Re: Quantum Suicide and World War 3
On 11 Jan 2013, at 18:14, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: Reminds me of an old short by Larry Niven, called All the Myriad Ways, where a police detective tries to uncover why radom murder- suicides are happening, (That world is where scientists discover how to travel to different Earths) and had discovered one, where the Cuban War was just a wet firecracker. Everett's daughter committed suicide after Everett died (she was afflicted by schitzophrenia) to be with Daddy. Yes, to met Daddy in a parallel world. She said it explicitly, apparently, but it might also be only a poetical way to express herself. I don't know. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Quantum Suicide and World War 3
Reminds me of an old short by Larry Niven, called All the Myriad Ways, where a police detective tries to uncover why radom murder-suicides are happening, (That world is where scientists discover how to travel to different Earths) and had discovered one, where the Cuban War was just a wet firecracker. Everett's daughter committed suicide after Everett died (she was afflicted by schitzophrenia) to be with Daddy. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Quantum Suicide and World War 3
On 10 Jan 2013, at 21:43, John Clark wrote: Perhaps the Quantum Suicide experiment has already been performed and on a global scale. After Hugh Everett developed the many Worlds interpretation in his doctoral dissertation he was disappointed at the poor reception it received and never published anything on quantum mechanics again for the rest of his life; instead he became a Dr. Strangelove type character making computer nuclear war games and doing grim operational research for the pentagon about armageddon. Despite his knowledge of the horrors of a nuclear war Everett, like most of his fellow cold warrior colleagues in the 50's and 60's, thought the probability of Thermonuclear war happening was very high and he thought it would probably happen very soon. Although there is no record of it I wonder if Everett used anthropic reasoning and privately deduced that the fact that we live in a world where such a very likely war has not in fact happened was more confirmation that his Many Worlds idea was right. And I must say that it is odd, if you told me right after Nagasaki that in 68 years nuclear weapons would not be used again in anger I would have said you were nuts. Thanks for not dropping atomic bombs on us, the nuts people. Perhaps we are in a bizarrely rare offshoot universe where World War 3 never happened. This is not entirely impossible, but I am not sure we should bet on that. On the planet ZZi@, every citizen has a personal atomic bomb, fixed in his house, and the citizens can make it exploding each day when they are not satisfied by the day. By reaction , all other bombs explode too. The quantum politicians who favored that politics were hoping this would quantum select a reality where everybody is satisfied. Unfortunately, there was mister Smith who was hating Mister Durand, and satisfied only by Durand's non satisfaction. The result is that they get into a loop where the same day repeat forever with Mister Smith and Mister Durand respective satisfaction. They get into a little two days circle, but note that no one ever notice it. More (or less?) seriously, there is a possibility that the origin of life has been partially a quantum suicide kind of game, making sadly such an origin or life a rare event, making us rarer, if not unique, in the universe. I hope not. Such an explanation is cheap, and might lead to a form don't try to understand, it is just a quantum miracle. Yet, if one day we have evidence that we are alone in our cluster of galaxies, that would be an evidence for a quantum miracle (rare event). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Quantum Suicide and World War 3
Everett's daughter was right in the sense of a lithothese (double negation = positive answer) translated into * I don't want to be WITHOUT my father * The rest is interpretation. JM On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 12:14 PM, spudboy...@aol.com wrote: ** Reminds me of an old short by Larry Niven, called All the Myriad Ways, where a police detective tries to uncover why radom murder-suicides are happening, (That world is where scientists discover how to travel to different Earths) and had discovered one, where the Cuban War was just a wet firecracker. Everett's daughter committed suicide after Everett died (she was afflicted by schitzophrenia) to be with Daddy. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Quantum Suicide and World War 3
Perhaps we must worship Everett. Maybe he is with Einstein in a superdimensional throne of quarks. Aleluya. 2013/1/10 John Clark johnkcl...@gmail.com Perhaps the Quantum Suicide experiment has already been performed and on a global scale. After Hugh Everett developed the many Worlds interpretation in his doctoral dissertation he was disappointed at the poor reception it received and never published anything on quantum mechanics again for the rest of his life; instead he became a Dr. Strangelove type character making computer nuclear war games and doing grim operational research for the pentagon about armageddon. Despite his knowledge of the horrors of a nuclear war Everett, like most of his fellow cold warrior colleagues in the 50's and 60's, thought the probability of Thermonuclear war happening was very high and he thought it would probably happen very soon. Although there is no record of it I wonder if Everett used anthropic reasoning and privately deduced that the fact that we live in a world where such a very likely war has not in fact happened was more confirmation that his Many Worlds idea was right. And I must say that it is odd, if you told me right after Nagasaki that in 68 years nuclear weapons would not be used again in anger I would have said you were nuts. Perhaps we are in a bizarrely rare offshoot universe where World War 3 never happened. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- Alberto. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Quantum Suicide and World War 3
On 1/10/2013 12:43 PM, John Clark wrote: Perhaps the Quantum Suicide experiment has already been performed and on a global scale. After Hugh Everett developed the many Worlds interpretation in his doctoral dissertation he was disappointed at the poor reception it received and never published anything on quantum mechanics again for the rest of his life; instead he became a Dr. Strangelove type character making computer nuclear war games and doing grim operational research for the pentagon about armageddon. Despite his knowledge of the horrors of a nuclear war Everett, like most of his fellow cold warrior colleagues in the 50's and 60's, thought the probability of Thermonuclear war happening was very high and he thought it would probably happen very soon. Although there is no record of it I wonder if Everett used anthropic reasoning and privately deduced that the fact that we live in a world where such a very likely war has not in fact happened was more confirmation that his Many Worlds idea was right. And I must say that it is odd, if you told me right after Nagasaki that in 68 years nuclear weapons would not be used again in anger I would have said you were nuts. Perhaps we are in a bizarrely rare offshoot universe where World War 3 never happened. Everett also famously cared little about his personal health and died young (in this world). Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
Re: Quantum suicide and immortality
2009/5/10 ZeroSum ing...@usa.net: David Lewis' statement cuts to the core of the nature of consciousness. If each conscious observer on planet Earth (and let's assume the laws of physics don't limit consciousness to humans but includes any sentient animal life form) exists in Many Worlds (see Wiki topic on physicist Hugh Everett III at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett) then Houston, we've got a problem. The human population alone is over 6 billion conscious observers. Each observer can cause branching into an unfathomably huge number of parallel universes (or perhaps an infinite number). Everyone else, in addition to an incomprehensibly large number of people only born in some parallel universes, branches into their own parallel universes, extrapolating logically from the Many Worlds theory. Each one of us is essentially forced to consciously exist in parallel universes that continue coming into existence as the result of the actions of every other conscious observer on this planet. Include conscious non-human observers (animal and who knows what else) and Houston, we've got a really big problem... or is it really a problem? Instead of using this line of thinking to debunk the Many Worlds interpretation, I think this isn't such a big problem as it initially appears. For one thing, consider sleep walking. I don't really understand what the problem is. That there are many world in the MWI is already a given. Consciousness and quantum immortality experiments don't create any more worlds than there otherwise would be. In the multiverse as a whole, only a very small number of worlds contain versions of you who survived a direct nuclear blast. In almost all the worlds, you have died. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Quantum suicide and immortality
ZeroSum wrote: The Wiki article Quantum suicide and immortality (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality) states: Also, the philosopher David Lewis, in How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat?, remarked that in the vast majority of the worlds in which an immortal observer might find himself (i.e. the subset of quantum-possible worlds in which the observer does not die), he will survive, but will be terribly maimed. This is because in each of the scenarios typically given in thought experiments (nuclear bombing, Russian roulette, etc.), for every world in which the observer survives unscathed, there are likely to be far more worlds in which the observer survives terribly disfigured, badly disabled, and so on. I think this is just a misinterpretation of the physics. All those scenarios and their effects are essentially classical. In Julian Barbour's metaphor they are all strands in the same branch and are classically indistinguishable. Since the brain is a classical information processor, they all correspond to the same conscious stream. Since classically you are either killed or not, or maimed or not, there is are not huge numbers of worlds in which you are maimed to different degrees that are consciously distinct. Brent --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Quantum Immortality (was Re: Quantum Suicide)
Le 28-oct.-05, à 17:54, GottferDamnt a écrit (for-list): Hi, I would like talk about this quote from an old topic: This is a rather shocking conclusion. We are conscious here and now because our (computational state) belongs to aleph_1 (or 2^aleph_0 for those who doesn't want to rely on Cantor's continuum hypothesis) infinite computational histories ! Remember Brice deWitt shock when he realised that at each instant he is multiplied by 10^100. Now it seems that we are multiplied by the continuum (!) (Moreover this is coherent with the Z modal logics). So it seems you are completely right Bob (at least formally), and Russell Standish is also right when he said :Therefore QTI and the existence of cul-de-sac branches are a mutual contradiction. The pruning of dead-end corresponds to the adding of consistency (the modal diamond ) in the modal definition of observation. Bruno What about these cul-de-sac branches? Is It definitely that dead-end branches can exist with the quantum theory of immortality (for example, a state of consciousness which can't be follow)? And how comp' Bruno theory manage these cul-de-sac branches? I believe that the quantum theory does not allow cul-de-sac branches. I also believe that the Godel-Lob theory of self-reference not only allow cul-de-sac branches, but it imposes them everywhere: from all alive states you can reach a dead end. The Universal Dovetailer Argument shows that the physics (which has no dead ends) should be given by the self-reference logics (with reachable dead end everywhere). I have been stuck in that contradiction a very long time ... ... until I realized the absolute necessity of distinguishing the first and third person point of views. That necessity is implied itself by the incompleteness phenomena, but that is technical (ask me on the everything-list if interested). The intuitive point here is that you cannot have a first person point of view on your own death: 1-death is not an event, and should be kept out of the domain of verification of probabilistic statements. Another intuition: the finite histories are of measure null among the collection of all histories (the continuum). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Quantum Immortality (was Re: Quantum Suicide)
Bruno, So why is it that from the 3rd person point of view everyone dies? Also along the lines of the Let There Be Something thread, isn't it also true that a finite set of finite histories, or even a countable set of infinite histories, is of measure zero in the continuum? If this is the type of selection that is being made from The Multiverse (whose measure = measure(continuum)) to the initial multiverse(s) of your and others' theories, then by the same argument that you use to show that the probability of dying is zero, doesn't this imply that the probability of having such an initial multiverse is zero? I may be in over my head, but if my Let There Be Something inquiry is correct, then we're all in over our head. Tom -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Everything-List List everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 13:27:27 +0100 Subject: Re: Quantum Immortality (was Re: Quantum Suicide) Le 28-oct.-05, à 17:54, GottferDamnt a écrit (for-list): Hi, I would like talk about this quote from an old topic: This is a rather shocking conclusion. We are conscious here and now because our (computational state) belongs to aleph_1 (or 2^aleph_0 for those who doesn't want to rely on Cantor's continuum hypothesis) infinite computational histories ! Remember Brice deWitt shock when he realised that at each instant he is multiplied by 10^100. Now it seems that we are multiplied by the continuum (!) (Moreover this is coherent with the Z modal logics). So it seems you are completely right Bob (at least formally), and Russell Standish is also right when he said :Therefore QTI and the existence of cul-de-sac branches are a mutual contradiction. The pruning of dead-end corresponds to the adding of consistency (the modal diamond ) in the modal definition of observation. Bruno What about these cul-de-sac branches? Is It definitely that dead-end branches can exist with the quantum theory of immortality (for example, a state of consciousness which can't be follow)? And how comp' Bruno theory manage these cul-de-sac branches? I believe that the quantum theory does not allow cul-de-sac branches. I also believe that the Godel-Lob theory of self-reference not only allow cul-de-sac branches, but it imposes them everywhere: from all alive states you can reach a dead end. The Universal Dovetailer Argument shows that the physics (which has no dead ends) should be given by the self-reference logics (with reachable dead end everywhere). I have been stuck in that contradiction a very long time ... ... until I realized the absolute necessity of distinguishing the first and third person point of views. That necessity is implied itself by the incompleteness phenomena, but that is technical (ask me on the everything-list if interested). The intuitive point here is that you cannot have a first person point of view on your own death: 1-death is not an event, and should be kept out of the domain of verification of probabilistic statements. Another intuition: the finite histories are of measure null among the collection of all histories (the continuum). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Quantum Immortality (was Re: Quantum Suicide)
I should have said a countable set of countable histories. Tom -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Tue, 01 Nov 2005 15:05:39 -0500 Subject: Re: Quantum Immortality (was Re: Quantum Suicide) Bruno, So why is it that from the 3rd person point of view everyone dies? Also along the lines of the Let There Be Something thread, isn't it also true that a finite set of finite histories, or even a countable set of infinite histories, is of measure zero in the continuum? If this is the type of selection that is being made from The Multiverse (whose measure = measure(continuum)) to the initial multiverse(s) of your and others' theories, then by the same argument that you use to show that the probability of dying is zero, doesn't this imply that the probability of having such an initial multiverse is zero? I may be in over my head, but if my Let There Be Something inquiry is correct, then we're all in over our head. Tom -Original Message- From: Bruno Marchal [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Everything-List List everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Tue, 1 Nov 2005 13:27:27 +0100 Subject: Re: Quantum Immortality (was Re: Quantum Suicide) Le 28-oct.-05, à 17:54, GottferDamnt a écrit (for-list): Hi, I would like talk about this quote from an old topic: This is a rather shocking conclusion. We are conscious here and now because our (computational state) belongs to aleph_1 (or 2^aleph_0 for those who doesn't want to rely on Cantor's continuum hypothesis) infinite computational histories ! Remember Brice deWitt shock when he realised that at each instant he is multiplied by 10^100. Now it seems that we are multiplied by the continuum (!) (Moreover this is coherent with the Z modal logics). So it seems you are completely right Bob (at least formally), and Russell Standish is also right when he said :Therefore QTI and the existence of cul-de-sac branches are a mutual contradiction. The pruning of dead-end corresponds to the adding of consistency (the modal diamond ) in the modal definition of observation. Bruno What about these cul-de-sac branches? Is It definitely that dead-end branches can exist with the quantum theory of immortality (for example, a state of consciousness which can't be follow)? And how comp' Bruno theory manage these cul-de-sac branches? I believe that the quantum theory does not allow cul-de-sac branches. I also believe that the Godel-Lob theory of self-reference not only allow cul-de-sac branches, but it imposes them everywhere: from all alive states you can reach a dead end. The Universal Dovetailer Argument shows that the physics (which has no dead ends) should be given by the self-reference logics (with reachable dead end everywhere). I have been stuck in that contradiction a very long time ... ... until I realized the absolute necessity of distinguishing the first and third person point of views. That necessity is implied itself by the incompleteness phenomena, but that is technical (ask me on the everything-list if interested). The intuitive point here is that you cannot have a first person point of view on your own death: 1-death is not an event, and should be kept out of the domain of verification of probabilistic statements. Another intuition: the finite histories are of measure null among the collection of all histories (the continuum). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Quantum Suicide Bombing
Le 09-juil.-05, à 16:09, David Deutsch a écrit : On 8 Jul 2005, at 11:25am, [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now - what should be done about the presentation of this concep of Quantum Suicide Bombing? By the way: The discussion is *not* about the validity of many worlds interpretation. In order to do a quantum suicide attack, one only has to *believe* in many world interpretation. In my opinion, not *only*: one also has to have some misconceptions about probability and decisions (and about morality too). *The Beginning of Infinity* is going to contain a critique of the quantum suicide argument and what I consider to be other misuses of the concept of probability such as the simulation argument. Which misuses? Which misconceptions? Schmidhuber, Bostrom, or ... Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Quantum Suicide Bombing
Le 13-juil.-05, à 01:01, Charles Goodwin a écrit : From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:Fabric-of- [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Lee Corbin I don't know what you even *mean* by QS does not reduce the number of worlds you experience, unless you mean that nothing that I can do affects the number of worlds I can experience. (And I will not discuss free will vs. determinism.) I *think* what this means is based on the QTI rule (or theorem or whatever) that *all* observer-moments have continuers. But I could be wrong. It *is* a delicate matter. Recently Stathis Papaioannou, on the everything-list, has made a theory where to be in an alive state is represented by an observer-moment having at least one continuer (or successor as he called them). to be (absolutely) dead is represented by an observer-moment having no successor (so that: to be dead = not to be alive, which is rather natural for a platonist). And at some point in a reasoning Stathis said that we die at each instant. This gives a theory where all transient (alive) observer moments have a cul-de-sac successor. Of course an observer moment could have more than one successor and some successor can be transient. In Stathis theory, at first sight, to be immortal would consist in being forever in the state of being able to die! Now the problem with such a theory where there are cul-de-sac worlds everywhere (I mean accessible from all transient worlds) is that it can be shown that there is no available notion of (relative) probability bearing on accessible observer moments. Probabilities reappears when we explicitly make abstraction of the cul-de-sac worlds or observer-moments. It is the implicit default assumption of probability: if you throw a dice you will not say the probability of getting 6 is 1/7 giving that the possible results would be getting 1, getting 2, getting 3, ... , getting 6, and dying! Doing that abstraction changes the logic, and changes the possible structure on the set of OMs. With comp such a change logic can be justified logically once we distinguish provability and truth, that is by taking into account explicitly the incompleteness phenomenon. It is hard to say more without being a tiny bit more technical. I will explain more on the everything list. The point is that quantum immortality or the more general (and older) comp-immortality is *provably* a personal opinion bearing on first person notions. But that is the case with any assertion that some theory are *true*. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Quantum Suicide without suicide
On Thursday, January 9, 2003, at 08:22 PM, George Levy wrote: OK. Let's consider the case of the guy dying of cancer and playing the stock market simultaneously.. In real life, the hard part is to get meaningful probability data. For the sake of the argument let's assume the following scenario: ..scenario elided, not to mislead, but because I will not be using any details of the calculation... As we can see, the rate of return for Alice is 4.8 times that of Bob. Alice will make a profit, but not Bob. Conclusions: All this involves really basic probability theory. The first person perspective probability is identical to the probability conditional to the person staying alive. The probability of the event in question (stock going up) must be tied to the person staying alive ( a cure for cancer). In the case of a conventional QS suicide to world conditions matching the requested state: ie. winning one million dollars. In the deathrow case one could imagine a scenario in which the event in question (DNA test discovery) is tied to a reprieve from the governor coming because of a DNA test exhonerating the prisoner. The prisoner could bet on DNA testing as a good investment. The airline case is similar. The hard part is figuring the probability of very unlikely saving events such as a scientific discovery, ET landing on earth or the coming of the messiah :-) How is this different from standard life insurance arguments, where buying a policy is betting one will die and not buying a policy is betting one will live? If one has no heirs to worry about, no concern about the world if and after one dies, then it has been known for a long time that the smart thing to do is not to buy life insurance. If one dies, the policy payoff is worthless (to the dead person), but if one lives, the money has been saved. Similar calculations are very simple for going into a dangerous situation: take a bet, at nearly any odds, that one will live. If the odds of survival in going into a combat situation are one in a hundred, and betting odds reflect this, bet everything one can on survival. If one dies, the $10,000 lost is immaterial. If one lives, one has a payout of roughly a million dollars. The scenario with cancer cures and doctors and quackery and all just makes this standard calculation more complicated. And instead of couching this in terms of bets (or stock investments), one can phrase it in standard terms for high risk jobs: Your chance of succeeding is one in a hundred. But if you succeed, one million dollars awaits you. (I doubt many would take on such a job. But with varying payouts, we all take on similar sorts of jobs. For example, flying on business.) It's a reason some people take on very risky jobs. They figure if they succeed, they'll be rich. If they fail, they'll be dead and won't care. (Certainly not many people think this way, but some do. But betting on yourself is not quantum suicide in any way I can see. It's just a straightforward calculation of odds and values of things like money (of no value if dead, for example) in the main outcomes. Lastly, like most many worlds views, the same calculations apply whether one thinks in terms of actual other worlds or just as possible worlds in the standard probability way (having nothing to do with quantum mechanics per se). Or so I believe. I would be interested in any arguments that the quantum view of possible worlds gives any different measures of probability than non-quantum views give. (If there is no movement between such worlds, the quantum possible worlds are identical to the possible worlds of Aristotle, Leibniz, Borges, C.I. Lewis, David Lewis, Stalnaker, Kripke, and others.) --Tim May How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? --Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Gulag Archipelago
Re: Quantum Suicide without suicide
This is a reply to Eric Hawthorne and Tim May. Eric Hawthorne wrote: George Levy wrote: Conclusions: All this involves really basic probability theory. The first person perspective probability is identical to the probability conditional to the person staying alive. But that first-person probability is not objective, true. It is a first person point of view. and not valid, and not useful. not true as the example demonstrates Consider this from a purely pragmatic point of view. (Not a formal argument per say.) A person must consider the (non-zero) objective probability that they will die (and be then non-existent) (if they do this or that action). If people did not account for the probability that they will die if they do a foolish act, then they will probably die. Their subjective 1st person sense of probability is naively optimistic and not a survival trait. If a person acts with that kind of probability belief in every possible world, they will reduce their measure beyond measure. Surely there is something incorrect about a probability view which has that detrimental effect on one's measure. Reread the example. The way the example is set up, the probability of Alice's survival is not affected one iota by her investment. It remains constant with a value of 20% whether she buys the stock or not. The issue the example intends to illustrate is her decision with regard her return on investment. Of course one could construct another example where her survival is decreased (as in conventional QS) or increased (Alice's investment has an impact on Charles' research and makes Charles' success more probable). But that is another story. As I mentioned earlier, if measure is infinite, there may not be any sense in talking about increasing or decreasing absolute measure. If absolute measure did have meaning, one's measure should keep decreasing as one ages since the cumulative probability of one's dying increases with age. Yet from a subjective viewpoint an old man and a young man have the same measure. A concept that I discussed a few months ago, was the extension of the Cosmological Principle to the manyworld. The Cosmological Principle asserts that the universe is uniform in the large scale, independently of where the observer is positioned. An extension of this principle that supported the Steady State theory asserted that the universe looked the same at any time in its history. This extension has been discredited by the evidence for an expanding universe. However, one could argue that the reason the Cosmological Principle does not work is that the scope of its application is not large enough. With the Manyworld (or in the limit, the Plenitude) we are bound to have the largest possible scope possible, and therefore the Cosmological Principle should work. The Cosmological Principle is also appealing in that it describes the Manyworld with the smallest amount of information possible. Thus the Cosmological Principle applied to the Manyworld states that measure is independent of the position of the observer. If the Cosmological Principle holds then we should not have to worry about absolute measure. Tim May wrote: On Thursday, January 9, 2003, at 08:22 PM, George Levy wrote: OK. Let's consider the case of the guy dying of cancer and playing the stock market simultaneously.. In real life, the hard part is to get meaningful probability data. For the sake of the argument let's assume the following scenario: ..scenario elided, not to mislead, but because I will not be using any details of the calculation... As we can see, the rate of return for Alice is 4.8 times that of Bob. Alice will make a profit, but not Bob. Conclusions: All this involves really basic probability theory. The first person perspective probability is identical to the probability conditional to the person staying alive. The probability of the event in question (stock going up) must be tied to the person staying alive ( a cure for cancer). In the case of a "conventional" QS suicide to world conditions matching the requested state: ie. winning one million dollars. In the deathrow case one could imagine a scenario in which the event in question (DNA test discovery) is tied to a reprieve from the governor coming because of a DNA test exhonerating the prisoner. The prisoner could bet on DNA testing as a good investment. The airline case is similar. The hard part is figuring the probability of very unlikely saving events such as a scientific discovery, ET landing on earth or the coming of the messiah :-) How is this different from standard life insurance arguments, where buying a policy is betting one will die and not buying a policy is betting one will live? If one has no heirs to worry about, no concern about the world if and after one dies, then it has been known for a long time that the "smart" thing to do is not to buy life insurance. If one
Re: Quantum suicide without suicide
Hi Brent. Brent Meeker wrote: I don't understand the point of this modification. The idea of QS was to arrange that in all possible worlds in which I exist, I'm rich. If it's just a matter of being rich in a few and not rich in the rest, I don't need any QS. Yes but you only want to know those worlds where you are rich. You don't want to be in those worlds where your are poor. In this example I only intended to pinpoint the crux of consciousness in relation to QS experiment and to show how altering a minimum amount in the memory of the observer changes his frame of reference. George
Re: Quantum suicide without suicide
Tim May wrote On Wednesday, January 8, 2003, at 10:58 AM, George Levy wrote: In the original verision of Quantum Suicide (QS), as understood in this list, the experimenter sets up a suicide machine that kills him if the world does not conform to his wishes. Hence, in the branching many-worlds, his consciousness is erased in those worlds, and remains intact in the worlds that do satisfy him. Is it possible to perform such a feat without suicide? What is the minimum attrition that is required and still get the effect of suicide? Hawking had a good line: When I hear about Schrodinger's Cat, I reach for my gun. Good line? I would say it is rather stupid (with all my respect for Hawking). Come on. The Schroedinger's Cat paper is one of the deepest early paper on QM conceptual issues. The notion of entanglement appears in it. It prepares both EPR and quantum computing, which arises from taking seriously the QM superpositions. You can only mock Schroedinger's Cat by taking a purely instrumentalist view of QM, and with such a view quantum computing would not have appear. Slightly modify the QS conditions in another direction: instead of dying immediately, one goes onto death row to await execution. Or one is locked in a box with the air running out. And so on. This removes the security blanket of saying Suicide is painless, and in all the worlds you have not died in, you are rich! In 99....99% of all worlds, you sit in the box waiting for the air to run out. It reminds me a novel I wrote (a long time ago) where computationalist practitioners always wait for complete reconstitution before annihilating the original. It can be consider as a fair practice letting imagine the risk of such immortality use. I don't know if there are other worlds in the DeWitt/Graham sense (there is no reason to believe Everett ever thought in these terms), but if they exist they appear to be either unreachable by us, or inaccessible beyond short times and distances (coherence issues). I disagree. It is only by playing with word that you can suppress the many worlds in Everett. Some of Everett's footnote are rather explicit. See the Michael Clive Price FAQ for more on this. http://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm People like Roland Omnes which agree with pure QM (QM without collapse) and still postulate a unique world acknowledge their irrationality. In particular, it seems to me there's a causal decision theory argument which says that one should make decisions based on the maximization of the payout. And based on everything we observe in the world around us, which is overwhelmingly classical at the scales we interact in, this means the QS outlook is deprecated. You confuse first and third person point of view. If you put yourself at the place of Schroedinger Cat you will survive in company of people which will *necessarily* be more and more astonished, and which should continue to bet you will not survive. Although *where* you will survive they will lose their bets. Consider this thought experiment: Alice is facing her quantum mechanics exam at Berkeley. She sees two main approaches to take. First, study hard and try to answer all of the questions as if they mattered. Second, take the lessons of her QS readings and simply _guess_, or write gibberish, killing herself if she fails to get an A. (Or, as above, facing execution, torture, running out of air, etc., just to repudiate the suicide is painless aspect of some people's argument.) From rationality, or causal decision theory, which option should she pick? It depends of Alice's goal. If she just want the diplom (and not the knowledge corresponding to the field she studies) then QS is ok, but quite egoist and vain at some other level. If she want the knowledge, she will be unable to find a working criteria for her quantum suicide. By the Benacerraf principle we cannot know our own level of implementation code. (I use comp here). All indications are that there are virtually no worlds in which random guessers do well. Of course! From a 3-person point of view quantum suicide is ordinary suicide. Tegmark (and myself before in french) made this completely clear. Also, it is an open problem if some feature in the apparition of life or even matter-appearance does not rely on some quantum guess. (The odds are readily calcuable, given the type of exam, grading details, etc. We can fairly easily see that a random guesser in the SATs will score around 550-600 combined, but that a random guesser in a non-multiple-choice QM exam will flunk with ovewhelming likelihood.) What should one do? What did all of you actually do? What did Moravec do, what did I do, what did Tegmark do? I think the QS point is not practical, and it is highly unethical. It is the most egoist act possible. But QS just illustrate well conceptual nuances in the possible interpretation of QM and MWI. Bruno
Re: Quantum suicide without suicide
Thanks Bruno, for your comments, I fully agree with you. Let me add a few comments for Tim and Scerir Tim May wrote: Consider this thought experiment: Alice is facing her quantum mechanics exam at Berkeley. She sees two main approaches to take. First, study hard and try to answer all of the questions as if they mattered. Second, take the lessons of her QS readings and simply _guess_, or write gibberish, killing herself if she fails to get an "A." (Or, as above, facing execution, torture, running out of air, etc., just to repudiate the "suicide is painless" aspect of some people's argument.) What should one do? What did all of you actually do? What did Moravec do, what did I do, what did Tegmark do? Tim, this example is completely inapplicable to the case of QS just like you would not set up a relativistic experiment to measure the slowing of a clock in which the clock travels one mile per hour. To get significant results you must travel a significant fraction of the speed of light. QS decisions are significantly different from "classical" decisions when the life of the experimenter is at stake, (or as I pointed out earlier the memory of the quantum suicide machine in the mind of the experimenter must be at stake). The amount "at stake" does not have to be 100% as I shall explain below. Even intentional death (suicide) is not necessary. The incoming death may be entirely unintentional! This reminds me of a science fiction story I read about 30 years ago in which the end of the world was forecasted for midnight. A zealous journalist was faced with preparing a story to be published the next day (after the world ended.) He accomplished the task by stating in the story that the forecast was in fact in error and that the world had not ended. In the branch of the manyworld, in which he remained alive, his story was right, and he therefore, astonished the public with his prescience. He made the right QS decision. As you can see, suicide is not necessary. One could be on death row - in other words have a high probability of dying - and make decisions based on the probability of remaining alive. Being on death row, dying of cancer, travelling on an airline, or sleeping in our bed involve different probability of death... These situations only differ in degrees. We are all in the same boat so to speak. We are all likely to die sooner or later. The closer the probability of death, the more important QS decision becomes. The guy on death row must include in his QS decision making the factor that will save his life: probably a successful appeal or a reprieve by the state governor. The person flying in an airline should include in his QS decision process the fact that the plane will not have a mechanical failure or be hijacked. The person dying of cancer must include the possibility of finding a cure to cancer, or of being successfully preserved somehow by cryogenic means. As you see, suicide is not necessary for QS decisions. In addition the whole issue of "measure" is in my opinion suspect as I have already extensively stated on this list. See below. Scerir wrote Lev Vaidman wrote that we must care about all our 'successive' worlds in proportion to their measures of existence [Behavior Principle]. He does not agree to play the 'quantum Russian roulette' because the measure of existence of worlds with himself dead is be much larger than the measure of existence of the worlds with himself alive and rich! I agree that QS is unethical. Yet, the reasons given by Vaidman could be unjustified because maximizing measure may not be possible if measure is already infinite - a clue that measure is infinite is that the manyworld seem to vary according to a continuum since schroedinger function is continuous. George
Re: Quantum suicide without suicide
From: Tim May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Thu Jan 9, 2003 1:22:32 PM US/Pacific To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Quantum suicide without suicide On Thursday, January 9, 2003, at 12:32 PM, George Levy wrote: As you can see, suicide is not necessary. One could be on death row - in other words have a high probability of dying - and make decisions based on the probability of remaining alive. Being on death row, dying of cancer, travelling on an airline, or sleeping in our bed involve different probability of death... These situations only differ in degrees. We are all in the same boat so to speak. We are all likely to die sooner or later. The closer the probability of death, the more important QS decision becomes. The guy on death row must include in his QS decision making the factor that will save his life: probably a successful appeal or a reprieve by the state governor. No, this is the good news fallacy of evidential decision theory, as discussed by Joyce in his book on Causal Decision Theory. The good news fallacy is noncausally hoping for good news, e.g., standing in a long line to vote when the expected benefit of voting is nearly nil. (But if everyone thought that way, imagine what would happen! Indeed.) The guy on death row should be looking for ways to causally influence his own survival, not consoling himself with good news fallacy notions that he will be alive in other realities in which the governor issues a reprieve. The quantum suicide strategy is without content. As you see, suicide is not necessary for QS decisions. No, I don't see this. I don't see _any_ of this. Whether one supports Savage or Jefferys or Joyce or Pearl, I see no particular importance of quantum suicide to the theory of decision-making. It would help if you gave some concrete examples of what a belief in quantum suicide means for several obvious examples: -- the death row case you cited -- the airplane example you also cited -- Newcomb's Paradox (discussed in Pearl, Joyce, Nozick, etc.) -- stock market investments/speculations --Tim May
Re: Quantum suicide without suicide
On Wednesday, January 8, 2003, at 10:58 AM, George Levy wrote: In the original verision of Quantum Suicide (QS), as understood in this list, the experimenter sets up a suicide machine that kills him if the world does not conform to his wishes. Hence, in the branching many-worlds, his consciousness is erased in those worlds, and remains intact in the worlds that do satisfy him. Is it possible to perform such a feat without suicide? What is the minimum attrition that is required and still get the effect of suicide? Hawking had a good line: When I hear about Schrodinger's Cat, I reach for my gun. Slightly modify the QS conditions in another direction: instead of dying immediately, one goes onto death row to await execution. Or one is locked in a box with the air running out. And so on. This removes the security blanket of saying Suicide is painless, and in all the worlds you have not died in, you are rich! In 99....99% of all worlds, you sit in the box waiting for the air to run out. I don't know if there are other worlds in the DeWitt/Graham sense (there is no reason to believe Everett ever thought in these terms), but if they exist they appear to be either unreachable by us, or inaccessible beyond short times and distances (coherence issues). In particular, it seems to me there's a causal decision theory argument which says that one should make decisions based on the maximization of the payout. And based on everything we observe in the world around us, which is overwhelmingly classical at the scales we interact in, this means the QS outlook is deprecated. Consider this thought experiment: Alice is facing her quantum mechanics exam at Berkeley. She sees two main approaches to take. First, study hard and try to answer all of the questions as if they mattered. Second, take the lessons of her QS readings and simply _guess_, or write gibberish, killing herself if she fails to get an A. (Or, as above, facing execution, torture, running out of air, etc., just to repudiate the suicide is painless aspect of some people's argument.) From rationality, or causal decision theory, which option should she pick? All indications are that there are virtually no worlds in which random guessers do well. (The odds are readily calcuable, given the type of exam, grading details, etc. We can fairly easily see that a random guesser in the SATs will score around 550-600 combined, but that a random guesser in a non-multiple-choice QM exam will flunk with ovewhelming likelihood.) What should one do? What did all of you actually do? What did Moravec do, what did I do, what did Tegmark do? --Tim May
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
It seems so obvious to me that 'self' and 'time' are an 'illusion' (i.e not representative of an external reality) that I have barely mentioned it. That's Eastern Philosopy 1.01. Thank you, Robert, for pointing that out. I'd also draw the list's attention to a paragraph in Robert's last post that most members will have missed because they stopped reading much earlier, having developed mystic-fatigue: Again to restate the irony I perceive, the experiment mentioned involving altering memory, is in effect, what mystics do to transcend the physical. They actually train themselves to ignore the memory that binds them to this place, making the free to see what their consciousness perceives constantly, but could not grasp or pick out from the noise. Another example of this is sensory deprivation. This is an interesting point. - Original Message - From: rwas rwas [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: James Higgo [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 05, 2001 9:14 PM Subject: Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary? There is no 'you'. 'You' don't 'travel'. There are just different observer moments, some including 'I am Micky and I'm, sick'. -- So? This is trivial. We still percieve ourselves as continuous beings, I think you missed it. I interpret what he's saying to mean that I-ness is an illusion. It implies to me that one's perception of time, integral to I-ness is an illusion. So one moves around an expression space depending on viewpoint. The perception of being continuous in time is illusory in my view. We are already all things we can be, except in consciousness. Those bound to temporal thinking lack the consciousness to transcend it. Robert W. __ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
I have a white Rabbit. Your thought does not include a _flying_ rabbit and hence it seems to you that there should be a reason for this. Really, all you are saying is 'why does my thought not include anything I find strange'. I have said this before. - Original Message - From: Brent Meeker [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: James Higgo [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Michael Rosefield [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, March 04, 2001 9:33 PM Subject: Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary? On 03-Mar-01, James Higgo wrote: Your comment, 'an explanation that can explain anything explains nothing.' is very imporatnt, and many people have said it. It is true of any TOE, as you say, and implies that _you_ should stop looking for a TOE as you will always be dissatisfied. I would be satisfied with a TOE that explains everything, but not anything. Some TOE's are inconsistent with white rabbits - i.e. couldn't explain a white rabbit, and hence have some explanatory power. TOE's that start with all observer moments exist don't seem to have even this. Brent Meeker
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
I think I understand your concern. As to how to form a complete theory, I find that kind of thinking outside my form of expression. Finding an all encompassing theory for consciousness I believe will be impossible. I think all we can do is frame the understanding in terms of what we are trying to achieve with it. In my thinking style, I find myself strugling to turn intuitive thoughts and feelings into words. It's a bit easier if I say: I want to design an AI to achieve *this* kind of robotic cooperation. Trying to develop a *complete* theory is something I've never been able to do. It seems to require forming specifics for things lost in the translation to specifics. For me, understanding of AI and consciousness is the kind of thing one interprets, knowing it's only a limited expression. Robert W. --- Brent Meeker [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 05-Mar-01, rwas rwas wrote: I think you missed it. I interpret what he's saying to mean that I-ness is an illusion. It implies to me that one's perception of time, integral to I-ness is an illusion. So one moves around an expression space depending on viewpoint. It may be an 'illusion', but it still requires an explanation if the theory is to be anything more than hand waving. Not only does the illusion of personal continuity, but also the 'illusion' of space-time and an external (non-mental) world obeying a fairly specific physics. I can well accept that at some 'fundamental' level the ontology is just thoughts, observer moments, or windowless monads. In fact that seems like a good place to start. That's fine, but when I ask how this explains the things we're interested in - perception, physics, space-time, mathematics - all I hear is, It's just a web of observer moments. which explains nothing because it is consistent with anything. Brent Meeker The perception of being continuous in time is illusory in my view. We are already all things we can be, except in consciousness. Those bound to temporal thinking lack the consciousness to transcend it. Robert W. __ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ __ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/ Regards __ Do You Yahoo!? Get email at your own domain with Yahoo! Mail. http://personal.mail.yahoo.com/
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
--- rwas rwas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: versions of many-worlds theories, one might consider a different approach. By deleting certain sectors of one's memory one should be able to travel to different branches of the multiverse. Suppose you are diagnosed with a rare disease. You don't have complaints yet, but you will die within a year. If you could delete the information that you have this particular disease (and also the information that information has been deleted), branches in which you don't have the disease merge with the branches in which you do have the disease. So with very high probability you have traveled to a different branch. I don't know whether to be relieved or annoyed that I'm not the only person to think of this ;D. As a student of mysticism, I meditate often and explore mind, consciousness, and feeling. Your experiment points to the process of quieting the ego. The framework for I-ness that gives meaning to our existence here. At some point one experiences a complete loss of I and any constraint of consciousness formed by life here. One appears to move through something from here to somewhere else. The strange part is when you are conscious in both places. For the purpose of this convo I'll say alternate universes. I had read in mystic writings that time and space are an illusion. It seems physicists (masters of intellect) are coming to the same conclusion 10,000 years after the masters of the soul and mind had. I offer this comparison not as proof, but mainly to demonstrate the irony I perceive. I grew up with a strong perpensity for intellect and mind. I was attracted to mysticism for some strange reason but found conflict between my understanding of the physical and myself from an intellect's point of view. Melding the two worlds of understanding was and still is difficult. I also have a strong interest in AI and have developed my own theories of synthetic consciousness. Interestingly enough, they seem to point to what I've found through meditation, if not exactly representative of the process. One particular experience involved waking up from sleep after meditating about 3 hours prior. I was aware in a place with no time or dimension. I got up to relieve myself and found myself slipping between two realities. The sensation was that of traveling between two points, but not travel like one expects. It seemed reality was being folded depending on where I went. One or the other by itself was'nt too impressive, but when combined (both points joined) the result was unsettling. The awareness of non-dimension while trying to stand upright is an odd experience. I had no trouble standing up but up had no meaning. It was necessary to keep from falling down but I was not consciously bound to dimension or time. Again, I provide this as an illustration of things that have been discussed in this list found and verified (at least to me) in alternate methods. One important point to emphasize is that in these realms, dimension is useless. This means the classical physics falls down. Without a way to measure something or compare something, one trained in thinking where observables are constrained to things measurable would be lost. Emphasis on characteristics and relationships between characteristics in a completely abstract way are the only way to grasp what is observed. For me, an afterlife is a certainty. I have no doubts that physical science will bridge the gap between *here and there*. The biggest issue I see with the theories I see is that they seem to demand that alternate places behave and act like the physical here. In this place, we are confined to act and perceive with the five senses. We do with our physical body as go-between, between consciousness and the physical. It seems most people proposing theories have no experience effecting outcomes with anything but their physical bodies, so it's not too surprising that they constrain their alternate (theories of) realities to the same limitations found here. I'll provide a mystically influenced frame work to consider... The physical (the apparent in mystic terms) is a place where *things* persist. This is unique to this place. Trying to take something that persists (ie., spacecraft, diagnostic vehicle, etc) else where, would result in the persistent object succoming to in-persistent laws. It would dissolve. The discussions here seem to revolve around consciousness, the laws which it is found in, and methods to delineate consciousness. From my perspective, consciousness is the *only* vehicle in which to transcend the realm of persistence. Again to restate the irony I perceive, the experiment mentioned involving altering memory, is in effect, what mystics do to transcend the physical. They actually train themselves to
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
Your comment, 'an explanation that can explain anything explains nothing.' is very imporatnt, and many people have said it. It is true of any TOE, as you say, and implies that _you_ should stop looking for a TOE as you will always be dissatisfied. - Original Message - From: Brent Meeker [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: James Higgo [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Michael Rosefield [EMAIL PROTECTED]; Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2001 5:40 PM Subject: Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary? I checked out your website, but it still seems to me there is a big gap between saying all universes with physics that are consistent with the WAP are experienced and saying that all thoughts (observer moments) exists. In the later case there is no explanation for the seeming existence of coherent sequences of thoughts such as 'me', except to say that if all thoughts exist then this sequence must exist too. The trouble with this is that an explanation that can explain anything explains nothing. Brent Meeker Before I was blind but now I see. I was the one who came up with the expression, 'Quantum Theory of Immortality', and I now see that it's false - and all this stuff in this thread is based on the same mistake. See www.higgo.com/qti , a site dedicated to the idea. There is no 'you'. 'You' don't 'travel'. There are just different observer moments, some including 'I am Micky and I'm, sick'. Even thinking in your passe Newtonian terms, how can a universe in which 'you have a disease' be the same as one in which 'you do not have the disease', just because you don't know it? I see why Jacques gets so irritated by this type of thinking, but it's nice to see him back on the list now then.
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
I checked out your website, but it still seems to me there is a big gap between saying all universes with physics that are consistent with the WAP are experienced and saying that all thoughts (observer moments) exists. In the later case there is no explanation for the seeming existence of coherent sequences of thoughts such as 'me', except to say that if all thoughts exist then this sequence must exist too. The trouble with this is that an explanation that can explain anything explains nothing. Brent Meeker Before I was blind but now I see. I was the one who came up with the expression, 'Quantum Theory of Immortality', and I now see that it's false - and all this stuff in this thread is based on the same mistake. See www.higgo.com/qti , a site dedicated to the idea. There is no 'you'. 'You' don't 'travel'. There are just different observer moments, some including 'I am Micky and I'm, sick'. Even thinking in your passe Newtonian terms, how can a universe in which 'you have a disease' be the same as one in which 'you do not have the disease', just because you don't know it? I see why Jacques gets so irritated by this type of thinking, but it's nice to see him back on the list now then.
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
Bruno wrote: Saibal Mitra wrote: Instead of the previously discussed suicide experiments to test various versions of many-worlds theories, one might consider a different approach. By deleting certain sectors of one's memory one should be able to travel to different branches of the multiverse. Suppose you are diagnosed with a rare disease. You don't have complaints yet, but you will die within a year. If you could delete the information that you have this particular disease (and also the information that information has been deleted), branches in which you don't have the disease merge with the branches in which you do have the disease. So with very high probability you have travelled to a different branch. Be careful because in the process you take the risk of losing a friend. More aptly (3 1 switch) a friend risks losing you. Do you agree that at *some* level we do that all the time? Does death works as personal local and relative memory eraser ? Your suggestion is risky, if not egoist, but, is there another way when the rare disease is fatal? Indeed. Death will erase my memory anyway, so why not do it in a controlled way to maximize the probability of some desired outcome. Thought experiment with speculative memory capture raised quickly the interesting question: how many (first) person exists, really. I don't know the answer. One ? Why not an infinite number? In another post Saibal wrote: I think the source of the problem is equation 1 of Jürgens paper. This equation supposedly gives the probability that I am in a particular universe, but it ignores that multiple copies of me might exist in one universe. Let's consider a simple example. The prior probability of universe i (i0) is denoted as P(i), and i copies of me exist in universe i. In this case, Jürgen computes the propability that if you pick a universe at random, sampled with the prior P, you pick universe i. This probability is, of course, P(i). Therefore Jürgen never has to identify how many times I exist in a particular universe, and can ignore what consciousness actually is. Surerly an open univere where an infinite number of copies of me exist is infinitely more likely than a closed universe where I don't have any copies, assuming that the priors are of the same order? Would you agree that a quantum multiverse could play the role of a particular open universe where an infinite number of copies of me exists? I agree that this could be the case. If you agree, would that mean we have anthropic reasons to believe in a quantum-like multiverse? That's an interesting point! Saibal
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
From: James Higgo Before I was blind but now I see. I was the one who came up with the expression, 'Quantum Theory of Immortality', and I now see that it's false - and all this stuff in this thread is based on the same mistake. See www.higgo.com/qti , a site dedicated to the idea. Hey, I'm still counting it as original! I _did_ come up with it independently And I still can't see anything wrong with it. Thanks for the web-site, though. There is no 'you'. 'You' don't 'travel'. There are just different observer moments, some including 'I am Micky and I'm, sick'. So? This is trivial. We still percieve ourselves as continuous beings, and the qualia is what I'm talking about here. The point is that one will _always_ have observer moments to go to. The illusion of self is maintained. I'm pretty sure at least one of us is misunderstanding the other. Even thinking in your passe Newtonian terms,how can a universe in which 'you have a disease' be the same as one in which 'you do not have the disease', just because you don't know it? Oh Please don't do that. You don't know how I think, and I really don't see why you jumped to this conclusion. The wayI see it now, the observer moment is all we have. I think I may have picked up the followingmetaphor here, but I'll use it nonetheless: did Jack and Jill go up the hill in August? Does it matter? The rhyme leaves it undefined, so it's a meaningless question; they did and they didn't. We belong to all universes that generate this observer moment, and only a sort of statistical Ockham's Razor says which ones we'll perceive ourselves to be in next. What's the problem here? I see why Jacques gets so irritated by this type of thinking, but it's nice to see him back on the list now then. What type of thinking? Please, I don't want to get into a catfight here. I'm on this list, presumably, for the same reasonyou are: to try and see the whole picture.
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
Oh, as to 'this is trivial - we still perceive ourselves as continuous beings' - I guess as far as you're concerned,the Earth does not move. - Original Message - From: Michael Rosefield To: James Higgo ; Saibal Mitra ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2001 3:34 PM Subject: Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary? From: James Higgo Before I was blind but now I see. I was the one who came up with the expression, 'Quantum Theory of Immortality', and I now see that it's false - and all this stuff in this thread is based on the same mistake. See www.higgo.com/qti , a site dedicated to the idea. Hey, I'm still counting it as original! I _did_ come up with it independently And I still can't see anything wrong with it. Thanks for the web-site, though. There is no 'you'. 'You' don't 'travel'. There are just different observer moments, some including 'I am Micky and I'm, sick'. So? This is trivial. We still percieve ourselves as continuous beings, and the qualia is what I'm talking about here. The point is that one will _always_ have observer moments to go to. The illusion of self is maintained. I'm pretty sure at least one of us is misunderstanding the other. Even thinking in your passe Newtonian terms,how can a universe in which 'you have a disease' be the same as one in which 'you do not have the disease', just because you don't know it? Oh Please don't do that. You don't know how I think, and I really don't see why you jumped to this conclusion. The wayI see it now, the observer moment is all we have. I think I may have picked up the followingmetaphor here, but I'll use it nonetheless: did Jack and Jill go up the hill in August? Does it matter? The rhyme leaves it undefined, so it's a meaningless question; they did and they didn't. We belong to all universes that generate this observer moment, and only a sort of statistical Ockham's Razor says which ones we'll perceive ourselves to be in next. What's the problem here? I see why Jacques gets so irritated by this type of thinking, but it's nice to see him back on the list now then. What type of thinking? Please, I don't want to get into a catfight here. I'm on this list, presumably, for the same reasonyou are: to try and see the whole picture.
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
You miss the point. You do not go anywhere. You are this observer moment. No observer moment 'becomes' another OM, or it would be a different OM to begin with. I guess this is extremely hard for people to understand, because it denies that people exist. - Original Message - From: Michael Rosefield To: James Higgo ; Saibal Mitra ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, March 03, 2001 3:34 PM Subject: Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary? From: James Higgo Before I was blind but now I see. I was the one who came up with the expression, 'Quantum Theory of Immortality', and I now see that it's false - and all this stuff in this thread is based on the same mistake. See www.higgo.com/qti , a site dedicated to the idea. Hey, I'm still counting it as original! I _did_ come up with it independently And I still can't see anything wrong with it. Thanks for the web-site, though. There is no 'you'. 'You' don't 'travel'. There are just different observer moments, some including 'I am Micky and I'm, sick'. So? This is trivial. We still percieve ourselves as continuous beings, and the qualia is what I'm talking about here. The point is that one will _always_ have observer moments to go to. The illusion of self is maintained. I'm pretty sure at least one of us is misunderstanding the other. Even thinking in your passe Newtonian terms,how can a universe in which 'you have a disease' be the same as one in which 'you do not have the disease', just because you don't know it? Oh Please don't do that. You don't know how I think, and I really don't see why you jumped to this conclusion. The wayI see it now, the observer moment is all we have. I think I may have picked up the followingmetaphor here, but I'll use it nonetheless: did Jack and Jill go up the hill in August? Does it matter? The rhyme leaves it undefined, so it's a meaningless question; they did and they didn't. We belong to all universes that generate this observer moment, and only a sort of statistical Ockham's Razor says which ones we'll perceive ourselves to be in next. What's the problem here? I see why Jacques gets so irritated by this type of thinking, but it's nice to see him back on the list now then. What type of thinking? Please, I don't want to get into a catfight here. I'm on this list, presumably, for the same reasonyou are: to try and see the whole picture.
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
Before I was blind but now I see. I was the one who came up with the expression, 'Quantum Theory of Immortality', and I now see that it's false - and all this stuff in this thread is based on the same mistake. See www.higgo.com/qti , a site dedicated to the idea. There is no 'you'. 'You' don't 'travel'. There are just different observer moments, some including 'I am Micky and I'm, sick'. Even thinking in your passe Newtonian terms,how can a universe in which 'you have a disease' be the same as one in which 'you do not have the disease', just because you don't know it? I see why Jacques gets so irritated by this type of thinking, but it's nice to see him back on the list now then. - Original Message - From: Michael Rosefield To: Saibal Mitra ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 3:30 PM Subject: Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary? *Phew!*; this afternoon I finally got round to reading the 190-odd messages I have received from this list From: Saibal Mitra Instead of the previously discussed suicide experiments to test variousversions of many-worlds theories, one might consider a different approach. By deleting certain sectors of one's memory one should be able to travelto different branches of the multiverse. Suppose you are diagnosed with a rare disease. You don't have complaints yet, but you will diewithin a year. If you could delete the information that you have thisparticular disease (and also the information that information hasbeen deleted), branches in which you don't have the diseasemerge with the branches in which you do have the disease. So withvery high probability you have travelled to a different branch. I don't know whether to be relieved or annoyed that I'm not the only person to think of this ;D. http://pub45.ezboard.com/fwastelandofwondersfrm1.showMessage?topicID=353.topicindex=5 I'm guessing this is quite a common idea? Rats, I thought I was so great I_did_ thinkof the following today, though: If you take this sort of thing one step further, an afterlife is inevitable; there will always be systems - however improbable - where the mind lives on. For instance, you could just be the victim of an hallucination, your mind could be downloaded, you could be miraculously cured, and other _much_ more bizzare ones. Since you won't be around to notice the worlds where you did die, they don't count, and you are effectively immortal. Or at least you will perceive yourself to live on, which is the same thing. When I thought of it, it seemed startlingly original and clever. Looking at the posts I have from this list, I'm beginning to suspect it's neither Anyhow, while this sort of wild thinking iswonderfully pure andcathartic, itnever seems to lead anywhere with testable or useful implications. So far, anyway What's the opinion here on which are more fundamental - minds or universes? I'd say they're both definable and hence exist de facto, and that each implies the other. Well,I'm new here. Is there anything I should know about this list? Apart from the fact that everyone's so terribly educated Feel free to go a bit OT ;). Michael Rosefield, Sheffield, England "I'm a Solipsist, and I must say I'm surprised there aren't more of us." -- letter to Bertrand Russell
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
*Phew!*; this afternoon I finally got round to reading the 190-odd messages I have received from this list From: Saibal Mitra Instead of the previously discussed suicide experiments to test variousversions of many-worlds theories, one might consider a different approach. By deleting certain sectors of one's memory one should be able to travelto different branches of the multiverse. Suppose you are diagnosed with a rare disease. You don't have complaints yet, but you will diewithin a year. If you could delete the information that you have thisparticular disease (and also the information that information hasbeen deleted), branches in which you don't have the diseasemerge with the branches in which you do have the disease. So withvery high probability you have travelled to a different branch. I don't know whether to be relieved or annoyed that I'm not the only person to think of this ;D. http://pub45.ezboard.com/fwastelandofwondersfrm1.showMessage?topicID=353.topicindex=5 I'm guessing this is quite a common idea? Rats, I thought I was so great I_did_ thinkof the following today, though: If you take this sort of thing one step further, an afterlife is inevitable; there will always be systems - however improbable - where the mind lives on. For instance, you could just be the victim of an hallucination, your mind could be downloaded, you could be miraculously cured, and other _much_ more bizzare ones. Since you won't be around to notice the worlds where you did die, they don't count, and you are effectively immortal. Or at least you will perceive yourself to live on, which is the same thing. When I thought of it, it seemed startlingly original and clever. Looking at the posts I have from this list, I'm beginning to suspect it's neither Anyhow, while this sort of wild thinking iswonderfully pure andcathartic, itnever seems to lead anywhere with testable or useful implications. So far, anyway What's the opinion here on which are more fundamental - minds or universes? I'd say they're both definable and hence exist de facto, and that each implies the other. Well,I'm new here. Is there anything I should know about this list? Apart from the fact that everyone's so terribly educated Feel free to go a bit OT ;). Michael Rosefield, Sheffield, England "I'm a Solipsist, and I must say I'm surprised there aren't more of us." -- letter to Bertrand Russell
Re: (Quantum) suicide not necessary?
Saibal Mitra wrote: Instead of the previously discussed suicide experiments to test various versions of many-worlds theories, one might consider a different approach. By deleting certain sectors of one's memory one should be able to travel to different branches of the multiverse. Suppose you are diagnosed with a rare disease. You don't have complaints yet, but you will die within a year. If you could delete the information that you have this particular disease (and also the information that information has been deleted), branches in which you don't have the disease merge with the branches in which you do have the disease. So with very high probability you have travelled to a different branch. Be careful because in the process you take the risk of losing a friend. More aptly (3 1 switch) a friend risks losing you. Do you agree that at *some* level we do that all the time? Does death works as personal local and relative memory eraser ? Your suggestion is risky, if not egoist, but, is there another way when the rare disease is fatal? Thought experiment with speculative memory capture raised quickly the interesting question: how many (first) person exists, really. I don't know the answer. One ? In another post Saibal wrote: I think the source of the problem is equation 1 of Jürgens paper. This equation supposedly gives the probability that I am in a particular universe, but it ignores that multiple copies of me might exist in one universe. Let's consider a simple example. The prior probability of universe i (i0) is denoted as P(i), and i copies of me exist in universe i. In this case, Jürgen computes the propability that if you pick a universe at random, sampled with the prior P, you pick universe i. This probability is, of course, P(i). Therefore Jürgen never has to identify how many times I exist in a particular universe, and can ignore what consciousness actually is. Surerly an open univere where an infinite number of copies of me exist is infinitely more likely than a closed universe where I don't have any copies, assuming that the priors are of the same order? Would you agree that a quantum multiverse could play the role of a particular open universe where an infinite number of copies of me exists? If you agree, would that mean we have anthropic reasons to believe in a quantum-like multiverse? Bruno
Re: Quantum Suicide
Bob Hearn wrote (from [EMAIL PROTECTED] question): I asked Tegmark what he thought about the idea that one could view life as a quantum suicide experiment, in the sense that if it is at all possible that I will be alive in, say, 100 years, then I will experience this - by definition, I won't experience the branches in which I'm not! This could mean everyone is immortal in their own world. Tegmark did not agree. But I do agree. I have even shown that a minimal platonistic assumption together with mechanism (the doctrine that I'm finitely descriptible) entails a similar form of immortality. I have also developped the quantum suicide idea in my 1988 and 1991 paper. (ref. in my thesis http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal). I also derive in the thesis a Quantum Logic from the (godelian-like) arithmetisation of the idea that by definition, I won't experience the branches in which I'm not. More about Mechanist or Quantum immortality, related to the idea that Everything Exist (but then what is a thing?) can be find in the everything list discussion at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/. Not all everythinger agrees with such form of immortality (to be sure). I'm not quite sure I *like* the idea but I don't believe it is easy to logically escape it when you accept either QM-without-collapse, or just Digital Mechanism. See also James Higgo web page on that question: http://www.higgo.com/quantum/qtidebate.htm About [EMAIL PROTECTED]'s original question: Can an observer really decide if the Copenhagen interpretation is false by performing a quantum suicide experiment as proposed by Tegmark (See http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9709032 )? I think that if a CopenhagenQM repeats quantum suicides, and survives, then he will either become an Everett fan or he will become a quite a-la-von-Neumann solipsist (believing he is the only one able to reduce the wave packet!). Bruno
Re: Quantum suicide
Hello. Max, you haven't responded to the arguments I've made against it. (e.g. http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/msg00287.html, http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/msg00306.html, http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/msg00313.html, http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/msg00349.html, etc.) If you will be in NYC again or want to come up here and have a discussion about about it, we could arrange a meeting, since that would probably allow a more effective discussion than by email. - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Graduate Student / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://pages.nyu.edu/~jqm1584/ | Add C | | ono | | n | |x n |x |ox e | |ooxc | |xoox t | | J.M. 4 |
Re: quantum suicide = deadly dumb
On Wed, Dec 09, 1998 at 08:12:38PM -0500, Jacques M. Mallah wrote: On the contrary, it's the same. That is easy to prove: suppose the MWI was false but assume the universe is spacially infinite, so there are other people like you in distant galaxies. Clearly they have no bearing on what you do, so you should make the usual decisions, including of course any suicide decisions. It is no different in the MWI; the only difference is that the others are in different parts of wavefunction configuration space, rather than regular space. Unfortunately because currently accepted decision theory makes some metaphysical assumptions, it can be compatible with a spacially infinite universe but not with MWI. Basicly decision theory depends on the idea of alternate realities and the notion that an individual chooses the actual reality among the alternatives as he makes decisions and acts upon them. But according to MWI, all alternatives are real and have predetermined measures. I can't figure out how to apply decision theory with the MWI. If you can, show us how, and please include an example. maybe the decision theory itself (I must confess that my only knowledge of it comes from what Wei writes here) is somewhat metaphysical because it assumes that an individual can actually change the evolution of the world (acts upon it). In any model (not only MWI) where human beings are nothing but rather complicated physical systems, free will is an illusion. They evolve simply (including in their choices) following the physical laws. So you can theoretically determine what would be the best choice following some criteria, but you are never certain that a given physical system will follow this way. In MWI, you can also calculate a best way, but you are certain that other ways will be followed as well. In one world interpretation, you can try to programm a system (or a brain) to maximise the probability of evolving along a good way, but I think it is also true in MWI (maximise the number of worlds where the good way is followed). Gilles
Re: quantum suicide = deadly dumb
On Thu, Dec 10, 1998 at 03:20:58PM +0100, Gilles HENRI wrote: maybe the decision theory itself (I must confess that my only knowledge of it comes from what Wei writes here) is somewhat metaphysical because it assumes that an individual can actually change the evolution of the world (acts upon it). In any model (not only MWI) where human beings are nothing but rather complicated physical systems, free will is an illusion. They evolve simply (including in their choices) following the physical laws. So you can theoretically determine what would be the best choice following some criteria, but you are never certain that a given physical system will follow this way. In MWI, you can also calculate a best way, but you are certain that other ways will be followed as well. In one world interpretation, you can try to programm a system (or a brain) to maximise the probability of evolving along a good way, but I think it is also true in MWI (maximise the number of worlds where the good way is followed). But in the MWI, you can't maximize anything since all of the measures are predetermined by boundary conditions. I agree the problem is with decision theory, and that's why I suggest we find a new decision theory rather than reject the MWI. I think this is serious and of interest to more than just economists, because decision theory appears to be the only justification we have for Bayesian probability theory. Probability theory was invented for gambling and its axioms are still justified by showing that they lead (via decision theory) to reasonable behavior. Without a viable decision theory, an MWIer would have to either give up probability theory or accept it as a given without justification. Then it won't even be clear what probabilities mean, since they'll just be useless numbers.
RE: quantum suicide = a jolly good idea
Max's point is that this is a flaw in the argument you're criticising. You should have said 'yes way!'. But you propose a neat solution with your brain-zapper. Where can I buy one? -Original Message- From: Jacques M. Mallah [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 04 December 1998 18:10 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: quantum suicide = deadly dumb Higgo James wrote: Jaques, try reading what Max wrote, then post a better reply. Higgo, try reading what I wrote, then post a better reply. Jacques Mallah wrote: Max Tegmark wrote: However, I think there's a flaw. After all, dying isn't a binary thing where you're either dead or alive - rather, there's a whole continuum of states of progressively decreasing self-awareness. What makes the quantum suicide work is that you force an abrupt transition. I suspect that when I get old, my brain cells will gradually give out (indeed, that's already started happening...) so that I keep feeling self-aware, but less and less so, the final death being quite anti-climactic, sort of like when an amoeba croaks. Do you buy this? No way. It's a desperate attempt to save a very bad idea, and it shows. I can't blame you for wanting to, but what I really respect is when someone admits he made a mistake. I assume this is what you (Higgo) are referring to? I stand by it. Would you have us believe that if only I could hook up a device to my head, that could measure my neurons to see if they are giving out (which is of course a quantum process), and instantly kill me if they are, then since only the few copies of me with healthy brains will exist, that I would be immortal? Ridiculous. BTW, for more on the anthropic principle, see my page on it at http://pages.nyu.edu/~jqm1584/anth.htm - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Graduate Student / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://pages.nyu.edu/~jqm1584/
