die in the attempt is a matter of preferences, but if we're simply talking about which outcome to experience, this is how it goes, I think.

Note that playing quantum roulette successfully depends crucially on the speed with which you can kill yourself. Trying to play by slitting your wrists, for example, doesn't work because once you see that your wrists are slit you can't roll that back. So the success of the enterprise depends entirely on killing yourself fast enough that you don't become aware of your imminent and (in the relevant branches of the multiverse) unavoidable death. How fast is fast enough? Well, that is (literally!) the sixty-four-million-dollar question. Unless you have an answer that you are very confident is the correct one, it seems to me like an imprudent risk to take.

With this I agree, which is why I think the quantum Russian roulette or quantum suicide scenarios are mostly interesting as a thought experiment, as they're intended to be. But there are practical situations that are somewhat analogous: think, for example, about a terminally ill patient who faces an almost certain death within several days. Should they expect to survive or continue to experience things, and if so, in what way? My understanding is that according to quantum mechanics, there are all kinds of weird scenarios with non-zero probability that make "survival" possible, such as simply surviving one more day indefinitely despite all odds, being miraculously cured, or maybe being resurrected by a hyper-advanced future civilization in a simulation. Note that, in principle, this probably applies to any possible life-and-death situation.

I used the word "experience" a number of times there, which brings me to a point you made in another comment:

Notice (!) that when you start to talk about "noticing" things you are tacitly bringing consciousness into the discussion, which is a whole 'nuther can o' philosophical worms.

I don't think this can of worms is that bad. We have a pretty good grasp of what it means to be conscious, even if we can't define it exactly; and also we're (at least I am) pretty confident that it's a purely physical phenomenon with nothing supernatural and thus subject to the laws of QM. I think that's enough. Where it does get a bit problematic is when we're talking about scenarios like the one with the terminally ill patient; presumably there's also a possibility that the patient's consciousness degrades until it no longer makes sense to call them conscious, since there's probably no clear line anywhere separating conscious and non-conscious in this way. (This might also imply that if we should expect to die, we should expect to do so by very slow decay, like patients with Alzheimer's, which doesn't sound too good to me.)

Comment author: lisper 08 March 2016 04:50:18PM 0 points [-]

I agree with most of what you say. Consciousness is not supernatural. But it is still problematic because:

the only outcome the participant can expect to experience, and that they will experience with certainty

"Only outcome you can experience" is not quite the same thing as "Will experience with certainty." Let's go back to the case where you survive in both branches. The outcome you do experience is the only outcome that you can experience. The trick is that this is really two statements disguised as one. After the event there are two you's, you1 and you2. The outcome that you1 do experience is the only outcome you1 can experience, and the outcome you2 do experience is the only outcome you2 can experience. This remains true (I believe) even if one of those experiences is the null experience of having your consciousness enter the cosmic void.

Reasonable people could disagree, I suppose. We can never know what the null experience "feels like" because by definition it doesn't feel like anything. Personally, I find even the possibility that this argument could be correct to be sufficient reason for me to avoid playing quantum roulette. But everyone needs to choose their own risk posture.

Comment author: qmotus 08 March 2016 05:58:20PM 0 points [-]

It was two statements: "only outcome the participant can expect to experience" because I think that no, it is not possible to experience a null experience; and "will experience with certainty" because I believe quantum mechanics, when interpreted literally, means that the experience will exist.

As I said, I don't find the Russian roulette a particularly interesting scenario in reality, nor something that I would like to try myself; it's because I think this applies to other life-and-death situations as well that I think the basic question is important.

Comment author: akvadrako 08 March 2016 09:56:55AM *  0 points [-]

In that case the only outcome the participant can expect to experience, and that they will experience with certainty, is that the gun didn't fire

Yes, that's the point. Every future version of you will of course call themselves "you".

Note that playing quantum roulette successfully depends crucially on the speed with which you can kill yourself. With this I agree, which is why I think the quantum Russian roulette or quantum suicide scenarios are mostly interesting as a thought experiment, as they're intended to be.

Although I don't want to advocate performing the roulette experiment, I do disagree. If it's a quantum certainty that all future branches of you die off, perhaps due to a conservation law, then only those versions of you which didn't go down that branch will be conscious.

Even if it isn't certain, because it seems like we are more likely to experience the branches that match our classical explanations in the following scenario after a few minutes I would expect to be version 3. Version 1 is of course impossible and only with a very short-sighted definition of self do I need to consider version 2.

  1. fire the gun and die (0%)
  2. fire the gun and be miraculously saved (1%)
  3. don't even attempt the experiment (99%)
Comment author: qmotus 08 March 2016 10:25:59AM 0 points [-]

Yeah. I meant that I don't find the roulette scenario very relevant since I believe that we're much more likely to experience some other scenario where this property of the quantum multiverse becomes relevant, like the terminal illness one I described. Most of us won't play the roulette.

Anyways, there's a flaw in lisper's original argument: death is not unavoidable even after wrists have been slit.

Comment author: lisper 08 March 2016 04:31:34PM 1 point [-]

Oh, come on. Surely you do not dispute that there are ways of dying that are both unavoidable and non-instantaneous. What difference does it make what the details are?

Comment author: qmotus 08 March 2016 05:54:55PM *  0 points [-]

If I decide to open my wrists, there are many ways that I can still keep going: I may simply faint and wake up in a hospital, the paramedics having arrived just in time despite all odds; quantum fluctuations may spawn a hitherto unkown angelic being who heals me; or a highly advanced future civilization may decide to run an afterlife simulation for 21st century earthlings that I end up in. As far as I know, these are all scenarios with a non-zero probability according to quantum mechanics and that this is in principle generalizable to any other life-and-death situation, although I have to admit that my understanding of QM is somewhat fuzzy. Feel free to correct me.

Comment author: Lumifer 08 March 2016 06:56:41PM 1 point [-]

quantum fluctuations may spawn a hitherto unkown angelic being who heals me

Quantum fluctuations may also spawn the ghost of Karl Popper who will wag his finger at you and remind you that unfalsifiable statements aren't terribly useful.

Comment author: qmotus 13 March 2016 10:34:57AM 0 points [-]

Heh, I would definitely like to see that.

That said, I do believe that what I said is true if we assume that quantum mechanics is a complete theory, and pretty much all evidence so far points towards it. It's a fairly common idea among physicists nowadays, actually, that not every single prediction needs to be falsifiable. David Deutsch has also mentioned that most fiction or something arbitrarily close to it is probably real in some part of the quantum multiverse.

Comment author: Lumifer 14 March 2016 02:34:47PM 0 points [-]

Once you start to invoke "hitherto unknown angelic beings" and give up on falsifiablity you are basically in a religious dispute and I don't see much advantages to this new religion over the existing traditional ones.

Comment author: qmotus 14 March 2016 09:32:24PM *  0 points [-]

The point was to illustrate that there can be ways to survive a seemingly inevitably fatal situation that are extremely unlikely but still have a non-zero probability of occurring and that, therefore, will happen in some Everett branches (assuming MWI is true). Being rescued by an angel is probably one of the least likely ways for somebody to survive after slicing their wrists, so I would bet on simply waking up in a hospital instead.

I don't think claims like that need to be empirically falsified. Quantum mechanics is falsifiable, and so far it's withstood every test. I suppose you could try to prove that survival probability in some case or in some way is zero by math alone, but I don't think that's true.

Comment author: Lumifer 15 March 2016 02:38:50PM 0 points [-]

to illustrate that there can be ways to survive

Well, from my point of view an unfalsifiable illustration doesn't really illustrate anything. "There could be a god and she could save me" is a fully generic answer to absolutely anything.

Comment author: akvadrako 08 March 2016 11:28:07AM 0 points [-]

I think we agree but I was trying to make a bigger point than your reply captures. I doubt that you will even experience the terminal illness assuming there are many more possible futures where you stay healthy and anti-aging science advances than ones where you are miraculously saved at the last minute, by aliens or luck.

That makes the roulette scenario relevant to our experience. Because if you have the conviction to pull the trigger if something doesn't go your way you have the three options I laid out. So most likely you don't even have to try - assuming you are sure you will.