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mwengler comments on timeless quantum immortality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Thanks for the criticism.
summary: If, hypothetically, I tried to catch a terminal-velocity bowling ball with my face, your theory says I would experience the bowling ball doing nonfatal damage and then stopping just before killing me, and my theory says I would experience changing my mind and getting out of the way of the bowling ball. It looks like our key disagreement is whether Quantum Immortality only operates over short timescales. You say it only acts in an instant, and I say it acts over long time intervals as well.
longer argument: I'm not convinced by your argument yet. Specifically:
1) I agree that two worlds may be very similar or very different or many places in between. However, my consciousness observes exactly one world at once. Do we have a disagreement about reality, or only about word definitions?
2) I agree that splitting events produce massive numbers of worlds (I have no idea how many, but I'm guessing no more than the volume of the Universe divided by the cube of the Planck length). Does this invalidate my argument (that I'll live forever without appearing to get lucky)?
3) I agree that the likelihoods are a sum over various paths whose magnitude ranges from approximately 1 to approximately 0. I also agree with your intuition that if I ended up in a situation with a high-velocity bowling ball partially inside my head then my survival paths are much much less likely than my death paths. However, my argument is that Quantum Immortality works backward in time, if that makes sense. For example, consider all the ways I can walk through a bowling alley -- a 10-minute-long time interval. Quantum Immortality means I will not experience death during that 10 minutes. Looking at all of the different worlds in which I don't die in the bowling alley, it's most probable I'll find myself in one where I walk safely and nothing weird happens, and really really improbable that I'll throw a bowling ball straight up in the air and then try to catch it with my face and then have the bowling ball spontaneously lose its momentum right before impact. This looks like where we disagree. This is clearer in your next point...
4) I'm kept off of those doomed states by Quantum Immortality. I disagree with you here, and I'll make two arguments why...
4a) My conscious experience already averages over large lengths of time relative to quantum processes. The brain runs at about 10Hz. In the time it takes for one neuron to fire, many many quantum processes have time to happen. Since my consciousness only collapses the universal wavefunction once every 1/10th second, I see no problem with looking at the problem as if my consciousness only collapses the universal wavefunction once every 10 minutes, or once every lifetime.
4b) When I look at the real world, it looks like I'm kept away from doomed states. Why was I so ridiculously lucky as to be born in the current era, where human immortality is a possibility for the first time in history? Timeless Quantum Immortality provides an answer: because it's more probable that I'll live forever from the World I experience now, than it would be for me to live forever from most other worlds. Being born an ancient Sumerian or a dolphin would require many more improbable events to get me to immortality. Being born in a post-Singularity culture where immortality already exists would require a more complicated Universe. My existence looks like it's one of the most likely ones of the set of all possible Universes in which I don't die.
4c) I go to sleep (lose consciousness) and wake up again. QI seems to predict that I would never fall asleep, because I stop observing when I'm asleep and so I couldn't observe that instant. Timeless QI has no problem with me falling asleep and then observing I'm alive and awake hours later.
5) QI is all about the timeless perspective because it requires looking at worlds splitting into other worlds from a perspective outside of time. I'm just doing what regular QI is already doing, just on a longer timescale.
So from the perspective of a you that I can talk to after the near miss with the bowling ball, your description makes sense. But it also makes sense to me. We are both in the universe where you changed your mind before the bowling ball hit you and you got out of the way.
But from the perspective of me in the world where you got hit by the bowling ball and died in pain, your consciousness did whatever consciousnesses do when people die. Presumably it felt the fear when it noticed he inevitability, felt the impact and then the pain, and then stopped working as the neurons in the brain stopped working, some from immediate injury, others more slowly form loss of viable environment.
The worlds in which people die exist. I am in a world where billions, of people have died. A small number I have seen die with my own eyes, a larger number I have seen soon after they died, a much larger number I know of by reliable report.
This immortality you speak of: if there are identical twins and a the age of 5 they are crossing the street and one is hit by a bus,has not some individual died? If you live in a world with MWI, and at the age of 5 for one conscious version of you the universe splits, and in one of those branches EVERY new universe generated ends in your death at a finite age at least 20 years later, while in the other branch there are some branches where you go on forever, than have there not been at least one conscious version of you which will last 20 or more years, but not infinitely, that will die?
This idea that your consciousness jumps from the dying world to somehow mystically join with the version of you in a different world is anti-intuitive at best, and non-scientific or religious at worst. Nothing else jumps between worlds once they have split, why would consciousness? There is already a consciousness in the world you want to jump to with different experiences than yours as you face your last seconds of life, how is there room for your consciousness to pop on over to the other universe to escape death?
Your theory strikes me as the opposite of timeless. Your theory seems to come down to, if I ask my 10,000 year old self about the worlds, I am always going to get an answer in which I lived at least 10,000 years. But if you ask your 20 year old self about the world, then almost all the answers you get are going to be about worlds in which you live less than 100 years, I say that based on the observation that the people other tyan you that you see, way over 99% of them are dying before age 100.
A QI belief in infinite life seems indistinguishable from any other regligious belief in infinite life, at least in regards to conformity with evidence, logical plausibility, and some amount of wishful thinking.
I don't know if anyone else is conscious, but if they are, and they die in my branch of reality, then in my theory they experience a branch of reality in which they continue living.
I agree it's pretty similar. I have to accept the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation, and it's a short hop from that to full-on theism.