Quantum immortality does not predict that you will not sleep any more than it predicts that you will not observe someone else’s death. There is a subjective experience of having been asleep, and a subjective experience of observing someone else’s death, but not a subjective experience of having died.
The reason I don’t trust quantum immortality is that I expect that whatever explains the Born probabilities will be a problem for a subjective experience continuing indefinitely in a quantum branch of vanishing measure.
If you flip a quantum coin 1000000 times, you will get into equally improbable branches. I don’t see how your suggestion would work without any symmetry breaking.
Consider Robin’s idea of World Mangling which, if true, would explain the Born probabilities. The idea is that a quantum branch with small measure could be “mangled” by a branch with larger measure, and that branches with smaller measure are more likely to further decohere into branches small enough to be mangled.
If this were true, then we would assign each of 2^1000000 branches split by your quantum coin flips equal probability of experiencing sufficient further decoherence to be mangled. But, the symmetry of our map is our ignorance, not the absence, of asymmetry in the territory. The effects of the different coin flip results could cause different rates of decoherence, that causes some branches to split faster and actually get mangled. And I would not want to be alive in only those branches.
Thanks. Very interesting indeed. This is the first comment so far on this topic that seems to have a chance of providing logical evidence against the viability of the game.
[EDIT] AFAICT, the mangled world hypothesis also suffers from the mathematical ugliness issues as the single world interpretation: nonlinear, nonlocal discontinuous action. Of course, you can assume that for the sake of eliminating quantum roulette type scenarios, but it makes the theory much uglier.
Sorry, I don’t understand your comment. What if, unbeknownst to you, I decide to kill you as soon as you fall asleep? Does this break the version of quantum immortality that you have in mind?
Quantum immortality does not predict that you will not sleep any more than it predicts that you will not observe someone else’s death. There is a subjective experience of having been asleep, and a subjective experience of observing someone else’s death, but not a subjective experience of having died.
The reason I don’t trust quantum immortality is that I expect that whatever explains the Born probabilities will be a problem for a subjective experience continuing indefinitely in a quantum branch of vanishing measure.
If you flip a quantum coin 1000000 times, you will get into equally improbable branches. I don’t see how your suggestion would work without any symmetry breaking.
Consider Robin’s idea of World Mangling which, if true, would explain the Born probabilities. The idea is that a quantum branch with small measure could be “mangled” by a branch with larger measure, and that branches with smaller measure are more likely to further decohere into branches small enough to be mangled.
If this were true, then we would assign each of 2^1000000 branches split by your quantum coin flips equal probability of experiencing sufficient further decoherence to be mangled. But, the symmetry of our map is our ignorance, not the absence, of asymmetry in the territory. The effects of the different coin flip results could cause different rates of decoherence, that causes some branches to split faster and actually get mangled. And I would not want to be alive in only those branches.
Thanks. Very interesting indeed. This is the first comment so far on this topic that seems to have a chance of providing logical evidence against the viability of the game.
[EDIT] AFAICT, the mangled world hypothesis also suffers from the mathematical ugliness issues as the single world interpretation: nonlinear, nonlocal discontinuous action. Of course, you can assume that for the sake of eliminating quantum roulette type scenarios, but it makes the theory much uglier.
Sorry, I don’t understand your comment. What if, unbeknownst to you, I decide to kill you as soon as you fall asleep? Does this break the version of quantum immortality that you have in mind?