It seems to me that discussions of quantum immortality often founder on the
fact that people don't make their assumptions about philosophy of mind
explicit, or don't have a well-thought-out position on metaphysical issues
relating to mind in the first place. For example, Jaques, are you assuming a
purely physicalist metaphysics where the only truths are physical truths, or
are you open to the idea that there might be truths about subjectivity (such as
truths about what philosophers call 'qualia') which cannot be reduced to purely
physical statements? Are you familiar with the ideas of philosopher David
Chalmers, who takes the latter position? He doesn't advocate interactive
dualism, where there's some kind of soul-stuff that can influence matter--he
assumes that the physical world is "causally closed", so all physical events
have purely physical causes, including all human behavior--but he argues that
first-person subjective states and qualia are ontologically distinct from the
brainstates that are associated with them, and that there may be some set of
"psychophysical laws" which determine the relation between
third-person-describable brainstates and first-person mental states. If one
buys into the possibility of objective truths about mental states/qualia and
psychophysical laws, it wouldn't be such a stretch to imagine that there may be
objective truths about the first-person probabilities of experiencing different
branches in either the MWI or duplication experiments in a single universe (so
that you don't have to rely on decision theory, which depends on non-objective
choices about which future possibilities you 'care' about, to discuss quantum
immortality), and that these probabilities could be determined by some
combination of an objective physical measure on different brainstates and some
set of "psychophysical laws". If so, the question of quantum immortality would
boil down to whether a given mind always has a 100% chance of experiencing a
"next" observer-moment as long as a "next" brainstate exists somewhere, or
whether there is some nonzero chance of one's flow of experience just
ending.Jesse
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