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qmotus comments on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory - Less Wrong
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can just ignore the angelic being thing if it bothers you too much. Even so, I'd argue that at least in almost every slit-wrists scenario, there is a non-zero probability of being rescued by modern medicine. But do not that I'm not saying that the angelic being will in fact appear somewhere! That one would follow from quantum mechanics being a complete theory and MWI (or QIT) being a correct interpretation, both of which are surely debatable (and even then it would only happen in a very small minority of all worlds).
I wonder where you would draw the line with falsifiability though. For example, according to quantum mechanics there is a non-zero probability (and this one I'm quite certain about) that when you perform a double-slit experiment, all the photons will hit the detector in just the right way to give results that agree with the world being classical. Is this claim falsifiable? I guess not, but it's still true.
So, replace slit wrists with standing in the center of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 around 8:15 looking up at the sky.
In the usual way: is it possible to observe an empirical result which will either prove of disprove the claim in question?
In your example it is possible to observe the classical result from the double-slit experiment, so I don't know why you think it's not falsifiable.
All right, that's more difficult. So are you sure that there's no way, miraculous or non-miraculous, to keep existing in that situation?
You would have to run the experiment very many times to see the classical result even once. In practice it's not possible to test it. And what if my claim is not true - how would you show that?
Your default assumption regarding the classical result in a double-slit experiment seems to be that it is actually allowed by the formalism of quantum mechanics. So why does your default assumption seems to be that the formalism of quantum mechanics says that the angel thing is impossible?
Divine intervention can solve ALL problems.
That is not my assumption and QM says nothing about angelic beings. My problem is that deux ex machina, in the form of an angel or not, is the answer to absolutely everything and so is useless.
As to why the "angel thing" is unlikely, let me introduce you to Bertrand Russel. You see, he had a teapot...