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Lumifer comments on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory - Less Wrong
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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...
Maybe you misunderstand my point. I'm not proposing the angel thing as an answer to anything. I'd rather say that I'm trying to present a problem, actually.
Unfortunately, I don't understand the math of QM enough to make a convincing argument here. But basically my logic is this: the probability that instead of an angel, a disembodied brain will materialize in front of me is apparently non-zero according to our current knowledge, since the Boltzmann brain paradox is something that is taken seriously by physicists. I don't see any fundamental difference between this and a blonde guy dressed in white with wings (perhaps made of cardboard) who's very skilled at treating slit wrists materializing instead, so I assume that also has a small but non-zero probability. (Also, the probability that I would survive a nuclear explosion by tunneling to a safe distance is non-zero, I believe, by the same logic that the probability of me tunneling to the room next door is non-zero, which I've also heard physicists say.)
Now, the possible existence of Boltzmann brains is actually generally considered a problem, but scientists who work on that problem, as far as I know, usually don't deny that our current understanding of physics says that Boltzmann brains are a real thing; instead, they think that it either shows a flaw in the theories that predict them, or that our understanding of those theories is incomplete in some way (Sean Carroll has written about this). I don't know, but I suppose it's also possible that the world simply really is a weird place.
You are basically arguing that "the probability of X is non-zero for all X". That is true (or unfalsifiable) in the same sense that solipsism is true (or unfalsifiable). No one can prove to you that it ain't so, but it's an entirely uninteresting and useless position to hold.
It's not non-zero for all X. If I claim that "according to QM, there's a non-zero probability two entangled particles have the same spin", one could just produce the math necessary to show that this claim is false. Likewise, if my claim about QM saying that the probability of an angel appearing is non-zero, I'm sure it's possible to do that (it might be difficult, though). The same with those Boltzmann brains, but physicists seem to think that their probability really is non-zero. Solipsism, on the other hand, is completely immune to such attacks.
The important thing here is really whether what I'm claiming follows from the math of quantum mechanics or not. Physicists don't try to falsify every single prediction that quantum mechanics makes, because they already think there's enough evidence (well, most do) that the theory is correct. There obviously is no such evidence for solipsism.