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Laszlo comments on timeless quantum immortality - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (52)
(Rather than start with the main point I'll follow your responses and conclude)
1 - word definitions. This was one of those that was not wrong, but unclear.
2 - another point that was kind of sketchy-looking. It wasn't directly wrong, but it looked overly simplified. You'll see why in a few points.
A better limit would be not more than 2 to the power of that. Hilbert space is very, very large.
3 - this seems to be going out of order.
Regular old Quantum Immortality takes as an axiom that you cannot experience death. If you could, then the whole thing falls to pieces.
As for the universe putting you in a safe place, well then, you are fortunate. How does this argument apply to people who die? Did they not have subjective experiences? What makes them different from you?
4 - the heart of the matter
This is seriously, majorly wrong, and the reason I complained about point 2. Your brain decoheres a zillion times per second. Your consciousness is far, far, far into the classical regime.
Observing does not cause collapse. Events which cause the wavefunction to split into dynamically separate parts do, and those happen at the same rate in a system regardless of how you cut it.
Depends on how you formulate it, doesn't it? Anyway, arguing against regular QI does not argue for your variant.
That doesn't look like immortality to me. It looks like you dying eventually. You look at the history of your lifeline and it peters out, little by little, sometimes more at once than other times. Those decreases? Those are dying. The only way QI works is if you ignore the parts that died, and the only justification I've seen for doing that is by locking your viewpoint to your subjective experience. That's what allows you to discard any cases where you don't survive. If you're looking from a distance, you see a whole lot of dead you-s out there.
I believe the argument goes that they, too, are immortal... from their own perspective. Your consciousness traces its worldline, taking branches where you stay alive, and theirs does the same, but picking worlds where they stay alive. In other words, you can see them die, and they can see you die, but the consciousness, the qualia of the person who's supposedly dying is not there; it's gone down a different worldline.
I think that the theory is cute and quite seductive, but quite clearly wrong. The problem is, for example, brain damage: does quantum immortality allow you to experience Phineas Gage-type brain damage, or doesn't it?
Also, I've been blackout drunk in college, and if quantum immortality is a thing, it's not clear why my consciousness didn't trace a path through the universes where I wasn't blackout drunk. It was, after all, a loss of self, even if it was only temporary. The arguments QI uses for keeping you alive could be used equally easily to prove that you cannot become blackout drunk.
That was my point. The above QI argument broke that by going timeless and universal.