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akvadrako comments on The Philosophical Implications of Quantum Information Theory - Less Wrong Discussion
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Yes, that's the point. Every future version of you will of course call themselves "you".
Although I don't want to advocate performing the roulette experiment, I do disagree. If it's a quantum certainty that all future branches of you die off, perhaps due to a conservation law, then only those versions of you which didn't go down that branch will be conscious.
Even if it isn't certain, because it seems like we are more likely to experience the branches that match our classical explanations in the following scenario after a few minutes I would expect to be version 3. Version 1 is of course impossible and only with a very short-sighted definition of self do I need to consider version 2.
Yeah. I meant that I don't find the roulette scenario very relevant since I believe that we're much more likely to experience some other scenario where this property of the quantum multiverse becomes relevant, like the terminal illness one I described. Most of us won't play the roulette.
Anyways, there's a flaw in lisper's original argument: death is not unavoidable even after wrists have been slit.
Oh, come on. Surely you do not dispute that there are ways of dying that are both unavoidable and non-instantaneous. What difference does it make what the details are?
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.
I think we agree but I was trying to make a bigger point than your reply captures. I doubt that you will even experience the terminal illness assuming there are many more possible futures where you stay healthy and anti-aging science advances than ones where you are miraculously saved at the last minute, by aliens or luck.
That makes the roulette scenario relevant to our experience. Because if you have the conviction to pull the trigger if something doesn't go your way you have the three options I laid out. So most likely you don't even have to try - assuming you are sure you will.