On 9/12/2019 9:49 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:41 PM Stathis Papaioannou
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 09:38, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via
Everything List <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 9/10/2019 4:30 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> Another argument that has been given here before
is that if quantum
> immortality is true, then we should expect to
see a number of people
> who are considerably older than the normal life
expectancy -- and we
> do not see people who are two or three hundred
years old. Even if the
> probabilities are very low, there have been an
awful lot of people
> born within the last 500 or so years -- some
must have survived on our
> branch if this scenario is true.
My argument was that each of us should find
ourselves to be much older
than even the oldest people we know.
That is probably the best single argument against
quantum immortality: if QI is true, then the measure
of our lifetime after one reaches a normal lifetime is
infinitely greater than the measure before age , say,
120 yr. So if one finds oneself younger than 120
years, QI is false, and if MWI is still considered to
be true, there must be another argument why MWI does
not imply QI.
Why do you think that measure only increases with age? On
an objective level it only decreases.
As Bruno would say, "you confuse the 1p with the 1pp." I am
talking about my personal measure of the number of years I
have lived. As I get older, the number of years I have lived
increases. If I live to 1000, I have lived more years between
100 and 1000 than between 1 and 100. This is arithmetic, after
all.
But this discussion has gone off the rails. It started as a
discussion of quantum immortality, and the arguments against
this notion, even in MWI. The arguments against QI that have
been advanced are that life-threatening events tend not to be
binary or quantum, but rather we enter a period of slow
decline, due to illness or other factors. Consequently, there
is no reason for us to expect to be immortal, even in MWI. The
other argument is that if QI is true, then you would expect to
be very old. This argument was advanced by Mallah (arXiv:
0905.0187) and has not been satisfactorily rebutted.
It is not simple arithmetic if you live to be very old that most
of your measure is in your older years if you take into account
all the copies. Suppose there are 10^100 copies of you under 100
years old and then all but one copy dies, but that one copy goes
on to live to 1000. If you did not know how old you were and you
had to guess given this information, then you would guess with
near certainty that you were under 100 years old. However, you
would also know with certainty that you would live to 1000, and
you would not notice anything weird happening as you approached
your 100th birthday.
The trouble with this argument is that you know that at least one copy
of you will survive past 100 years (or past any age, for that matter).
Given that you survive, the probability of survival is one. Taking
account of all the other copies who die does not alter this fact. If
you are all your copies, then your probability of survival under the
assumption of QI is always one.
Your RSSA assumption is effectively a dualist model -- there is only
one soul that makes you really you, and that soul goes at random into
one and only one copy at any time. Then the chances that this
soul-containing copy is the one that survives, does indeed decrease
rapidly with age. But that is the wrong way to look at it -- there is
no 'soul' that makes a copy you. On the MWI assumptions, every copy is
'you', so since at least one copy always survives, 'you' will always
survive. The number of years you survive past age 100 is indefinitely
large, so you spend more time in those years, and you have probability
one of getting there.
As I understand it the theory is that all these 'you's' on all the
branches are potentially the you-of-here-and-now. So the probability
that you-of-here-and-now sees your self as much older than others
depends on the measure of intervals along all the branches. So the
question then turns, as Telmo said, whether this branching structure
wide or deep. QI is the theory that it is infinitely deep. Could it
also be infinitely wide? I don't think so, but in Bruno's theory it
could be both. The question seems to come down to whether one is
"copied" by quantum level events that are amplified to the level of
consciousness (which is quasi-classical) very frequently (continuously?)
or rarely.
Brent
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