subject:"Re\: quantum immortality"

> On 13 Sep 2019, at 22:57, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 9/13/2019 3:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>> On 11 Sep 2019, at 16:51, smitra  wrote:
>>> 
>>> Back to basics. There exists a universal wavefunction that evolves 
>>> according to the Schrodinger equation. Observers are internal structures in 
>>> this description. Whether or not one believes that the Born rule can be 
>>> derived or not, what matters in practice is that you'll end up having to 
>>> use it, so you have to assign a measure for observations that is given by 
>>> the summation of the squared modulus of the states that correspond to those 
>>> observations. The information about personal identity must then also be 
>>> extracted from the wavefunction, so one cannot insert this in an ad hoc way.
>>> 
>>> Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the states 
>>> that correspond to extremely old observers is small.
>> 
>> The same reasoning would apply to “quantum suicide”, where it is clear that 
>> we survive all the time; given that we cannot take into account the world 
>> where we do not.
>> 
>> If in H you are multiplied in W and M, but directly killed in M, you survive 
>> in W with probability one. That is why we add p or <>t to []p to transform 
>> the logic of belief ([]p) into a probability logic ([]p & <>t).
> 
> Suppose you live a few seconds in M.  Do you then survive in W with 
> probability 0.5?

Assuming you do die in M, even after some years, the probability in H to be 
feeling the one in W will be one, assuming you never dies in W. But this 
assumes mortality, and some transitivity of the probability rules, so the  
question is very complex. The probability in H to be W or M, for a short time,  
is one half, but the probability to be in the place where you stay for a long 
time, will be close to one in a sort of retrospective way. 

All this comes from a simple fact: absolute-death is not a first person 
experience. There is no entry in the first person diary which mention “I died 
today”.

The difficulty is that the first person renormalise the probabilities all the 
time, and that is why making them transitive leads to paradoxes.

Let me try to illustrate. You are in H, just before the WM-duplication. You are 
told in advance that in W you will get a cup of tea, and then be killed. In W 
you get a cup of coffee, and not killed. What is the probability (in H) that 
you will get a cup of tea. It is 1/2. But what is the probability, in H, that 
you will have a long lasting memory of having drink a cup of coffee after that 
experiments: It is 1. In fact, in Moscow, you could (although it is 
psychologically very difficult) still bet that “you” will have a memory of 
having doing coffee, and just an amnesia of M and its cup of tea. This also 
gives some sense that we survive more in our kids and in the value we transmit 
to them, than in bodies and personal first person happening. 

Now, that renormalisation process is not easy, a bit like in QFT, we get 
infinities which are hard to subtract. 

Bruno

> 
> Brent
> 
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Re: Quantum immortality


> On 13 Sep 2019, at 22:28, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 9/13/2019 10:59 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 6:38 PM Bruce Kellett > > wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch > > wrote:
>> On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett > > wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>> mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> I see.  This reasoning works only under the assumption that finding yourself 
>> in any particular year across your infinite lifespan is equiprobable (i.e. 
>> you can ignore the effects of the number or measure of the various yous in 
>> other branches).  This is what I thought you mean by measure, in terms of 
>> how to calculate probabilities / weights of the various branches.
>>  
>> 
>> 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.
>> 
>> I don't see how that last sentence follows.  It is true MWI doesn't 
>> guarantee we should expect to always survive in the same condition, but it 
>> does guarantee we should survive in some form.
> 
> But what does "we" refer to. Are you saying Jason, with the memories he has 
> at this moment, will always have a successor in the future.   Or are you 
> saying there'll always be a Jason that shares my childhood memories or my 
> memories of last year when that lightning bolt just missed me.
> 
>>  
>> The other argument is that if QI is true, then you would expect to be very 
>> old.
>> 
>> We only know we are very old if our memories accumulate without limit, but 
>> MWI does not guarantee persistence of memory.  It also follows from this 
>> that to know one is immortal (has lived an infinite number of years) 
>> requires an infinitely large brain and memory capacity.
> 
> I don't have to remember everything that happened over 80yrs to know I'm 
> 80yrs old.  In fact I only need to remember my birthday.


And memory is fallible, and memory of age has no more meaning when your age is 
bigger that the nameable or describable number, which happens very soon, 
relatively, for the immortal being trying to keep track of their birthday. 

Immortality is when you are to old to be able to even name your age. After 
that, you have always the same age.

Mortality is an illusion enjoyed by the gods when tired of eternity. It is very 
long 

Bruno


What, you ask, was the beginning of it all?

And it is this ...
Existence that multiplied itself
For sheer delight of being
And plunged into numberless trillions of forms
So that it might
Find 
Itself
Innumerably (Shri Aurobindo)


> 
> Brent
> 
>>  
>>  
>> This argument was advanced by Mallah (arXiv: 0905.0187) and has not been 
>> satisfactorily rebutted.
>> 
>> Mallah used to contribute to this list.  You can review some of his past 
>> discussions in the archives which debate this very point: 
>> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/everything-list/Mallah%7Csort:date
>>  
>>

Re: Quantum immortality


> On 13 Sep 2019, at 22:17, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 9/13/2019 4:18 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Le ven. 13 sept. 2019 à 13:16, Bruce Kellett > > a écrit :
>> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 8:49 PM Bruno Marchal > > wrote:
>> On 12 Sep 2019, at 01:50, Bruce Kellett > > wrote:
>>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 1:55 AM Bruno Marchal >> > wrote:
>>> On 11 Sep 2019, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett >> > wrote:
 From: Bruno Marchal mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
>> On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett > > wrote:
>> 
>> If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum 
>> immortality, then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has 
>> been shown many times to be a complete nonsense.
> 
> Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.
 Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide.
 
>>> That is not what I mean by a  reference.
>>> 
>>> I later gave a reference to the paper by Mallah -- whom you know of, 
>>> apparently. The paper is available at
>>> 
>>> https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0187 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Yes, the oldest participant in this list have know Jacques Mallah, who 
>> participated a lot in this list.
>> 
>> Mallah is wrong here:
>> 
>> <<
>> Max Tegmark publicized the QS idea, but in some ways he is more of a 
>> moderate on the issue than most of its believers are. If he were to follow 
>> in the footsteps of Don Page and alter his views, recanting belief in QS, it 
>> would be a great help in exposing the belief as a fallacy, and I hold out 
>> hope that it is possible that he will do so.
>> 
>> In his paper [Tegmark 1] QS is explained as follows:
>> 
>> “Since there is exactly one observer having perceptions both before and 
>> after the trigger event, and since it occurred too fast to notice, the MWI 
>> prediction is that” (the experimenter) “will hear “click” with 100% 
>> certainty.”
>> 
>> That is a rather odd statement because he is certainly aware that in the MWI 
>> there is no sense in which it can be rightfully said that “there is exactly 
>> one observer” either before
>> 
>> 
>> or after the experiment. The ket notation may be unhelpful here; indeed, if 
>> the tensor product of kets on the left hand side were expanded instead of 
>> factoring out the observer, there would appear to have been “two observers” 
>> initially.
>> >>
>> 
>> I don't get Mallah's point here, either. I will have to look more clearly at 
>> his argument against QS. I don't think that case is a clear-cut as for QI. 
>> The fact that I am not the oldest person around is clear evidence against QI.
>> 
>> It's wrong, that imply you can nerver have been young.
> 
> And I am young, therefore quantum immortality is wrong.  But exactly where is 
> it wrong. There seem to be two different ideas of quantum immortality.  In 
> one verison, the everything-happens version, is that whatever your state 
> there is a physically possible way for you to survive...like invoking Bruno's 
> magic cosmic rays that just happen to trigger the right nerves for the brain 
> damaged student to ace her test. 


Just to be clear, nobody believes in such magic cosmic rays. They have a 
probability zero in all histories, and I used them only to illustrate a point 
(indeed, they are replaced by the movie projection at the following step).

The computationalist immortality does not rely on such magic. To be sure.




> In this version, no matter your age or circumstance, there will be a 'you' 
> that remembers your age and circumstance indefinitely far into the future.  
> 
> The other version says that almost all Everettian 'copies' of your future 
> will die but there's a non-zero probability of one still existing at any 
> future time.  So then the relative measure of your future self depends on the 
> ratio of copies that haven't died to those that have.  This implicitly 
> assumes that whatever event that causes you to die does not also cause a 
> surviving copy to be created (i.e. it's not a Tegmark machine gun). 

I don’t see the difference. In all cases, when old and sick, surviving is like 
a white rabbit. The immortality comes only from the fact that no matter how the 
probability of surviving is small, from “your" first person view, death is not 
an experience, and “you” are always there. But you can become amnesiac, and the 
question of immortality without any amnesia is very different from more general 
form of immortality.

There is no absolute personal identity. It is a relative indexical, useful for 
short and middle term planning, but full technological immortality with no 
amnesia does not make much sense. To forget might be the most key element in 
the ability to become conscious or borrow the arithmetical

Re: Quantum immortality

> On 13 Sep 2019, at 13:53, John Clark  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 2:14 AM Quentin Anciaux  > wrote:
> 
> > Wel if by "dualist soul" you mean something immaterial about our 
> > consciousness (like I don't know information) can be duplicated then yes it 
> > is dualist and any computational theory of mind is dualist in this sense 
> > then.
> 
> Yes I agree completely. I'm a dualist but there is nothing mystical about 
> that, I just believe that nouns and adjectives refer to different things, 
> nouns refer to physical objects and adjectives refer to nouns. 

A noun refers to any object (that a mind can conceive).

With mechanism, you are not identical with your atoms configurations, which 
change all the time already, and even more when each morning you change of body 
(which makes sense in the Mechanism frame).

But you keep your noun in the process, and indeed, with Mechanism you are the 
owner of your body, but you are not identical with your body.

But you are right: if you believe in mind and matter you are a dualist. The 
problem is how you relate the mind and the body.

If ten very different computers (physical or not) emulate your current brain 
process, you will have ten bodies, and your mind will not be related to “only 
one” of them. Your consciousness is not localised, and eventually the idea of 
locality of consciousness is a mind construct (again, assuming Mechanism all 
along).

> 
> > I suppose you would say that if someone believe "he" can be copied and 
> > uploaded in a virtual environment then he is a dualist 
> 
> I agree again. A standard dictionary will say Information is a noun but I 
> think that demonstrates an inconsistency in human language because adjectives 
> describe nouns and so does information. In the case of uploads information 
> describes the way generic atoms are arranged, and this time I agree with the 
> dictionary, atoms are nouns. Arrange atoms one way and they're me, arrange 
> those exact same atoms another way and they're you.

Atoms are not really nouns, but atoms can have nouns, but then numbers have 
noun too. To say that noun applied only to physical material token necessity 
the belief in some primary substance, which does not work with digital 
mechanism.

Bruno

> 
>  John K Clark
> 
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Re: Quantum immortality

On Sat, 14 Sep 2019 at 14:30, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 9/13/2019 3:12 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sat, 14 Sep 2019 at 06:38, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 9/12/2019 11:59 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 13 Sep 2019 at 14:49, Bruce Kellett 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> ...
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> I would not call it dualism. There are many copies, but I am one and only
>> one copy. I do not assume there is a “soul”, just a process that can
>> reflect and say “hey, it’s me”. I don’t know which copy I am and it doesn’t
>> matter. What matters, because it defines survival, is that there be an
>> entity in the future that identifies as being me and remembers being me.
>> Effectively, since I am a process rather than a persisting physical object,
>> I die with every passing moment, and it is only the existence of such
>> entities that identify as being me and remember being me that creates the
>> illusion of survival. I die if no such entities exist anywhere or any time.
>>
>>
>> If the Stahis-here-and-now dies, then no entities remember being
>> Stahis-here-and-now, but there may be ones that remember being
>> Stahis-yesterday.
>>
>
> If I have an episode of amnesia, then effectively that version of me dies,
> while the version of me prior to the period of amnesia survives.
>
>
> According to MWI there are different versions of you who have survived
> consciousness changing events yesterday, last week, last year,
>

But they are not the continuation of my present self. If I have a drug like
midazolam, I will have amnesia for an hour or two, and if I am aware that
this will happen it will be equivalent to anticipating my death.
-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List




On 9/13/2019 3:25 PM, Jason Resch wrote:



On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 3:28 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:


...
I don't have to remember everything that happened over 80yrs to
know I'm 80yrs old.  In fact I only need to remember my birthday.


To know your birthday requires log(n) bits, which goes to infinity as 
n goes to infinity.


Fortunately, 30 July 1939 doesn't got to infinity.  It stays the same.

Without an ever expanding memory, you are limited to experiencing at 
most M^2 states, where M is your memory capacity in bits.  If M is 
finite, then infinite years don't matter, you will begin to revisit 
previous states.


That 2^M.

By that kind of reasoning the universe will revisit previous states and 
there's no meaning to "immortality".  But there's still obvious meaning 
to living a 10,000yrs vs 100yrs.


Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

On 9/13/2019 3:12 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Sat, 14 Sep 2019 at 06:38, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
> wrote:

On 9/12/2019 11:59 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Fri, 13 Sep 2019 at 14:49, Bruce Kellett
mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:

...

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.

I would not call it dualism. There are many copies, but I am one
and only one copy. I do not assume there is a “soul”, just a
process that can reflect and say “hey, it’s me”. I don’t know
which copy I am and it doesn’t matter. What matters, because it
defines survival, is that there be an entity in the future that
identifies as being me and remembers being me. Effectively, since
I am a process rather than a persisting physical object, I die
with every passing moment, and it is only the existence of such
entities that identify as being me and remember being me that
creates the illusion of survival. I die if no such entities exist
anywhere or any time.

If the Stahis-here-and-now dies, then no entities remember being
Stahis-here-and-now, but there may be ones that remember being
Stahis-yesterday.

If I have an episode of amnesia, then effectively that version of me
dies, while the version of me prior to the period of amnesia survives.

According to MWI there are different versions of you who have survived
consciousness changing events yesterday, last week, last year, ...

Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Friday, September 13, 2019, Bruce Kellett  wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 14, 2019 at 8:25 AM Jason Resch  wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 3:28 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>> everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't have to remember everything that happened over 80yrs to know I'm
>>> 80yrs old.  In fact I only need to remember my birthday.
>>>
>>>
>> To know your birthday requires log(n) bits, which goes to infinity as n
>> goes to infinity.
>>
>
> Rubbish. I just have to look at my birth certificate!
>

But you would be unable to calculate (or contemplate) your age.


>
>
>>  Without an ever expanding memory, you are limited to experiencing at
>> most M^2 states, where M is your memory capacity in bits.  If M is finite,
>> then infinite years don't matter, you will begin to revisit previous states.
>>
>
> That assume that in order to survive you have to remember everything that
> ever happened to you. And that is such obvious nonsense that it doesn't
> merit a rebuttal.
>
>
You misunderstand. This has nothing to do with remembering everything, it
speaks to the finite number of possible experiences a finite mind can have.

Jason

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread smitra

On 13-09-2019 22:23, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List wrote:

On 9/13/2019 10:12 AM, smitra wrote:

On 11-09-2019 19:41, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 00:51, smitra wrote:

Back to basics. There exists a universal wavefunction that evolves
according to the Schrodinger equation. Observers are internal
structures
in this description. Whether or not one believes that the Born rule
can
be derived or not, what matters in practice is that you'll end up
having
to use it, so you have to assign a measure for observations that is
given by the summation of the squared modulus of the states that
correspond to those observations. The information about personal
identity must then also be extracted from the wavefunction, so one
cannot insert this in an ad hoc way.

Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the
states
that correspond to extremely old observers is small.

This means that if you don’t know if you are young or very old and
have to guess, you are more likely to be right if you guess that you
are young. But it does not mean that you won’t inevitably become
very old.--

Indeed, there is always going to be a very small probability of
finding yourself in a very atypical situation. In the MWI we would
need to take into account all possible relevant processes here, and
forgetting about some fact and learning about that again will tend to
replace extremely atypical information from he memory and replace that
by more typical information.

So if I forget about that accident in 1987 my collar bone won't have
been broken and it will be straight again?

There exists a copy of you who didn't had that accident. But he may have
suffered some other accident.

In the MWI the so-called stability of records of measurements is not
valid in an absolute sense. It's only valid in each branch, but you
can hop from one to another branch such that all your memories are
swapped with those of your copy. So, if I find myself to be a trillion
years old and I go top sleep then I'll most likely wake up as a copy
that has that information about me being a trillion years old replaced
by a more reasonable lower number.

If that happened how would you know? You'd be finding yourself where
you were...which is just a tautology.

That's right, so this doesn't provide for a test for the MWI. But when
we assume the validity of the MWI we must take into account this effect
which effectively erases freak events.

This also means that even if you win the lottery and become a multi
millionaire, you'll very likely end up forgetting this and finding
yourself to not having won the lottery.

Which is to say you'd not win.

Indeed, you won't find yourself in the sector where you've won.

Saibal

Re: Quantum immortality

On Sat, Sep 14, 2019 at 8:25 AM Jason Resch  wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 3:28 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't have to remember everything that happened over 80yrs to know I'm
>> 80yrs old.  In fact I only need to remember my birthday.
>>
>>
> To know your birthday requires log(n) bits, which goes to infinity as n
> goes to infinity.
>

Rubbish. I just have to look at my birth certificate!


>  Without an ever expanding memory, you are limited to experiencing at most
> M^2 states, where M is your memory capacity in bits.  If M is finite, then
> infinite years don't matter, you will begin to revisit previous states.
>

That assume that in order to survive you have to remember everything that
ever happened to you. And that is such obvious nonsense that it doesn't
merit a rebuttal.

Bruce

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 5:25 PM Jason Resch  wrote:

>
> Without an ever expanding memory, you are limited to experiencing at most
> M^2 states, where M is your memory capacity in bits.  If M is finite, then
> infinite years don't matter, you will begin to revisit previous states.
>
>
Correction: the above should be 2^M states.

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 3:28 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 9/13/2019 10:59 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 6:38 PM Bruce Kellett 
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch  wrote:
>>
>>> On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
 everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.
>>
>
> I see.  This reasoning works only under the assumption that finding
> yourself in any particular year across your infinite lifespan is
> equiprobable (i.e. you can ignore the effects of the number or measure of
> the various yous in other branches).  This is what I thought you mean by
> measure, in terms of how to calculate probabilities / weights of the
> various branches.
>
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I don't see how that last sentence follows.  It is true MWI doesn't
> guarantee we should expect to always survive in the same condition, but it
> does guarantee we should survive in some form.
>
>
> But what does "we" refer to. Are you saying Jason, with the memories he
> has at this moment, will always have a successor in the future.   Or are
> you saying there'll always be a Jason that shares my childhood memories or
> my memories of last year when that lightning bolt just missed me.
>

It depends on your definition of personal identity. I think in this case,
all of them might work.  There is both bodily/physical and
mental/psychological continuity under MWI.
There will always exist someone remembering my current state as their
previous state, and there is physical/bodily continuity, or viewed from the
other direction, with the mind as a program, there is always some branch
that realizes a consistent extension of that computation.


>
>
>
>> The other argument is that if QI is true, then you would expect to be
>> very old.
>>
>
> We only know we are very old if our memories accumulate without limit, but
> MWI does not guarantee persistence of memory.  It also follows from this
> that to know one is immortal (has lived an infinite number of years)
> requires an infinitely large brain and memory capacity.
>
>
> I don't have to remember everything that happened over 80yrs to know I'm
> 80yrs old.  In fact I only need to remember my birthday.
>
>
To know your birthday requires log(n) bits, which goes to infinity as n
goes to infinity.  Without an ever expanding memory, you are limited to
experiencing at most M^2 states, where M is your memory capacity in bits.
If M is finite, then infinite years don't matter, you will begin to revisit
previous states.

Jason

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Sat, 14 Sep 2019 at 06:38, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 9/12/2019 11:59 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
>
> On Fri, 13 Sep 2019 at 14:49, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>
>> ...
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I would not call it dualism. There are many copies, but I am one and only
> one copy. I do not assume there is a “soul”, just a process that can
> reflect and say “hey, it’s me”. I don’t know which copy I am and it doesn’t
> matter. What matters, because it defines survival, is that there be an
> entity in the future that identifies as being me and remembers being me.
> Effectively, since I am a process rather than a persisting physical object,
> I die with every passing moment, and it is only the existence of such
> entities that identify as being me and remember being me that creates the
> illusion of survival. I die if no such entities exist anywhere or any time.
>
>
> If the Stahis-here-and-now dies, then no entities remember being
> Stahis-here-and-now, but there may be ones that remember being
> Stahis-yesterday.
>

If I have an episode of amnesia, then effectively that version of me dies,
while the version of me prior to the period of amnesia survives.

> --
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Sat, 14 Sep 2019 at 03:12, smitra  wrote:

> On 11-09-2019 19:41, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> > On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 00:51, smitra  wrote:
> >
> >> Back to basics. There exists a universal wavefunction that evolves
> >> according to the Schrodinger equation. Observers are internal
> >> structures
> >> in this description. Whether or not one believes that the Born rule
> >> can
> >> be derived or not, what matters in practice is that you'll end up
> >> having
> >> to use it, so you have to assign a measure for observations that is
> >> given by the summation of the squared modulus of the states that
> >> correspond to those observations. The information about personal
> >> identity must then also be extracted from the wavefunction, so one
> >> cannot insert this in an ad hoc way.
> >>
> >> Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the
> >> states
> >> that correspond to extremely old observers is small.
> >
> > This means that if you don’t know if you are young or very old and
> > have to guess, you are more likely to be right if you guess that you
> > are young. But it does not mean that you won’t inevitably become
> > very old.--
>
>
> Indeed, there is always going to be a very small probability of finding
> yourself in a very atypical situation. In the MWI we would need to take
> into account all possible relevant processes here, and forgetting about
> some fact and learning about that again will tend to replace extremely
> atypical information from he memory and replace that by more typical
> information.
>
> In the MWI the so-called stability of records of measurements is not
> valid in an absolute sense. It's only valid in each branch, but you can
> hop from one to another branch such that all your memories are swapped
> with those of your copy. So, if I find myself to be a trillion years old
> and I go top sleep then I'll most likely wake up as a copy that has that
> information about me being a trillion years old replaced by a more
> reasonable lower number.
>
> This also means that even if you win the lottery and become a multi
> millionaire, you'll very likely end up forgetting this and finding
> yourself to not having won the lottery.


I only survive because I remember the person I was. If a branch I find
myself in is a dead end then that version of me dies. So if I find myself
being a trillion years old and a trillion year old plus a day copy does not
exist, or exists but forgets he is me, then the trillion year old copy
dies. But if such a copy does exist with an intact memory, then the
trillion year copy survives in this copy. It is not an option that I switch
from a trillion year old copy to a younger copy with greater measure, any
more than it is an option that I will tomorrow wake up Chinese, because
there are more Chinese than Australians.

> --
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

On 9/13/2019 3:38 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 11 Sep 2019, at 16:51, smitra wrote:

Back to basics. There exists a universal wavefunction that evolves according to
the Schrodinger equation. Observers are internal structures in this
description. Whether or not one believes that the Born rule can be derived or
not, what matters in practice is that you'll end up having to use it, so you
have to assign a measure for observations that is given by the summation of the
squared modulus of the states that correspond to those observations. The
information about personal identity must then also be extracted from the
wavefunction, so one cannot insert this in an ad hoc way.

Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the states that
correspond to extremely old observers is small.

The same reasoning would apply to “quantum suicide”, where it is clear that we
survive all the time; given that we cannot take into account the world where we
do not.

Suppose you live a few seconds in M. Do you then survive in W with
probability 0.5?

Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

On 9/12/2019 11:59 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Fri, 13 Sep 2019 at 14:49, Bruce Kellett > wrote:

...

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.

I would not call it dualism. There are many copies, but I am one and
only one copy. I do not assume there is a “soul”, just a process that
can reflect and say “hey, it’s me”. I don’t know which copy I am and
it doesn’t matter. What matters, because it defines survival, is that
there be an entity in the future that identifies as being me and
remembers being me. Effectively, since I am a process rather than a
persisting physical object, I die with every passing moment, and it is
only the existence of such entities that identify as being me and
remember being me that creates the illusion of survival. I die if no
such entities exist anywhere or any time.

If the Stahis-here-and-now dies, then no entities remember being
Stahis-here-and-now, but there may be ones that remember being
Stahis-yesterday.

Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

On 9/13/2019 10:59 AM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 6:38 PM Bruce Kellett > wrote:

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch mailto:jasonre...@gmail.com>> wrote:

On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett
mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via
Everything List mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 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.

I see. This reasoning works only under the assumption that finding
yourself in any particular year across your infinite lifespan is
equiprobable (i.e. you can ignore the effects of the number or measure
of the various yous in other branches). This is what I thought you
mean by measure, in terms of how to calculate probabilities / weights
of the various branches.

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.

I don't see how that last sentence follows. It is true MWI doesn't
guarantee we should expect to always survive in the same condition,
but it does guarantee we should survive in some form.

But what does "we" refer to. Are you saying Jason, with the memories he
has at this moment, will always have a successor in the future. Or are
you saying there'll always be a Jason that shares my childhood memories
or my memories of last year when that lightning bolt just missed me.

The other argument is that if QI is true, then you would expect to
be very old.

We only know we are very old if our memories accumulate without limit,
but MWI does not guarantee persistence of memory. It also follows
from this that to know one is immortal (has lived an infinite number
of years) requires an infinitely large brain and memory capacity.

I don't have to remember everything that happened over 80yrs to know I'm
80yrs old. In fact I only need to remember my birthday.

Brent

This argument was advanced by Mallah (arXiv: 0905.0187) and has
not been satisfactorily rebutted.

Mallah used to contribute to this list. You can review some of his
past discussions in the archives which debate this very point:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/everything-list/Mallah%7Csort:date (some
now 20 years old)

Jason
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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

On 9/13/2019 10:12 AM, smitra wrote:

On 11-09-2019 19:41, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 00:51, smitra wrote:

Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the
states
that correspond to extremely old observers is small.

So if I forget about that accident in 1987 my collar bone won't have
been broken and it will be straight again?

If that happened how would you know? You'd be finding yourself where
you were...which is just a tautology.

This also means that even if you win the lottery and become a multi
millionaire, you'll very likely end up forgetting this and finding
yourself to not having won the lottery.

Which is to say you'd not win.

Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List




On 9/13/2019 4:18 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:



Le ven. 13 sept. 2019 à 13:16, Bruce Kellett > a écrit :


On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 8:49 PM Bruno Marchal mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:

On 12 Sep 2019, at 01:50, Bruce Kellett mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 1:55 AM Bruno Marchal
mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:

On 11 Sep 2019, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett
mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:

From: *Bruno Marchal* mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>

On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett
mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>>
wrote:

If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is
quantum immortality, then many worlds is indeed dead.
Quantum immortality has been shown many times to be a
complete nonsense.


Really. I did not known that. Could you give the
references.


Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide.


That is not what I mean by a  reference.


I later gave a reference to the paper by Mallah -- whom you
know of, apparently. The paper is available at

https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0187





Yes, the oldest participant in this list have know Jacques
Mallah, who participated a lot in this list.

Mallah is wrong here:

<<
Max Tegmark publicized the QS idea, but in some ways he is
more of a moderate on the issue than most of its believers
are. If he were to follow in the footsteps of Don Page
and alter his views, recanting belief in QS, it would be a
great help in exposing the belief as a fallacy, and I hold out
hope that it is possible that he will do so.

In his paper [Tegmark 1] QS is explained as follows:

“Since there is exactly one observer having perceptions both
before and after the trigger event, and since it occurred too
fast to notice, the MWI prediction is that” (the experimenter)
“will hear “click” with 100% certainty.”

That is a rather odd statement because he is certainly aware
that in the MWI there is no sense in which it can be
rightfully said that “there is exactly one observer” either before

page13image25488
or after the experiment. The ket notation may be unhelpful
here; indeed, if the tensor product of kets on the left hand
side were expanded instead of factoring out the
observer, there would appear to have been “two observers”
initially.
>>


I don't get Mallah's point here, either. I will have to look more
clearly at his argument against QS. I don't think that case is a
clear-cut as for QI. The fact that I am not the oldest person
around is clear evidence against QI.


It's wrong, that imply you can nerver have been young.


And I am young, therefore quantum immortality is wrong.  But exactly 
where is it wrong. There seem to be two different ideas of quantum 
immortality.  In one verison, the everything-happens version, is that 
whatever your state there is a physically possible way for you to 
survive...like invoking Bruno's magic cosmic rays that just happen to 
trigger the right nerves for the brain damaged student to ace her test.  
In this version, no matter your age or circumstance, there will be a 
'you' that remembers your age and circumstance indefinitely far into the 
future.


The other version says that almost all Everettian 'copies' of your 
future will die but there's a non-zero probability of one still existing 
at any future time.  So then the relative measure of your future self 
depends on the ratio of copies that haven't died to those that have.  
This implicitly assumes that whatever event that causes you to die does 
not also cause a surviving copy to be created (i.e. it's not a Tegmark 
machine gun).


Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 6:38 PM Bruce Kellett  wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch  wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>>> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.
>

I see.  This reasoning works only under the assumption that finding
yourself in any particular year across your infinite lifespan is
equiprobable (i.e. you can ignore the effects of the number or measure of
the various yous in other branches).  This is what I thought you mean by
measure, in terms of how to calculate probabilities / weights of the
various branches.


>
> 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.
>

I don't see how that last sentence follows.  It is true MWI doesn't
guarantee we should expect to always survive in the same condition, but it
does guarantee we should survive in some form.


> The other argument is that if QI is true, then you would expect to be very
> old.
>

We only know we are very old if our memories accumulate without limit, but
MWI does not guarantee persistence of memory.  It also follows from this
that to know one is immortal (has lived an infinite number of years)
requires an infinitely large brain and memory capacity.


> This argument was advanced by Mallah (arXiv: 0905.0187) and has not been
> satisfactorily rebutted.
>

Mallah used to contribute to this list.  You can review some of his past
discussions in the archives which debate this very point:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/everything-list/Mallah%7Csort:date
(some
now 20 years old)

Jason

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread smitra

On 11-09-2019 19:41, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 00:51, smitra wrote:

Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the
states
that correspond to extremely old observers is small.

Indeed, there is always going to be a very small probability of finding
yourself in a very atypical situation. In the MWI we would need to take
into account all possible relevant processes here, and forgetting about
some fact and learning about that again will tend to replace extremely
atypical information from he memory and replace that by more typical
information.

In the MWI the so-called stability of records of measurements is not
valid in an absolute sense. It's only valid in each branch, but you can
hop from one to another branch such that all your memories are swapped
with those of your copy. So, if I find myself to be a trillion years old
and I go top sleep then I'll most likely wake up as a copy that has that
information about me being a trillion years old replaced by a more
reasonable lower number.

This also means that even if you win the lottery and become a multi
millionaire, you'll very likely end up forgetting this and finding
yourself to not having won the lottery.

Saibal

Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread John Clark

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 2:14 AM Quentin Anciaux  wrote:

> *Wel if by "dualist soul" you mean something immaterial about our
> consciousness (like I don't know information) can be duplicated then yes it
> is dualist and any computational theory of mind is dualist in this sense
> then.*

Yes I agree completely. I'm a dualist but there is nothing mystical about
that, I just believe that nouns and adjectives refer to different things,
nouns refer to physical objects and adjectives refer to nouns.

> *I suppose you would say that if someone believe "he" can be copied and
> uploaded in a virtual environment then he is a dualist *

I agree again. A standard dictionary will say Information is a noun but I
think that demonstrates an inconsistency in human language because adjectives
describe nouns and so does information. In the case of uploads information
describes the way generic atoms are arranged, and this time I agree with
the dictionary, atoms are nouns. Arrange atoms one way and they're me,
arrange those exact same atoms another way and they're you.

 John K Clark

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread Quentin Anciaux

Le ven. 13 sept. 2019 à 13:21, Bruce Kellett  a
écrit :

> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 9:18 PM Quentin Anciaux 
> wrote:
>
>> Le ven. 13 sept. 2019 à 13:16, Bruce Kellett  a
>> écrit :
>>
>>>
>>> I don't get Mallah's point here, either. I will have to look more
>>> clearly at his argument against QS. I don't think that case is a clear-cut
>>> as for QI. The fact that I am not the oldest person around is clear
>>> evidence against QI.
>>>
>>
>> It's wrong, that imply you can nerver have been young.
>>
>
> That does not follow.
>
> It does, because if it does the fact you're not the oldest person means
nothing, because *every year* before being old you had the possibilité to
make the same observation and as it's mandatory to lives those before being
old, you can't conclude what you do.


> Bruce
>
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> 
> .
>


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Re: Quantum immortality

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 9:18 PM Quentin Anciaux  wrote:

> Le ven. 13 sept. 2019 à 13:16, Bruce Kellett  a
> écrit :
>
>>
>> I don't get Mallah's point here, either. I will have to look more clearly
>> at his argument against QS. I don't think that case is a clear-cut as for
>> QI. The fact that I am not the oldest person around is clear evidence
>> against QI.
>>
>
> It's wrong, that imply you can nerver have been young.
>

That does not follow.

Bruce

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread Quentin Anciaux

Le ven. 13 sept. 2019 à 13:16, Bruce Kellett  a
écrit :

> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 8:49 PM Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>
>> On 12 Sep 2019, at 01:50, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 1:55 AM Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>>
>>> On 11 Sep 2019, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett 
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> From: Bruno Marchal 
>>>
>>> On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>>>
>>> If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum
>>> immortality, then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been
>>> shown many times to be a complete nonsense.
>>>
>>>
>>> Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.
>>>
>>> Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide.
>>>
>>> That is not what I mean by a  reference.
>>>
>>
>> I later gave a reference to the paper by Mallah -- whom you know of,
>> apparently. The paper is available at
>>
>> https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0187
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, the oldest participant in this list have know Jacques Mallah, who
>> participated a lot in this list.
>>
>> Mallah is wrong here:
>>
>> <<
>> Max Tegmark publicized the QS idea, but in some ways he is more of a
>> moderate on the issue than most of its believers are. If he were to follow
>> in the footsteps of Don Page and alter his views, recanting belief in QS,
>> it would be a great help in exposing the belief as a fallacy, and I hold
>> out hope that it is possible that he will do so.
>>
>> In his paper [Tegmark 1] QS is explained as follows:
>>
>> “Since there is exactly one observer having perceptions both before and
>> after the trigger event, and since it occurred too fast to notice, the MWI
>> prediction is that” (the experimenter) “will hear “click” with 100%
>> certainty.”
>>
>> That is a rather odd statement because he is certainly aware that in the
>> MWI there is no sense in which it can be rightfully said that “there is
>> exactly one observer” either before
>>
>> [image: page13image25488]
>> or after the experiment. The ket notation may be unhelpful here; indeed,
>> if the tensor product of kets on the left hand side were expanded instead
>> of factoring out the observer, there would appear to have been “two
>> observers” initially.
>> >>
>>
>
> I don't get Mallah's point here, either. I will have to look more clearly
> at his argument against QS. I don't think that case is a clear-cut as for
> QI. The fact that I am not the oldest person around is clear evidence
> against QI.
>

It's wrong, that imply you can nerver have been young.


>
> Bruce
>
> Two different brains doing the same computation gives only one subjective
>> first person.
>>
>> Bruno
>>
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> 
> .
>


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Re: Quantum immortality

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 8:49 PM Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> On 12 Sep 2019, at 01:50, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 1:55 AM Bruno Marchal  wrote:
>
>> On 11 Sep 2019, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett 
>> wrote:
>>
>> From: Bruno Marchal 
>>
>> On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>>
>> If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum
>> immortality, then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been
>> shown many times to be a complete nonsense.
>>
>>
>> Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.
>>
>> Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide.
>>
>> That is not what I mean by a  reference.
>>
>
> I later gave a reference to the paper by Mallah -- whom you know of,
> apparently. The paper is available at
>
> https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0187
>
>
>
>
> Yes, the oldest participant in this list have know Jacques Mallah, who
> participated a lot in this list.
>
> Mallah is wrong here:
>
> <<
> Max Tegmark publicized the QS idea, but in some ways he is more of a
> moderate on the issue than most of its believers are. If he were to follow
> in the footsteps of Don Page and alter his views, recanting belief in QS,
> it would be a great help in exposing the belief as a fallacy, and I hold
> out hope that it is possible that he will do so.
>
> In his paper [Tegmark 1] QS is explained as follows:
>
> “Since there is exactly one observer having perceptions both before and
> after the trigger event, and since it occurred too fast to notice, the MWI
> prediction is that” (the experimenter) “will hear “click” with 100%
> certainty.”
>
> That is a rather odd statement because he is certainly aware that in the
> MWI there is no sense in which it can be rightfully said that “there is
> exactly one observer” either before
>
> [image: page13image25488]
> or after the experiment. The ket notation may be unhelpful here; indeed,
> if the tensor product of kets on the left hand side were expanded instead
> of factoring out the observer, there would appear to have been “two
> observers” initially.
> >>
>

I don't get Mallah's point here, either. I will have to look more clearly
at his argument against QS. I don't think that case is a clear-cut as for
QI. The fact that I am not the oldest person around is clear evidence
against QI.

Bruce

Two different brains doing the same computation gives only one subjective
> first person.
>
> Bruno
>

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread Bruno Marchal


> On 12 Sep 2019, at 01:50, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 1:55 AM Bruno Marchal  > wrote:
> On 11 Sep 2019, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett  > wrote:
>> From: Bruno Marchal mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
 On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett >>> > wrote:
 
 If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum immortality, 
 then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been shown many 
 times to be a complete nonsense.
>>> 
>>> Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.
>> Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide.
>> 
> That is not what I mean by a  reference.
> 
> I later gave a reference to the paper by Mallah -- whom you know of, 
> apparently. The paper is available at
> 
> https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0187 
> 
> 


Yes, the oldest participant in this list have know Jacques Mallah, who 
participated a lot in this list.

Mallah is wrong here:

<<
Max Tegmark publicized the QS idea, but in some ways he is more of a moderate 
on the issue than most of its believers are. If he were to follow in the 
footsteps of Don Page and alter his views, recanting belief in QS, it would be 
a great help in exposing the belief as a fallacy, and I hold out hope that it 
is possible that he will do so.

In his paper [Tegmark 1] QS is explained as follows:

“Since there is exactly one observer having perceptions both before and after 
the trigger event, and since it occurred too fast to notice, the MWI prediction 
is that” (the experimenter) “will hear “click” with 100% certainty.”

That is a rather odd statement because he is certainly aware that in the MWI 
there is no sense in which it can be rightfully said that “there is exactly one 
observer” either before


or after the experiment. The ket notation may be unhelpful here; indeed, if the 
tensor product of kets on the left hand side were expanded instead of factoring 
out the observer, there would appear to have been “two observers” initially.
>>

Two different brains doing the same computation gives only one subjective first 
person.

Bruno




> 
> [.]
> 
>  
>> None of this has anything to do with wave-packet reduction, so you can rest 
>> easy.
>> 
> 
> You lost me here. With the wave reduction, there is just no quantum 
> immortality at all, nor even quantum suicide. I guess I mess something.
> 
> The argument was that QI makes no sense, even in a many-worlds setting.
>  
> The only “reasonable” critics was the one done by Jacques Mallah on this 
> list, which claims that if QI or MI is correct, we should expect to be very 
> old. But Quentin answered this validly: we expect in all situation to be just 
> a bit older than where we remember coming from, and the paradox comes from a 
> confusing between relative and absolute self-sampling on the states or 
> histories.
> 
> The trouble with this is that neither ASSA and RSSA is a law of nature. As I 
> have said, from the 1p perspective, I live more years between 100 and 1000 
> than between 1 and 100. So I expect to be very old. What we remember is 
> actually irrelevant -- we can always check our birth certificate if we forget 
> how old we are. In other words, we can use external sources to refresh 
> memories. What we personally remember at any instant is variable and 
> unreliable. Check against external references.
>  
> Typically, also, old and young are not absolute concept.
> 
> No, they are concepts relative to actual life span -- you are always at your 
> youngest when you are born, and at your oldest just before you die.
> 
> With mechanism or quantum mechanics without collapse, we can say that we are 
> always young.
> 
> Another good reason for abandoning mechanism.
> 
> Bruce 
> 
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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread Bruno Marchal



> On 11 Sep 2019, at 16:51, smitra  wrote:
> 
> Back to basics. There exists a universal wavefunction that evolves according 
> to the Schrodinger equation. Observers are internal structures in this 
> description. Whether or not one believes that the Born rule can be derived or 
> not, what matters in practice is that you'll end up having to use it, so you 
> have to assign a measure for observations that is given by the summation of 
> the squared modulus of the states that correspond to those observations. The 
> information about personal identity must then also be extracted from the 
> wavefunction, so one cannot insert this in an ad hoc way.
> 
> Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the states that 
> correspond to extremely old observers is small.


The same reasoning would apply to “quantum suicide”, where it is clear that we 
survive all the time; given that we cannot take into account the world where we 
do not.

If in H you are multiplied in W and M, but directly killed in M, you survive in 
W with probability one. That is why we add p or <>t to []p to transform the 
logic of belief ([]p) into a probability logic ([]p & <>t).

Bruno




> 
> 
> Saibal
> 
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Re: Quantum immortality

On Fri, 13 Sep 2019 at 14:49, Bruce Kellett  wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:41 PM Stathis Papaioannou 
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 09:38, Bruce Kellett 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett 
 wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.
>

I would not call it dualism. There are many copies, but I am one and only
one copy. I do not assume there is a “soul”, just a process that can
reflect and say “hey, it’s me”. I don’t know which copy I am and it doesn’t
matter. What matters, because it defines survival, is that there be an
entity in the future that identifies as being me and remembers being me.
Effectively, since I am a process rather than a persisting physical object,
I die with every passing moment, and it is only the existence of such
entities that identify as being me and remember being me that creates the
illusion of survival. I

Re: Quantum immortality

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 4:14 PM Quentin Anciaux  wrote:

> Le ven. 13 sept. 2019 à 08:03, Bruce Kellett  a
> écrit :
>
>>
>> Yes. QI is possible only in a many-worlds scenario, but that does not
>> necessarily mean that any many-worlds scenario implies QI. As you say, most
>> of life's significant events are quasi-classical in origin, not decoherence
>> amplified quantum events. One could be "copied" by quantum events that are
>> irrelevant to your survival. For example, by the splitting of worlds
>> occasioned by someone shining a laser on a half-silvered mirror. That just
>> increases the number of copies, all of which probably survive that
>> splitting process.
>>
>> As another aside, it seems to me that Stathis's RSSA, with measure along
>> the lifeline decreasing in accordance with Born's rule (as Russell Standish
>> puts it in his book "Theory of Nothing"), is equivalent to a collapse model
>> (or the existence of a dualist "soul" as I put it before).
>>
>
> Wel if by "dualist soul" you mean something immaterial about our
> consciousness (like I don't know information) can be duplicated then yes it
> is dualist and any computational theory of mind is dualist in this sense
> then. I suppose you would say that if someone believe "he" can be copied
> and uploaded in a virtual environment then he is a dualist ?
>

That is not implied by anything I said. If the measure along your lifeline
decreases according to the Born rule, as Russell suggests, then one is
effectively saying that after quantum duplication, the soul chooses one
copy at random, and that is the one that is "you". This is effectively a
collapse model -- all duplicates except the one randomly chosen cease to be
you. I am certainly not advocating such a position, I was just pointing out
that that is what RSSA amounts to.

Bruce

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-13 Thread Quentin Anciaux

Le ven. 13 sept. 2019 à 08:03, Bruce Kellett  a
écrit :

> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 3:07 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>> On 9/12/2019 9:49 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:41 PM Stathis Papaioannou 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 09:38, Bruce Kellett 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch 
 wrote:

> On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett 
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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,

Re: Quantum immortality

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 3:07 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

> On 9/12/2019 9:49 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>
> On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:41 PM Stathis Papaioannou 
> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 09:38, Bruce Kellett 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett 
 wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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

Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-12 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

On 9/12/2019 9:49 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:41 PM Stathis Papaioannou 
mailto:stath...@gmail.com>> wrote:

On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 09:38, Bruce Kellett mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch
mailto:jasonre...@gmail.com>> wrote:

On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett
mailto:bhkellet...@gmail.com>> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via
Everything List mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 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

Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-12 Thread Bruce Kellett

On Fri, Sep 13, 2019 at 1:41 PM Stathis Papaioannou 
wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 09:38, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch  wrote:
>>
>>> On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
 everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.

Bruce

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-12 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 09:38, Bruce Kellett  wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch  wrote:
>
>> On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>>> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.

-- 
Stathis Papaioannou


Virus-free.
www.avast.com

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 1:55 AM Bruno Marchal  wrote:

> On 11 Sep 2019, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>
> From: Bruno Marchal 
>
> On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>
> If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum immortality,
> then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been shown many
> times to be a complete nonsense.
>
>
> Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.
>
> Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide.
>
> That is not what I mean by a  reference.
>

I later gave a reference to the paper by Mallah -- whom you know of,
apparently. The paper is available at

https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0187

[.]

> None of this has anything to do with wave-packet reduction, so you can
> rest easy.
>
>
> You lost me here. With the wave reduction, there is just no quantum
> immortality at all, nor even quantum suicide. I guess I mess something.
>

The argument was that QI makes no sense, even in a many-worlds setting.

> The only “reasonable” critics was the one done by Jacques Mallah on this
> list, which claims that if QI or MI is correct, we should expect to be very
> old. But Quentin answered this validly: we expect in all situation to be
> just a bit older than where we remember coming from, and the paradox comes
> from a confusing between relative and absolute self-sampling on the states
> or histories.
>

The trouble with this is that neither ASSA and RSSA is a law of nature. As
I have said, from the 1p perspective, I live more years between 100 and
1000 than between 1 and 100. So I expect to be very old. What we remember
is actually irrelevant -- we can always check our birth certificate if we
forget how old we are. In other words, we can use external sources to
refresh memories. What we personally remember at any instant is variable
and unreliable. Check against external references.

> Typically, also, old and young are not absolute concept.
>

No, they are concepts relative to actual life span -- you are always at
your youngest when you are born, and at your oldest just before you die.

With mechanism or quantum mechanics without collapse, we can say that we
> are always young.
>

Another good reason for abandoning mechanism.

Bruce

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 2:55 AM Jason Resch  wrote:

> On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett 
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.

Bruce

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 5:17 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 9/11/2019 9:52 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 9/10/2019 5:35 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 7:18 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.
>>>
>>>
>> You could be very old, but (perhaps temporarily) amnesiac.
>>
>>
>> Then it's strange that so many other people and photographs happen to
>> agree with my memory.  Must be a conspiracy to hide the secret of quantum
>> immortality.  It would certainly be unpopular once people thought about
>> what it means.
>>
>>
>> Brent
>>
>
>
> I mean amnesic regarding the full extent of your billion+ year life.
>
>
> But if I don't remember it, was it me?
>

You might remember more when you wake up.  I think eventually the
probability of your consciousness continuing through an old-age body gets
so low that more likely continuation paths occur, such as waking up as a
technologically advanced being playing sim-human, or having your ever
diminishing conscious awareness eventually intersect with another similarly
diminished consciousness (perhaps that of a brain still developing in a
womb or an egg).

Jason

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List





On 9/11/2019 9:55 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
Why do you think that measure only increases with age? On an objective 
level it only decreases.


There's the crux of the question.  The measure of what, or whom?

Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

On 9/11/2019 9:52 AM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
> wrote:

On 9/10/2019 5:35 PM, Jason Resch wrote:

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 7:18 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything
List mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 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.

You could be very old, but (perhaps temporarily) amnesiac.

Then it's strange that so many other people and photographs happen
to agree with my memory.  Must be a conspiracy to hide the secret
of quantum immortality.  It would certainly be unpopular once
people thought about what it means.

Brent

I mean amnesic regarding the full extent of your billion+ year life.

But if I don't remember it, was it me?

Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List




On 9/11/2019 5:08 AM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:



Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 14:01, Bruce Kellett > a écrit :


On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:57 PM Quentin Anciaux
mailto:allco...@gmail.com>> wrote:

The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it
is flawed, moments are not random sampled from all possible
moments, with this argument and without QI, you should have
never find yourself young... But somewhere just before your death.


ASSA is not a law of physics. I am not assuming random sampling
from anything. It is just that you spend more time old than young
given quantum immortality. That is not to say that you are never
young -- of course you have to pass through all the years since
your birth, one year at a time. It is just that there are more
years after any given age than before that age.


And so by this reasoning I must be old near death, and it's not the 
case, so something is wrong with your theory.


Or with the theory of quantum immortality and MWI.

Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List

On 9/10/2019 11:25 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 at 12:00, Bruce Kellett > wrote:

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything
List mailto:everything-list@googlegroups.com>> 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.

The measure of our lifetime when young might be larger than the 
measure when very old if surviving as a very old person becomes 
exponentially less likely. In any case, this is not relevant if it is 
given that there will be a very old version of you in some corner of 
the world, whether distant in time, space or in a parallel universe. 
You cannot avoid surviving to become this version if it actually exists.

Right.  Your observation of your age is conditional on your having 
survived.  So that your survival to a great age is improbable is irrelevant.

Brent

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 00:51, smitra  wrote:

> Back to basics. There exists a universal wavefunction that evolves
> according to the Schrodinger equation. Observers are internal structures
> in this description. Whether or not one believes that the Born rule can
> be derived or not, what matters in practice is that you'll end up having
> to use it, so you have to assign a measure for observations that is
> given by the summation of the squared modulus of the states that
> correspond to those observations. The information about personal
> identity must then also be extracted from the wavefunction, so one
> cannot insert this in an ad hoc way.
>
> Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the states
> that correspond to extremely old observers is small.


This means that if you don’t know if you are young or very old and have to
guess, you are more likely to be right if you guess that you are young. But
it does not mean that you won’t inevitably become very old.
-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Wednesday, September 11, 2019, Bruce Kellett 
wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:26 PM Stathis Papaioannou 
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 at 12:00, Bruce Kellett 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>>> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.
>>>
>>
>> The measure of our lifetime when young might be larger than the measure
>> when very old if surviving as a very old person becomes exponentially less
>> likely. In any case, this is not relevant if it is given that there will be
>> a very old version of you in some corner of the world, whether distant in
>> time, space or in a parallel universe. You cannot avoid surviving to become
>> this version if it actually exists.
>>
>
> I think the point of quantum immortality is that everyone is immortal --
> it is not that this is very unlikely because it happens to everyone. So I
> am not sure what measure you think is exponentially decreasing. My personal
> measure of life-years is clearly greater for periods after age 120 yr than
> for the period before. Since this happens for everyone, the collective
> measure over all people is likewise exponentially greater. Even if one
> considers an infinite universe, with an infinite number of copies of me,
> all of these are immortal on the basis of the QI argument. So, again, the
> measure of old age is not decreasing with age.
>
> The situation is different for quantum suicide in the absence of quantum
> immortality. Then one is deliberately courting death on ever run of the
> scenario, and the number of survivors inevitably decreases, even if one
> copy survives indefinitely.
>

Playing Schrodinger's cat over and over with you as the cat is about the
same as living a year. It's just that each iteration of Schrodinger's cat
has a 50% chance if killing you while living another year as a healthy
adult let's say, has a 1 in 900 chance if killing you.  But the
consequences and conclusions are the same in either scenario.

Jason



>
> Bruce
>
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> 
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Re: Quantum immortality

On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, Bruce Kellett  wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.

Jason


>
> Bruce
>
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> 
> .
>

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
everything-list@googlegroups.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 9/10/2019 5:35 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 7:18 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.
>>
>>
> You could be very old, but (perhaps temporarily) amnesiac.
>
>
> Then it's strange that so many other people and photographs happen to
> agree with my memory.  Must be a conspiracy to hide the secret of quantum
> immortality.  It would certainly be unpopular once people thought about
> what it means.
>
>
> Brent
>


I mean amnesic regarding the full extent of your billion+ year life.

Jason



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> 
> .
>

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Bruno Marchal


> On 11 Sep 2019, at 01:30, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
> 
> From: Bruno Marchal mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>>
>>> On 8 Sep 2019, at 13:59, Bruce Kellett >> > wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 8:45 PM Bruno Marchal >> > wrote:
>>> On 7 Sep 2019, at 08:04, Bruce Kellett >> > wrote:
 On Sat, Sep 7, 2019 at 3:54 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 
 >>> > wrote:
 On 9/6/2019 10:21 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
> Sean Carroll is on a nationwide speaking tour now evangelizing Many 
> Worlds.
> 
> What is the predictive power of Many Worlds?
 
 None, unless someone can figure out how to derive Born's rule from 
 it...which I think is impossible.  But it does go a way toward making the 
 story of measurement more consistent.
 
 Amplify the above statement.
 
 Even Zurek, who starts from a many worlds perspective, thinks that 
 ultimately one can abandon the non-seen worlds as irrelevant.
>>> 
>>> But irrelevant does not mean false. So it is irrelevant in physics, but it 
>>> is not irrelevant in theology. It might plays a role concerning the 
>>> interpretation of death, like with quantum immortality.
>>> 
>>> If the only relevance you can find for many worlds is quantum immortality, 
>>> then many worlds is indeed dead. Quantum immortality has been shown many 
>>> times to be a complete nonsense.
>> 
>> Really. I did not known that. Could you give the references.
> Follow the Wikipedia entry on quantum suicide.
> 
That is not what I mean by a  reference.


> The main problem with the idea of quantum immortality is that not all 
> life-threatening events that one can encounter are in the form of alternative 
> outcomes to quantum processes.
> 
The point is that at each instant we have an infinity (plausibly aleph_1, at 
least aleph_0) alternate accessible histories, and it is up to you to prove 
that when we die in some history, we die in all. That is dubious, because there 
are always consistent extensions (but of course I use Mechanism here).





> Quantum suicide is an attempt to overcome this problem by linking death or 
> survival directly to the outcome of a particular quantum process. David 
> Deutsch was sceptical that this worked:
>  'Physicist David Deutsch , 
> though a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation, states regarding 
> quantum suicide that "that way of applying probabilities does not follow 
> directly from quantum theory, as the usual one does. It requires an 
> additional assumption, namely that when making decisions one should ignore 
> the histories in which the decision-maker is absent[M]y guess is that the 
> assumption is false."
> Tegmark was also doubtful about the chances for quantum immortality -- 
> pointing out that dying is rarely a binary event; it is more often the result 
> of a slow cumulative process.
> 
> 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
> 
That makes no sense. The argument rest typically on the first person, not the 
first person plural.



> -- and we do not see people who are two or three hundred years old.
> 
Just compute the probability. That would be akin to a white rabbit. The 
argument concerns only the first person experience, and it can involved amnesia.



> 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.
> 
The probability is the same as the one with a beam splitter (some “half 
mirror”) and all photons going on the same path. Nobody as seen this. But if 
you kill yourself if the photon go in the non rare path, you will see the 
photon going on the rare path with probability one, by the cul-de-sac principle 
(again, I use, like Everett; the mechanist hypothesis).




> 
>> That would be an indice that Mechanism is false, given that quantum 
>> immortality is deduce here from the already much more obvious arithmetical 
>> immortality, which is disturbing, but hard to avoid.
> 
> Well, as you know, I consider mechanism to be false in any case, so the 
> failure of quantum immortality is no news to me.
> 
> 


Mechanism implies a form of computational immortality. Non mechanism is 
neutral, especially in absence of some non mechanist theory of mind (and 
matter).



> 
>> Are you saying that quantum suicide is also a non-sense (metaphysically, it 
>> is a practical non-sense).
> 
> It relates to the standard problem for Many worlds theory -- if a quantum 
> experiment with binary outcomes is performed many times, there will always be 
> observers who see major deviations from the expected quantum probabilities. 
> In which

Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread smitra

Back to basics. There exists a universal wavefunction that evolves 
according to the Schrodinger equation. Observers are internal structures 
in this description. Whether or not one believes that the Born rule can 
be derived or not, what matters in practice is that you'll end up having 
to use it, so you have to assign a measure for observations that is 
given by the summation of the squared modulus of the states that 
correspond to those observations. The information about personal 
identity must then also be extracted from the wavefunction, so one 
cannot insert this in an ad hoc way.


Quantum immortality is therefore wrong because the measure of the states 
that correspond to extremely old observers is small.



Saibal

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread John Clark

On Tue, Sep 10, 2019 at 7:30 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.*

That doesn't follow. Yes there have been an awful lot of people born within
the last 500 years but that number is utterally dwarfed by the number of
quantum interactions that occurred in the last 500 years, and if Many
Worlds is correct then each one created a universe. So there is indeed a
universe that has a 300 year old man in it and even a 30,000 year old man,
but it is very unlikely you're living in one of them.

By the way, Hugh Everett the inventor of the Many Worlds idea was working
for the pentagon in 1962 and everybody knew the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis
was extremely dangerous, but recently as new information gets unclassified
it's now apparent it was vastly more dangerous than anybody thought at the
time. I think a logical person analyzing all the data would conclude the
most likely outcome was global thermonuclear war. But as unlikely as it
seems we somehow survived, at least in this universe.

 John K Clark

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Philip Thrift



My only point is that if you go to the actual Google Group

 Everything List 
<https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/everything-list>

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!forum/everything-list

there is the Topic 
 
"The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan) 
<https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/everything-list/NJWeGLXI2yw>


https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!topic/everything-list/NJWeGLXI2yw

All the posts *Re*:* Quantum immortality *are under that Topic,

There is  ontologically no such thing as as a fork or a thread in Google 
Groups. You can only create a new Topic.

@philipthrift

On Wednesday, September 11, 2019 at 4:25:30 AM UTC-5, telmo wrote:
>
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019, at 07:01, Philip Thrift wrote:
>
>
>
> >   *Re: Quantum immortality*
>
>
> Noting that changing a "Subject" in an emailer does not change the Topic
>
>
> It's not a change of topic, it's a fork :) You can continue the original 
> thread.
>
> Telmo.
>
>
> "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)
> 66 posts by 12 authors
>  
>
>
>
> a post is under in Google Groups.
>
> @philipthrift
>
>
>

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:08 PM Quentin Anciaux  wrote:

> Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 14:01, Bruce Kellett  a
> écrit :
>
>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:57 PM Quentin Anciaux 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is
>>> flawed, moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this
>>> argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But
>>> somewhere just before your death.
>>>
>>
>> ASSA is not a law of physics. I am not assuming random sampling from
>> anything. It is just that you spend more time old than young given quantum
>> immortality. That is not to say that you are never young -- of course you
>> have to pass through all the years since your birth, one year at a time. It
>> is just that there are more years after any given age than before that age.
>>
>
> And so by this reasoning I must be old near death, and it's not the case,
> so something is wrong with your theory.
>

That does not follow. "years" is only "un facon de parle".

Bruce

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Re: Quantum immortality

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 5:50 PM Stathis Papaioannou 
wrote:

> On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 at 16:43, Bruce Kellett  wrote:
>
>>
>> I think the point of quantum immortality is that everyone is immortal --
>> it is not that this is very unlikely because it happens to everyone. So I
>> am not sure what measure you think is exponentially decreasing. My personal
>> measure of life-years is clearly greater for periods after age 120 yr than
>> for the period before. Since this happens for everyone, the collective
>> measure over all people is likewise exponentially greater. Even if one
>> considers an infinite universe, with an infinite number of copies of me,
>> all of these are immortal on the basis of the QI argument. So, again, the
>> measure of old age is not decreasing with age.
>>
>> The situation is different for quantum suicide in the absence of quantum
>> immortality. Then one is deliberately courting death on ever run of the
>> scenario, and the number of survivors inevitably decreases, even if one
>> copy survives indefinitely.
>>
>
> Do you accept the idea that if there is continual duplication of the world
> through whatever means and each individual is mortal (the probability that
> he will survive a period t approaches zero as t approaches infinity), you
> will survive indefinitely?
>

A copy of you will. When I say that everyone is immortal under QI, I mean
that a copy of every person survives to any arbitrarily large age. This is
not because each near-death experience is quantum in origin, but because in
MWI there is continual duplication due to random quantum events. Every copy
inevitably dies at some point, but with new copies continually generated,
some will survive indefinitely. Not that this is anywhere as much as many
copies as people fear, because quantum events only give rise to world
splitting if the effect is magnified to be of macroscopic, decohered,
significance. That does not happen for every random neutrino that passes
through your body, although there a a very large number of scattering
events that could happen for any such neutrino. But none, even if there is
an interaction in your body, ever becomes macroscopic. But this is
irrelevant to the argument from relative measures.

Bruce

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Quentin Anciaux

Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 14:08, Quentin Anciaux  a
écrit :

>
>
> Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 14:01, Bruce Kellett  a
> écrit :
>
>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:57 PM Quentin Anciaux 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is
>>> flawed, moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this
>>> argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But
>>> somewhere just before your death.
>>>
>>
>> ASSA is not a law of physics. I am not assuming random sampling from
>> anything. It is just that you spend more time old than young given quantum
>> immortality. That is not to say that you are never young -- of course you
>> have to pass through all the years since your birth, one year at a time. It
>> is just that there are more years after any given age than before that age.
>>
>
> And so by this reasoning I must be old near death, and it's not the case,
> so something is wrong with your theory.
>

I mean even *without* QI...

>
>> Bruce
>>
>> --
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>> 
>> .
>>
>
>
> --
> All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. (Roy
> Batty/Rutger Hauer)
>


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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Quentin Anciaux

Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 14:01, Bruce Kellett  a
écrit :

> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:57 PM Quentin Anciaux 
> wrote:
>
>> The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is flawed,
>> moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this
>> argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But
>> somewhere just before your death.
>>
>
> ASSA is not a law of physics. I am not assuming random sampling from
> anything. It is just that you spend more time old than young given quantum
> immortality. That is not to say that you are never young -- of course you
> have to pass through all the years since your birth, one year at a time. It
> is just that there are more years after any given age than before that age.
>

And so by this reasoning I must be old near death, and it's not the case,
so something is wrong with your theory.

>
> Bruce
>
> --
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> 
> .
>


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Re: Quantum immortality

On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:57 PM Quentin Anciaux  wrote:

> The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is flawed,
> moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this
> argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But
> somewhere just before your death.
>

ASSA is not a law of physics. I am not assuming random sampling from
anything. It is just that you spend more time old than young given quantum
immortality. That is not to say that you are never young -- of course you
have to pass through all the years since your birth, one year at a time. It
is just that there are more years after any given age than before that age.

Bruce

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Telmo Menezes



On Wed, Sep 11, 2019, at 07:01, Philip Thrift wrote:
> 
> 
> > *Re: Quantum immortality*
> *
*
> **
> Noting that changing a "Subject" in an emailer does not change the Topic

It's not a change of topic, it's a fork :) You can continue the original thread.

Telmo.

> 
> "The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)
> 66 posts by 12 authors
> 
> 
> 
> 
> a post is under in Google Groups.
> 
> @philipthrift
> 
> 
> 
> 
>> 
> 

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> 
> 
> 
> *Attachments:*
>  * Auto Generated Inline Image 1

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Stathis Papaioannou

On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 at 16:43, Bruce Kellett  wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:26 PM Stathis Papaioannou 
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 at 12:00, Bruce Kellett 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>>> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.
>>>
>>
>> The measure of our lifetime when young might be larger than the measure
>> when very old if surviving as a very old person becomes exponentially less
>> likely. In any case, this is not relevant if it is given that there will be
>> a very old version of you in some corner of the world, whether distant in
>> time, space or in a parallel universe. You cannot avoid surviving to become
>> this version if it actually exists.
>>
>
> I think the point of quantum immortality is that everyone is immortal --
> it is not that this is very unlikely because it happens to everyone. So I
> am not sure what measure you think is exponentially decreasing. My personal
> measure of life-years is clearly greater for periods after age 120 yr than
> for the period before. Since this happens for everyone, the collective
> measure over all people is likewise exponentially greater. Even if one
> considers an infinite universe, with an infinite number of copies of me,
> all of these are immortal on the basis of the QI argument. So, again, the
> measure of old age is not decreasing with age.
>
> The situation is different for quantum suicide in the absence of quantum
> immortality. Then one is deliberately courting death on ever run of the
> scenario, and the number of survivors inevitably decreases, even if one
> copy survives indefinitely.
>

Do you accept the idea that if there is continual duplication of the world
through whatever means and each individual is mortal (the probability that
he will survive a period t approaches zero as t approaches infinity), you
will survive indefinitely?

> --
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Philip Thrift



>   Re: Quantum immortality


Noting that changing a "Subject" in an emailer does not change the Topic

"The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience" (John Horgan)
66 posts by 12 authors
 


a post is under in Google Groups.

@philipthrift




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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Telmo Menezes




On Wed, Sep 11, 2019, at 00:18, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List 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 my argument against the existence of heaven and hell. If they existed, 
we would already be there -- oh wait :)
However, here it only applies if the tree is infinitely deep but not infinitely 
wide.

Telmo.

> Brent
> 
> -- 
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>

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Re: Quantum immortality

2019-09-11 Thread Quentin Anciaux

The argument of the measure is based on ASSA and that's why it is flawed,
moments are not random sampled from all possible moments, with this
argument and without QI, you should have never find yourself young... But
somewhere just before your death.

Quentin

Le mer. 11 sept. 2019 à 08:43, Bruce Kellett  a
écrit :

> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 4:26 PM Stathis Papaioannou 
> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 11 Sep 2019 at 12:00, Bruce Kellett 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, Sep 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <
>>> everything-list@googlegroups.com> 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.
>>>
>>
>> The measure of our lifetime when young might be larger than the measure
>> when very old if surviving as a very old person becomes exponentially less
>> likely. In any case, this is not relevant if it is given that there will be
>> a very old version of you in some corner of the world, whether distant in
>> time, space or in a parallel universe. You cannot avoid surviving to become
>> this version if it actually exists.
>>
>
> I think the point of quantum immortality is that everyone is immortal --
> it is not that this is very unlikely because it happens to everyone. So I
> am not sure what measure you think is exponentially decreasing. My personal
> measure of life-years is clearly greater for periods after age 120 yr than
> for the period before. Since this happens for everyone, the collective
> measure over all people is likewise exponentially greater. Even if one
> considers an infinite universe, with an infinite number of copies of me,
> all of these are immortal on the basis of the QI argument. So, again, the
> measure of old age is not decreasing with age.
>
> The situation is different for quantum suicide in the absence of quantum
> immortality. Then one is deliberately courting death on ever run of the
> scenario, and the number of survivors inevitably decreases, even if one
> copy survives indefinitely.
>
> Bruce
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Everything List" group.
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> 
> .
>

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Re: Quantum immortality