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erratio comments on Help: Is there a quick and dirty way to explain quantum immortality? - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: erratio 20 October 2010 03:00AM

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Comment author: erratio 20 October 2010 10:52:42AM 3 points [-]

Maybe your argument doesn't hold any water, and so difficult to profess.

It's entirely possible. I don't claim a complete understanding of MWI and its implications yet. But my current understanding is useful for my purposes, so I'm ok to stick with it.

What did you try to explain about "quantum immortality"

One of the weirder implications of MWI that I've read here is that quantum immortality implies that it's literally impossible for me to die. Which means that if I was to attempt to kill myself the outcome would be large numbers of universes in which I hurt everyone I care about by killing myself, while from my perspective it wouldn't have succeeded and I would then have to live with the fallout from a failed attempt. I'm not sure how much I believe that this would actually happen but as a form of Pascal's Wager for suicide it's extremely effective at making me not want to test it.

Comment author: Baughn 22 October 2010 08:56:40PM 1 point [-]

You seem to be identifying yourself with only those beings like you that exist in universes like this one. I don't think that's necessarily valid, and removing the requirement adds more interesting options.

Let's say you exist in distribution of laws of physics, not just locations in this one. Then, attempting to kill yourself could change that distribution for those of you that survive.. in particular, it could vastly increase the measure of those extremely complex worlds that care about intelligent life.

For reasons that have been thoroughly explained previously, this would not necessarily be a good thing..

Another way to put it, then: If quantum immortality holds, even for non-quantum deaths, then there's a good chance that "death" really means "having your soul eaten by cthulhu", even if cthulhu has to invent it first. Fun stuff.