Do you really think it’s appropiate to joke about something as serious as suicide?
:smack: Sweet Jesus, Ryan, I take it for granted that no one is stupid enough to actually try this experiment. Do try to remember that not everything is meant to be taken literally and without context, would you? It seems to work okay for the rest of the world.
g8rguy-> I think Ryan’s just joking back.
Back on topic:
If we accept the premises of the QS concept. To make my little rig work I’d need to: make every element in the system work to a level of confidence that surpases the chances of NOT winning the lottery, by as much as possible.
This would give me, my soul, my viewpoint, the best chances of “traversing” the path that is most desirable.
So, it might be preferable to take out human decision out of the system. That is to say, once I start the experiment, I shouldn´t be able to stop it.
Any other Ideas?
PD: Ryan, just in case,… this is a thought experiment. Don’t try it out.
I just talked to Schrodinger about this little experiment.
He says he’d rather just lie on the newspaper and purr. Quantum thought experiments hurt his fuzzy little head.
Ummm, for me,
I don’t believe the ‘consciousness’ survives after we are dead, and there certainly is only one universe without parallels.
So you would never be saved, and killing yourself is pointless because no other “you’s” will get the money.
That’s just how I see it.
And yes, I don’t believe in any form of afterlife.
In the scenario though, after reading info on page of link…
You also would get old and die in any parallels…and cease to exist in all eventually. Right??? I mean, one thousand years from now…after you die…there would be no other forms of your consciousness left in any parallels.
Yes.
Well, Drabble, you need to consider what the chance is of surviving to age 1000. Is it actually precisely zero? If it isn’t zero, then, according to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, there exists a world in which it happens.
Keep in mind that according to the accepted principles of quantum mechanics a particle has a nonzero chance of being found in any position whatsoever (except points where its wave function is exactly 0, but this generally doesn’t matter). This means that, for example, accumulated errors in DNA have some chance of spontaneously repairing themselves. Harmful bacteria have some chance of spontaneously dying due to the malfunction of their cellular machinery. There is some chance that accumulated plaque in a person’s arteries will spontaneously dissolve or even vanish entirely from the body. There is even some chance, in fact, that enough hydrogen atoms will quantum-tunnel into the sun’s core from its atmosphere (or even from the atmospheres of completely different stars!) to keep the sun burning for far longer than its predicted ten-billion year span. Even if the protons that compose matter decay with some extremely long half-life on the order of 10^33 years, there is always a chance that some particular set of protons simply won’t.
There will always be a nonzero chance of personal survival. Thus, according to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, there will always be worlds in which a person is alive.
In my opinion, the best argument against the Quantum Theory of Immortality (assuming you accept the many-worlds interpretation) is based on probability. In general, we assume that the probability of a given outcome is the same for all observers. If I have a one-in-33-million chance of winning the lottery, I have that chance regardless of who is doing the calculation. When I calculate the probability, why should I be allowed to neglect the worlds in which I will be dead? To do this would essentially require that an additional axiom be added to probability theory that is not obviously justified.
Yes, it is precisely zero. No human can live that long. There is zero chance that you’ll live to be a thousand or a million, or a zillion. 
Drabble, I think you’re a bit behind the curve.
Of course it is ridiculous to suggest that humans can live to be a 1000. That is, it is ridiculous to suggest it with today’s technology. But imagine the technology a billion years from now. There are already suggestions amongst scientific and medical circles that age may just be a disease that can be reversed or halted. If we could develop a technology that would somehow halt the ageing of cells then we would be immortal. This technology is a distant prospect now in our universe but the Many-Worlds idea means that if this technology has ever been developed anywhere in the Multiverse then it is available to use.
Remember every Universe is possible so there are Universes where mankind began a couple of billion years earlier than it did in our Universe. So they are a couple of billion years ahead of us in terms of technology.
And they exist now silmultaneously with us, just in other Universes.
The problem with Quantum Suicide, to me, is that the OP makes certain assumptions ie that our consciousness is dependant on us being alive. The OP assumes that in 99% of Universes we would die from the explosives and that in 1% of Universes we would live and our consciousness would then funnel down to those 1% of Universes where we lived. Our consciousnesses would abandon the other 99% of Universes because we are dead in those Universes.
How do you know our consciousness deserts us when we are dead? What experiments have you done? Maybe dead people retain their consciousnesses after they are dead.
If every Universe has existed then that means there are Universes that have suddenly sparked out of existence. We are dying all the time. Is our consciousness continually being funnelled down to those consciousnesses that are still alive or do all the dead us’s have their own consciousnesses?
Maybe when a Universe splits off from this one a separate and different consciousness splits off too so if you die in this Universe that particular consciousness dies too. Sure other similar consciousness live on in other Universes but they aren’t your consciousness.
If our consciousnesses are continually being funnelled then we all have natural immortality anyway. We don’t need to blow ourselves up since all our consciousnesses are continually being funnelled down to those consciousnesses that are still alive.
Although, I agree it’d be nice to be a lottery winner in all those Universes and we might as well help the odds in our favour. We may all be immortal but I’d rather be immortal and rich than immortal and poor.
So yeah, ultimately I say build the machine and let us know what happens.
There is only one universe, and I was talking about a human could not live a billion years from today. Arguing those points with me is pointless because there is no other universe. There’s no proof.
discussions like this are fun…possibilities…blah blah, and I should know better to comment because I don’t believe those possibilities…so I’ll just pretend I was never silly enough to post here…carry on…very interesting.
I’m afraid, that’s where you’re wrong. There is proof.
You fire a single photon from a lasar into a sealed box. Halfway inside the box you place a sheet of cardboard with two slits in it 5mm apart. Close enough together so that the photon goes through both slits. When the photon hits the back wall of the box, you get a weird pattern consisting of vertical bands of light.
In between the bands there is dark.
However if you cut two more slits in the cardboard (so there are now four slits) some of the bands of light disappear. Why?
Something must be interfering with the photon you fired into the box. But what? The thing that is interfering with the photon acts like a photon since it must have come into the box when you fired the photon in. This mysterious thing also gets blocked by anything that blocks light - if you cover up two of the slits again then the bands of light miraculously re-appear.
The only thing that can be reacting with this photon is another photon. But you know there’s only one photon in the box because you only fired one in!
The only explanation (according to the Many-Worlds theory) is that this “shadow photon” must have come from a parallel universe. Where else did it come from?
They’ve tried every conceivable experiment to eliminate the idea. Maybe this is all some kind of mistake or a misunderstanding? But the parallel universe theory has withstood all scientific examination.
To the point where many (if not most) modern physicists now tend to accept the idea of parallel universes as unarguable. There are still problems with the theory but I think it’s fair to say that all modern phsycists at least have respect for the idea and a fair number (maybe most) are sold on it.
This is all very nice in theory but since there is no evidence that we can interact with other universes (if they even exist), I wouldn’t go about blowing yourself up in order to become “The One”.
I think it’s been pretty well established that our consciousness does not “funnel down” from one universe to the next. The evidence being that we do not store the memories of a thousand universes.
I think people are looking at the Quantum Suicide experiment backwards. Any reference to the experiment I’ve seen uses it as an explanation as to why our particular universe has just the right conditions for creating life. The answer, of course, is because if it didn’t, there would not be anyone around to contemplate it.
I’ve heard that photon in a box theory before, but it’s not proof by a long shot.
What is the universe when you take out all the matter and light in it? It doesn’t end, it doesn’t begin. It’s not particles…because you already took those out. It’s basically nothing. Nothing can’t end, or begin, and nothing can’t exist in parallels.
Humans have quite the imaginations, but when you come right down to it, there is only one universe.
And you can’t travel in time…the ‘future’ hasn’t happened yet, you can’t go where existance hasn’t happened yet, and the past is gone. You can’t go back where you already exist…the earth was here 10 years ago, and still exists in that space now, and you can’t ‘travel’ back to the earth of 10 years ago. It’s the same earth you occupy now. In fact, the air you breathed 10 years ago has travelled around the world a few times! The water you drink is the same people have drank for centuries…water…those molecules could have been any part of the planet and things in it…hydrogen and oxygen get around! It’s not new.
Yeah, I’m wierd, but photons in a box won’t be enough to prove a another universe/s…I have to see something of these parallels.
Drabble, what is existence? This isn’t a question with a single clear answer which is obvious to everyone. What if, for instance, all self-consistent mathematical systems exist, and what we call our universe is merely a specific set of rules? What if the mere fact that a person is capable of imagining something is sufficient to show that that thing exists?
You may be tempted to dismiss such abstract possibilities as multiple universes or time travel out of hand, but they are not inherently contradictory. We don’t have direct physical evidence that other universes physically related to ours exist (Jojo’s experiment notwithstanding) but nor do we have any evidence that they do not exist. However, we have good theoretical reason to believe that they do. In addition, evidence can have no bearing on the question of whether universes exist which are not physically connected to ours, but there is nothing inherently absurd about the idea.
Many people take such seemingly bizarre speculation quite seriously indeed, and I believe we are justified in doing so. What is truth in fact may be quite different from what we humans intuitively feel to be true. Human intuition evolved to deal with a very limited set of circumstances here on earth, and it is not always reliable when stretched far beyond that with which we were previously familiar.
For those of you that would like to read some interesting essays on Quantum Immortality and the like, I recommend this webpage: http://www.higgo.com/qti/index.htm
Unfortunately, the author died in 2001, at least in the universes we have access to.
You’re right, of course. In your next paragraph you come close to the reasoning behind QI, though…
That’s called “Solipsism”. And it’s the key to QI.
In Universe A, you blow yourself up.
In Universe B, you TRY to blow yourself up, but something interferes- the wires short, the explosives are duds, you’ve somehow built up an immunity to explosives. Whatever.
Now, what’s the major difference between Universe A and Universe B? It’s that, in Universe B, you’re still around to say, “Wow, I’m one lucky son-of-a-bitch!”. In Universe A, you’re not observing anything. At this point, Universe A is no longer important- only Universe B, since according to YOUR worldview, it’s the only outcome in which you’re still around to observe.
And, according to the Quantum Suicide experiment, you’ve also won the lottery.
There’s no “funneling” of consciousness- all the QS experiment does is winnow out the undesirable Universes.
Want proof? It’s all around you. You’re still alive. Think of all the random occurences that had to happen in the Universe before you came about, that were NECESSARY for you to come about. Think about how many times you could’ve been killed in your life- fire, lightning, the occasional meteor-to-the-head- and yet, somehow, miraculously, you’re still here to observe the Universe.
Er, pardon. In place of “Solipsism”, above, insert “The Anthropic Principle”. It’s late, I’m tired, and a still a little freaked out from rewatching “The Ring” and “Ringu”, both while sitting in a dark room. :eek:
Isn’t there the possibility that this experiment could land you dead in the one universe where Jack Chick is actually right and that you get hauled up to a faceless figure on a big chair, an angel that looks like Luke Duke says “his name does not appear Lord”, then you’re cast into the fiery pit “AAAAIIIIEEEEeeeee…”
Haw Haw Haw.