On 7 November 2014 23:17, Peter Sas <[email protected]> wrote: > O.K. so here is a question to which there is perhaps an easy answer... > I've been searching the net for an answer, but I can't find one... So > please enlighten me! > > On this forum MWI is probably the most popular interpretation of QM. As > Moravec, Bruno Marchal and Tegmark have argued, WMI implies quantum > immortality. Every event that could cause my death has in the universal > wave function multiple outcomes, which are all realized in different > parallel worlds. In some of these worlds I die; in other worlds I survive. > Subjectively I should feel myself immortal. So far so good... But now my > question is: why aren't there any immortals (or at least absurdly old > people) in our world? >
Because the size of the multiverse is mind-bogglingly huge, and the chances of someone surviving to be 100,200,300 etc are very very close to zero. I don't know what the actual chances are, in the sense of the number of branches you would need in order for one of them to contain a person who lived to be, say, 200, but I suspect that it's a lot higher than 100 billion (roughly the number of people who have ever lived). It's probably something ridiculously huge like an Avogadro of branches. Say it's 10 to the 26 for the ssake of argument. Then the chances are, even given all the people who've lived, that we'd still never find a Methuselah in our particular branch - the chances are still around 1 in 10 to the 15 of finding a Methuselah. Throw in all the animals too, and aliens, and there might be one ... perhaps ... given that I probably grossly underestimated the real number of branches required .... but even if we found it, it would almost certainly die in the next few seconds, because the chances of survival continue to drop (but never quite reach zero). So we might find a 1000 year old man who would die immediately (if we were incredibly lucky). To put it another way, David Deutsch reckons that there are "Harry Potter universes" in which magic appear to work through the fact that random events conspire to make it appear so. This means basically the 2nd law of thermodynamics has failed in such universes, repeatedly, and the chances of THAT are ludicrously small, say one in 10 to the 50000 for repeated failures long enough to make people believe magic works reliably. The chances the NEXT spell will work is perhaps one in 10 to the 10000. So HPUs cease to exist at a ridiculously high rate, but there are always some, somewhere, in an infinite multiverse... but the chances of us being in one, or seeing any such effect, ever, is incredibly small. We have hardly any chance of seeing *one* such event (thermodynamic reversal) in our entire universe during its entire lifetime. So if you consider that quantum immortality involves a breakdown of the 2nd law to some extent you can see the chances are against any quantum immortal existing in our particular universe anywhere on any planet at any time, and if one did, it would only last for a few seconds! -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
