Re: Conventional QTI = False
Saibal writes: According to the conventional QTI, not only do you live forever, you can also never forget anything. I don't believe this because I know for a fact that I have forgotten quite a lot of things that have happened a long time ago. Right, but to make the same argument against QTI you'd have to say, you don't believe this because you have died. But this is not possible. So the analogy is not as good as it looks. You do exist in branches where you have forgotten things, as well as in branches where you remember them. But you don't exist in branches where you have died, only in branches where you are still alive. They aren't really the same. There are arguments against QTI but this one does not work so well. Hal F.
Re: Immortality
I see that according to you Hal Ruhl qualifies as a copy of Hal Finney. - Oorspronkelijk bericht - Van: jamikes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aan: [EMAIL PROTECTED] CC: Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Hal Ruhl [EMAIL PROTECTED] Verzonden: zondag 9 september 2001 15:06 Onderwerp: Immortality As much as I enjoyed last years's discussions in worldview speculations, I get frustrated by the lately emerged word-playing about concepts used in just different contents from the conventional. May I submit a (trivial) proof for immortality in this sense: Death (of others, meaning not only persons) is a 3rd person (fantasy?), either true or imagined. NOBODY ever experienced his/her own death and the time after such, so immortality is the only thing in consciousness. The world (experienceable worldview) does not include otherwise. To the forgotten things existing in another (branch of?) world: If I 'forgot' something: that dose not necessarily build another world of those things I forgot. Alzheimer patients are not the most efficient Creators. And please do not 'rationalize' about 'near death' and similar fantasies in this respect. Excuse my out-of-topic remark to the topic. John Mikes - Original Message - From: Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2001 6:30 AM Subject: Re: Conventional QTI = False Hal Finney wrote: Saibal writes: According to the conventional QTI, not only do you live forever, you can also never forget anything. I don't believe this because I know for a fact that I have forgotten quite a lot of things that have happened a long time ago. Right, but to make the same argument against QTI you'd have to say, you don't believe this because you have died. But this is not possible. So the analogy is not as good as it looks. You do exist in branches where you have forgotten things, as well as in branches where you remember them. That is true, but I want to make the point that branches where I survive with memory loss have to be taken into account. In the case of a person suffering from a terminal disease, it is much more likely that he will survive in a branch where he was not diagnosed with the disease, than in a branch where the disease is magically cured. The latter possibility (conventional qti) can't be favoured above the first just because the surviving person is more similar to the original person. You could object that in the first case your consciousness is somehow transferred to a different person (you ``jump´´ to a different branch that separated from the dying branch before you were diagnosed), but I would say that the surviving person has the same consciousness the original person would have if you cured his disease and erased all memory of having the disease. Saibal
RE: Narrow escapes
-Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Suppose you almost cause a terrible accident. You are driving too fast down a quiet street and a child suddenly steps out. You swerve and manage to miss him. You drive on, nervous and anxious, and feeling very lucky that you did not hit and perhaps kill the child. It's all a matter of probabilities. In some universes you do hit him and in some you miss. By taking the action of driving recklessly, you increase the number of universes in which you kill the child. Suppose you cause a different accident. You drive into a crowd of 100 children and kill 20. Do you feel relief that 80 survived? No, you feel terrible that you have taken 20 children from the universe. The same feeling is appropriate in the first example, the narrow escape. You decreased the number of children in the multiverse by your actions. It is irrelevant that this instance of your consciousness happened to end up in a universe where nothing happened. The multiverse has been affected, the measure of that child has been reduced. You have killed children just as surely as in the second example where you drove into a crowd. In general, when you do something and you get lucky or unlucky with regard to the consequences, you shouldn't look too closely at the particular outcome you saw. Morally speaking your actions spread out through the multiverse. The fact that the results, good or bad, are not immediately visible to you does not decrease their reality. I don't think that this reasoning implies any differences in how we should make our decisions. We already base them on probabilites and the multiverse view retains probability based decision theory. However it does perhaps change how we should view the outcomes and the effects of what we do. Hal Finney Hmbut according to the MWI all possible universes exist, including ones in which you aren't speeding, or aren't driving at all, or someone else is, or some other person runs out in front of you, or doesn't. If you drive carefully are you merely ensuring that elsewhere in the multiverse you aren't??? I'm not sure where this leads in probability terms, especially given an uncountable infinity of universes branching off every second. Not that I'm advocating dangerous driving. Charles
RE: Conventional QTI = False
-Original Message- From: Saibal Mitra [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] In the case of a person suffering from a terminal disease, it is much more likely that he will survive in a branch where he was not diagnosed with the disease, than in a branch where the disease is magically cured. The latter possibility (conventional qti) can't be favoured above the first just because the surviving person is more similar to the original person. I don't understand this argument. The person survives (according to QTI) in both branches. In fact QTI postulates that an infinite number of copies of a person survives (although the *proportion* of the multiverse in which he survives tends to zero - but that is because the multivese is growing far faster than the branches in which a person survives). QTI postulates that ALL observer moments are part of a series (of a vast number of series') which survive to timelike infinity. You could object that in the first case your consciousness is somehow transferred to a different person (you ``jump´´ to a different branch that separated from the dying branch before you were diagnosed), but I would say that the surviving person has the same consciousness the original person would have if you cured his disease and erased all memory of having the disease. That isn't necessary (according to QTI). The multiverse is large enough to accomodate an uncountable infinity of branches in which a given person survives from ANY starting state, as well as a (larger) uncountable infinity in which he doesn't. Charles
Re: Conventional QTI = False
Hal Finney wrote: Saibal writes: According to the conventional QTI, not only do you live forever, you can also never forget anything. I don't believe this because I know for a fact that I have forgotten quite a lot of things that have happened a long time ago. Right, but to make the same argument against QTI you'd have to say, you don't believe this because you have died. But this is not possible. So the analogy is not as good as it looks. You do exist in branches where you have forgotten things, as well as in branches where you remember them. That is true, but I want to make the point that branches where I survive with memory loss have to be taken into account. In the case of a person suffering from a terminal disease, it is much more likely that he will survive in a branch where he was not diagnosed with the disease, than in a branch where the disease is magically cured. The latter possibility (conventional qti) can't be favoured above the first just because the surviving person is more similar to the original person. You could object that in the first case your consciousness is somehow transferred to a different person (you ``jump´´ to a different branch that separated from the dying branch before you were diagnosed), but I would say that the surviving person has the same consciousness the original person would have if you cured his disease and erased all memory of having the disease. Saibal
RE: fin insanity
-Original Message- From: Saibal Mitra [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] So, I would say that you will always find yourself alive somewhere. But it is interesting to consider only our universe and ignore quantum effects. Even then you will always find yourself alive somewhere, but you won't find yourself becoming infinitely old (see above). Because this is a classical continuation of you, it is much more likely than any quantum continuation that allows you to survive an atomic bomb exploding above your head. QTI can give you some idea of the size of the multiverse if you consider that there are branches in which every organism that has ever existed (including bacteria, viruses etc) are immortal - as well as every non-living configuration of matter (e.g. snowflakes, rocks, grains of sand...) - on every planet (and star, and empty space) in the universe ... According to QTI *no* observer moments ever lead to death. Every observer moment of every organism that has ever lived has timelike-infinite continuity. This leads to very very very big numbers, even if we allowed the output from the SWE to be quantised - which it isn't. Charles
Narrow escapes
Suppose you almost cause a terrible accident. You are driving too fast down a quiet street and a child suddenly steps out. You swerve and manage to miss him. You drive on, nervous and anxious, and feeling very lucky that you did not hit and perhaps kill the child. It's all a matter of probabilities. In some universes you do hit him and in some you miss. By taking the action of driving recklessly, you increase the number of universes in which you kill the child. Suppose you cause a different accident. You drive into a crowd of 100 children and kill 20. Do you feel relief that 80 survived? No, you feel terrible that you have taken 20 children from the universe. The same feeling is appropriate in the first example, the narrow escape. You decreased the number of children in the multiverse by your actions. It is irrelevant that this instance of your consciousness happened to end up in a universe where nothing happened. The multiverse has been affected, the measure of that child has been reduced. You have killed children just as surely as in the second example where you drove into a crowd. In general, when you do something and you get lucky or unlucky with regard to the consequences, you shouldn't look too closely at the particular outcome you saw. Morally speaking your actions spread out through the multiverse. The fact that the results, good or bad, are not immediately visible to you does not decrease their reality. I don't think that this reasoning implies any differences in how we should make our decisions. We already base them on probabilites and the multiverse view retains probability based decision theory. However it does perhaps change how we should view the outcomes and the effects of what we do. Hal Finney
Re: FIN too
Convince me of this fact, and I would readily reject QTI. What you say would be disproof of the cul-de-sac assumption, which sadly I suspect to be true except in rather extreme circumstances like black holes. Nevertheless, if you can construct a situation using forbidden states where conscious continuation of provably impossible, I'd be most interested to hear about it. Cheers Fred Chen wrote: Hal, Charles, I think this is an unavoidable part of the QTI or FIN debate. It seems that with QTI, you could only be entering white rabbit (magical-type) universes, not continue in probable ones. But in general I have a more fundamental objection (to quantum immortality). In QM, not all quantum states are possible for a given situation. For example, an electron orbiting a proton can only occupy certain energy states, not arbitrary ones. The energy states in between are forbidden; an electron cannot be measured and found to be in one of these forbidden states. So I do not see why immortality is allowed by QM from our universe if physical mechanisms generally ban it. Survival seems to me (and I guess most people) a forbidden state in the situations where death is certain. Fred Dr. Russell Standish Director High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967, 8308 3119 (mobile) UNSW SYDNEY 2052 Fax 9385 6965, 0425 253119 () Australia[EMAIL PROTECTED] Room 2075, Red Centrehttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02
