I was excited but skeptical, to hear that you could empirically test anything on the topic. And disappointed but unsurprised that you don’t. There’s nothing empirical about this—there is zero data you’re collecting, measuring, or observing.
It will be an empirical test when you ACTUALLY have and use this teleporter.
Until then, you’re just finding new ways to show that our intuitions are not consistent on esoteric and currently-impossible (and therefore irrelevant) topics.
This thought experiment can help us to find situations in nature when similar things have already happened. So, we don’t need to perform the experiment. We just look at its result.
One example: notoriously unwelcome quantum immortality is a bad idea to test empirically. However, the fact of biological life’s survival of Earth for the last 4 billion years, despite the risks of impacts, irreversible coolings and warming etc – is an event very similar to the quantum immortality. Which we observe just after the event.
This thought experiment can help us to find situations in nature when similar things have already happened.
It can? Depending on what you mean by “similar”, either we can find them without this thought experiment or they don’t exist and this doesn’t help. Your example is absolutely not similar in the key area of individual continuity.
For example, impossibility of sleep – a weird idea that if quantum immortality is true, I will not be able to fall asleep.
One interesting thing about the impossibility of sleep is that it doesn’t work here on Earth because humans actually start having night dreams immediately as they go into sleep state. So there is no last moment of experience when I become asleep. Despite popular misconception, such dreams don’t stop during deep stages of sleep, just become less complex and memorable. (Do we have dreams under general anesthesia is unclear and depends on the depth and type of anesthesia. During normal anesthesia some brain activity is preserved, but high dose barbiturates can temporarily stop it; also, an analogue of impossibility of sleep can be anesthesia awareness – under MWI it is more likely.)
It could be explained by anthropic effects: if two copies of me are born in the two otherwise identical worlds, one of which has protection from impossibility of sleep via constant dreaming – and another not, I will eventually find myself in the world with such protection as its share will grow relative to QI survivors. Such effects, if strong can be observed in advance – see our post about “future anthropic shadow”.
This meta effect can be used instead of the natural experiments.
If we observe that some natural experiment is not possible because of some peculiar property of our world, it means that we somehow were naturally selected against that natural experiment.
It means that continuity of consciousness is important and the world we live in is selected to preserve it
I was excited but skeptical, to hear that you could empirically test anything on the topic. And disappointed but unsurprised that you don’t. There’s nothing empirical about this—there is zero data you’re collecting, measuring, or observing.
It will be an empirical test when you ACTUALLY have and use this teleporter.
Until then, you’re just finding new ways to show that our intuitions are not consistent on esoteric and currently-impossible (and therefore irrelevant) topics.
This thought experiment can help us to find situations in nature when similar things have already happened. So, we don’t need to perform the experiment. We just look at its result.
One example: notoriously unwelcome quantum immortality is a bad idea to test empirically. However, the fact of biological life’s survival of Earth for the last 4 billion years, despite the risks of impacts, irreversible coolings and warming etc – is an event very similar to the quantum immortality. Which we observe just after the event.
It can? Depending on what you mean by “similar”, either we can find them without this thought experiment or they don’t exist and this doesn’t help. Your example is absolutely not similar in the key area of individual continuity.
For example, impossibility of sleep – a weird idea that if quantum immortality is true, I will not be able to fall asleep.
One interesting thing about the impossibility of sleep is that it doesn’t work here on Earth because humans actually start having night dreams immediately as they go into sleep state. So there is no last moment of experience when I become asleep. Despite popular misconception, such dreams don’t stop during deep stages of sleep, just become less complex and memorable. (Do we have dreams under general anesthesia is unclear and depends on the depth and type of anesthesia. During normal anesthesia some brain activity is preserved, but high dose barbiturates can temporarily stop it; also, an analogue of impossibility of sleep can be anesthesia awareness – under MWI it is more likely.)
It could be explained by anthropic effects: if two copies of me are born in the two otherwise identical worlds, one of which has protection from impossibility of sleep via constant dreaming – and another not, I will eventually find myself in the world with such protection as its share will grow relative to QI survivors. Such effects, if strong can be observed in advance – see our post about “future anthropic shadow”.
This meta effect can be used instead of the natural experiments.
If we observe that some natural experiment is not possible because of some peculiar property of our world, it means that we somehow were naturally selected against that natural experiment.
It means that continuity of consciousness is important and the world we live in is selected to preserve it