Ok lets assume for the sake of argument that many worlds is true etc.
How are the other reality versions of you really you?(assuming a human with your same DNA is alive in that reality) Instead of “you” it seems more like a clone of you that has had wildly different life experiences.
Is a you with vastly different experiences and personality in any way “you”? I mean I would not say that a identical twin of mine still living means I am still alive.
Apparently, if you are a physicist of slight note, your random bullshitting and wish-fulfillment fantasies deserve their own Wikipedia page now. :rolleyes:
(The rolleyes is not directed at you, grude. I agree with what you say. you shouldn’t get it. It’s stupid. People good at math can still be very stupid.)
The point isn’t that the various people in different quantum realities are you, but that the one person who survives doesn’t know about any of the rest of the ones who died. From his perspective he is immortal. There is no “you” involved.
At grude’s link:
And even if it were a perfect clone (pace Hollywood) it would not be you. Identical twins are perfect clones but they can have quite different personalities.
The quote you linked to, njtt, doesn’t really contradict **BigT’s **interpretation. From Everett’s point of view, his consciousness never ends. The ones that die are never aware that they died, because they ceased to exist and therefore have no memory of dying.
QI can’t be proven or disproven- it’s unfalsifiable. I suspect that it’s true, but I won’t rely on it because the only way you’ll ever know if it’s true is if you don’t die… and even then, you’ll never know if you just got lucky that time.
Nonsense. The Everett who said that, and any other momentary Everett you can point to, will die many times over. And you are ignoring Tegmark’s argument (OK I don’t really know what it is or how good it is, but it is referenced in the Wiki article, and, other things being equal, I am inclined to believe the argument that leads to a reasonably modest commonsensical conclusion rather than the one whose conclusion is an infantile wish-fullfullment fantasy contradicted by all human experience to date).
And even that, of course, is all assuming Everett’s grotesquely ontologically extravagant and completely untestable theory is true.
If one accepts the Many-Worlds interpretation, then the analogue to trying to prolong one’s life is to try to maximize the proportion of worlds one inhabits. Quantum immortality doesn’t do that, and so it should not be viewed as providing anything analogous to prolonged life.
This assumes that there’s a non-zero probability of a human being able to live forever. I don’t think I’m willing to take that as an axiom.
Would an analogous situation be that in some universe there exists a chunk of radioactive material that never decays?
That makes zero sense. The other worlds are inaccessible to me–I don’t care about them. I only need *one *world to inhabit; one in which I miraculously avoid any events that kill me.
Suppose I lock myself in Schrodinger’s Cat Box (stinky). In one universe, I die, and in another I emerge alive and well. I can do this a thousand times and still there will be a universe where I’m alive, even though I’m dead in 999 other universes (well, a lot more than that, but I’m simplifying here). I’ll be heralded as the luckiest man alive since I’ll have beaten 1:2^1000 odds.
The only question is if that person is actually *me *in any meaningful sense. It certainly seems like it: he shares all my memories. But when the gas is released, surely someone is there to experience it, and that person dies.
Until we have a better understanding of consciousness, I don’t think we can really say much on the matter.
The point you may be missing is that there is no magic bubble around “you” that “keeps ‘you’, ‘you’.” The “you” now is different from the “you” of 5 minutes ago, and so on. Many of the many variants of “you” in the MWI are no different from the kinds of variations in “you” that you experience in your own lifetime. Therefore there is no reason to preference one over the other.
A useful tool to start thinking about these concepts coherently is imagine what would happen to “you” if you could be “beamed up” ala Star Trek. Imagine if your body was dissolved at (x1,t1) and re-assembled at (x2,t2). Would “you” die? The correct answer is “no.” If you don’t see this, perhaps it would help to imagine that x1-x2–>0 and t1-t2–>0. Then the answer becomes obvious, and hopefully you realize that the value of x1-x2 and t1-t2 is irrelevant. Furthermore, you can ask questions like “well, what if the “re-assembled” “me” was slightly wrong?”: an atom in my left foot was put back in the wrong place. Would I still be “me” from a standpoint of conscious experience? Of course. Careful thinking about these kinds of concepts and extending them in various directions might help you begin to understand some of the interesting consequences of the MWI for a conscious observer.
Exactly. The concept of self is not fixed. Ten minutes ago, I was a person who had not read this thread. Now I’m a person that has read this thread. Does that make me a different person? I think pretty much everyone would agree that I maintained a continuity of self through this transition.
Tegmark is an advocate of the idea of quantum immortality (as well as the MWI), so I’m not sure why you are using him to justify your position. His point is just a technicality, that in some circumstances you may not be truly immortal, however the basic ideas of quantum immortality are still very much at play: you can experience a vastly prolonged life that, from your perspective, appears to be due to an incredible streak of good luck.
Boy do you have a chip on your shoulder. Others please be made aware that njtt’s pronouncements are not representative of majority scientific opinion (that’s not to say the MWI is universally accepted either).
There was recently a long thread about the transporter problem of philosophy (i.e. would you survive using a star trek style transporter)
Transporters and destruction of the self: What am I missing here?
Broadly speaking (and trying hard to avoid kicking off that whole debate again), there is something not right about our intuitive sense of a continued self. Either it’s an illusion; and at every instance you are a new consciousness, with just your memories in common with the you of 5 minutes ago.
Or there is something beyond the current neuronal conception of the brain (e.g. the quantum effects speculated by Roger Penrose in his Orch-OR concept).
If it’s the former, then of course you have plenty, in some cases all, your memories in common with the you of alternate universes. You’d have as much cause to say that person is you as the entity you identify with from this universe.
I should also note that, quite the contrary to your assessment, the MWI’s relative ontological simplicity is the primary reason for its attractiveness. It is rather the existence of a few technical issues that have really kept the MWI from being more widely adopted as the most natural QM interpretation. As it is apropos, I thought I’d mention that today Sean Carroll (mainstream theoretical physicist who is the most frequent contributor to the popular science blog Cosmic Variance) addresses a proposed solution to one of these technical issues in a very nice piece here. To those who think the MWI is somehow more complicated or are mystified by it, take note of Sean’s statement: “The MWI holds that we have a Hilbert space, and a wave function, and a rule (Schrödinger’s equation) for how the wave function evolves with time, and that’s it. No extra assumptions about “measurements” are allowed.”. And that is very correct. That is it. That is the entire theory. The rest is just working out the consequences.
My conciousness ceases to exist every night. There is no alternate timeline in which I stay awake forever. QI disproved.
Nope. You (presumably) woke up this morning. From your point of view, your consciousness was uninterrupted. Sure, you may have *reportedly *slept, but can you *remember *being unconscious?
I don’t think the Wikipedia article linked to in the OP is very clear or well written. Let me try to present the argument in clearer terms.
Suppose the many worlds interpretation is true.
Suppose I am in a chamber, and every ten seconds, based on a quantum event with a 50/50 probability, I am either killed or not killed.
At the ten second mark, there are worlds in which I am killed, and worlds in which I am not killed. (From 1 and 2)
I don’t experience any world in which I am killed. (Premise)
If there are any worlds in which I am not killed, I experience at least one of them. (Premise)
Hence I am not killed. (From 3 and 5)
The same reasoning goes through for each further ten second iteration of the experiment. (by a kind of mathematical induction)
Hence, I will survive the experiment, no matter how long it is prolonged. (From 6 and 7)
So then: If MWI is true, then anyone who underwent the described experiment for any time interval would survive. (From 1 through 8)
To object to the conclusion because it resembles the fulfillment of an infantile fantasy is not productive. Rejecting a conclusion because one does not like it is not in keeping with any reasonable philosophical method. What needs to happen is either one of the premises be shown false, or else the reasoning be shown to have some fatal flaw.
The only premises are lines 4 and 5. They both look true to me, but there’s probably a lot of conceptual stuff to clear up when it comes to the question of what it would mean to “experience a world in which I am killed.” That may be a promising line of attack.
Each inference appears valid to me, but there are on the other hand a lot of technical steps being skipped so something could turn up there as well.
BTW quantum immortality doesn’t resemble an infantile fulfillment of fantasy, because the natural implication of it is that we are all doomed to a tortured and solitary existence for as long as the universe itself continues to exist.
Nothing about QI implies you survive healthy, and in fact the probabilities are much in favor of you surviving in unbearable pain, probably without a coherently rational psychological state for most of that survival.
There is a hidden premise contained in inference to line 3. The premise is something like:
“Multi-world analogues of a person are that person.”
That’s pretty substantive. Drop it, and the conclusion becomes something more like:
“If MWI is true, then should any person P undergo the described experiment, an entity will survive the experiment which is physically related to P in exactly the same way all future selves are physically related to their former selves.”
Then it’s a separate question whether the surviving entity “really is” the person P or not.