I was addressing the horror inherent in quantum immortality as a reason to continue fearing death events; we’re not talking about universes you aren’t perceiving, but the only universes in which you survive a specific event.
Quantum immortality gave me hope at first, until I thought about it. Now it sounds positively hellish. Given quantum immortality, clinical immortality is a moral imperative.
Quantum immortality gave me hope at first, until I thought about it. Now it sounds positively hellish. Given quantum immortality, clinical immortality is a moral imperative.
I think the probability that someone survives 2 weeks due only to quantum immortality is absolutely dwarfed by the probability that they survive 2 weeks due to someone else (maybe an AI) having an ah-ha moment and inventing a clinical cure sometime during those 2 weeks. The probability of a secret government project inventing immortality and regeneration in the ’50s and randomly deciding to give it to everyone 60 years later starts to look fairly likely versus months of random quantum events sustaining human life and consciousness against the laws of thermodynamics.
Dying with quantum immortality would be very strange and world-altering but probably not completely hellish. The experience of the dying person would rapidly get caught up in the majority of remaining universes where they didn’t die for random but semi-plausible reasons. Sure, in a Tegmark IV universe some branches just keep on being hellish forever but those are also so rare that someone experiencing it should legitimately expect things to get better in the majority of their futures.
If quantum mechanics really does add up to normality then at any point in the multiverse’s configuration space we should expect normality in the future.
Miraculous survivals happen every day; every day, patients in all sorts of conditions beat the odds and live one more day, one more hour, one more minute, one more second. I don’t know what odds you’re looking at, but the ones I’m looking at aren’t even billion-to-one odds, and they get reset constantly; every moment experienced hits the reset button.
To properly calculate the odds on this kind of survival, you don’t get to use the odds of surviving a year, a month, a week, a day, or even an hour or a minute. You have to use the odds of surviving through the next momentary experience, the next thought. Consciousness is going to flow down the probability path of least resistance; even if your odds of year-long survival are dominated by secret government projects saving your life and rebuilding you, you’re still most likely to end the year surviving through the hellish route, because for any given moment, that’s the most likely path to continue existence through.
To explain this counterintuitive result, imagine two lotteries: one has million-to-one odds, one trillion-to-one odds. You -must- win. You get to keep playing until you win. If you win the million-to-one, you start over, and play again. If you win the trillion-to-one game AND the million-to-one game in the same round (any route of existence in which the government agent steps in and then you die before he does his work doesn’t count), the game ends. Even if it’s more likely to win the trillion and million deal in round 1 than to beat the odds some arbitrarily large number of times, you’re still more likely to end up in a universe in which you merely beat the odds some arbitrarily large number of times, because all you need to do to end up in that universe is win the million-to-one odds on round 1, rather than the million and trillion odds. The issue with quantum immortality is that you don’t get to compute odds properly; the most likely universe isn’t necessarily the universe you’re most likely to end up in.
A discontinuous existence may be preferable in such situations, therefore, to stack the odds. A year-long coma would break the continuum, for instance; then you get to calculate the total odds rather than the continuous odds.
To properly calculate the odds on this kind of survival, you don’t get to use the odds of surviving a year, a month, a week, a day, or even an hour or a minute. You have to use the odds of surviving through the next momentary experience, the next thought. Consciousness is going to flow down the probability path of least resistance; even if your odds of year-long survival are dominated by secret government projects saving your life and rebuilding you, you’re still most likely to end the year surviving through the hellish route, because for any given moment, that’s the most likely path to continue existence through.
Once the government invents immortality the probability of it succeeding every second is much better than the probability of it being invented in the first place. Assume you have a 10^-6 probability of surviving through quantum immortality every second and a 10^-12 probability of surviving due to the invention of government immortality and a 10^-5 probability of surviving due to the prior existence of government immortality (we’ll pretend it’s terribly risky but more likely to keep working than quantum immortality). Out of 10^72 initially identical universes, after one second there are 10^60 government immortals and 10^66 quantum immortals.
After 2 seconds there are 10^55 prior-government immortals and (10^60 + 10^66) * 10^-6 quantum immortals. I’m going to drop the number of quantum immortals who become government immortals after this point since they’re much smaller and make the totals too complex.
After 3 seconds there are 10^50 prior-government immortals and (10^55 + 10^54 + 10^60) * 10^-6 quantum immortals.
After 4 seconds there are 10^45 prior-government immortals and (10^50 + 10^49 + 10^48 + 10^54) * 10^-6 quantum immortals.
After 5 seconds there are 10^40 prior-government immortals and (10^45 + 10^44 + 10^43 + 10^42 + 10^48) * 10^-6 quantum immortals.
After 6 seconds there are 10^35 prior-government immortals and (10^40 + 10^39 + 10^38 + 10^37 + 10^36 + 10^42) * 10^-6 quantum immortals.
After 7 seconds there are 10^30 prior-government immortals and (10^35 + 10^34 + 10^33 + 10^32 + 10^31 + 10^30 + 10^36) * 10^-6 = 1.111111 * 10^-30 quantum immortals, or almost even odds.
After 8 seconds there are 10^25 prior-government immortals and only 2.111111 * 10 ^ 10^24 quantum immortals.
By the time there are no quantum immortals left in these 10^72 universes there are still ~ 10^10 government immortals.
Basically, any time the universe changes, your lotteries change. The invention of government immortality affects all future universes sharing that history whereas simply maintaining a quantum-hellish existence doesn’t change the universe enough to alter the lotteries. I also didn’t account for the fact that quantum immortality becomes more likely once government immortality exists (whatever changes government immortality causes raises your overall chances of survival, so they have to raise the probability that random quantum events can cause you to survive) but as long as surviving one second after government immortality has already been invented is more likely than surviving through quantum immortality it eventually becomes much more likely to have survived because of government immortality.
My point was that quantum immortality doesn’t raise the odds of government immortality. Your odds of being saved by government don’t improve in the event of quantum immortality.
What’s happening in other universes don’t change what’s happening in yours. Quantum immortality is going to operate on the same terms as evolution; the cheapest short-term path, even if the long-term path is more expensive, in this case in terms of probabilities.
If the odds of government having already invented clinical immortality spontaneously are one in a trillion, your odds of being saved by that remain one in a trillion, because your short-term survival doesn’t take into account the long-term probability costs. Just because your probable futures are 99.9999% government-discovered clinical immortality doesn’t mean your odds of getting that clinical immortality are 99.9999%. Quantum immortality only guarantees your survival; it doesn’t prefer any means, and it only operates on a moment-by-moment basis. A major component of quantum immortality is that it skips probability assessments in favor of immediate short-term survival. The lottery is rigged. Not all lotteries are rigged equally, however; long-term survival lotteries don’t get any weight at all. Only short-term survival lotteries get rigged.
Quantum immortality does increase the probability of government immortality in the universes where you are still alive. That was why I started with 10^72 identical universes to directly calculate how many branches had living copies after 10 or 11 seconds. It turned out that 10^10 of the universes had a copy that was government-immortal, and 0 had a copy that was quantum-immortal, so any living individual after 11 seconds has a much higher probability of not surviving the last 11 seconds due to quantum immortality. I think you should expect to experience what a majority of your future copies will experience. Of course you never die out of the metaverse completely, but even if I started with 3^^^^3 identical universes after 11 seconds there would still be many orders of magnitude more government-immortals than quantum-immortals, and that ratio would only increase the longer I calculated. Even if I look at each quantum immortal individually it has the same probability tree in its future so it should expect the government immortality to dominate its own future copies even if it’s the result of 3^^^3 seconds of quantum immortality. What am I doing wrong?
You’re taking the end-probability and using it as the probability of arriving at that location; you’re looking at the problem and asking, assuming I’m alive in ten seconds, what’s the most likely way for me to be alive? And asking the question that way, clinical immortality gets a huge boost.
The question, however, comes down to some atomic unit of existence. I don’t know what that atomic unit is, but in order for it to add up to normality, it has to survive things like unconsciousness and sleep. Quantum immortality is going to be the process of slipping from atomic unit to atomic unit, even when they’re not necessarily in the same universe. There isn’t going to be any forward mapping; it will go straight ahead to the “cheapest” next step, which will get incrementally more expensive (unlikely). Maybe the most likely next step is waking up from an unusually realistic dream, maybe it’s waking up in a hospital. If quantum immortality works, long-term probability won’t enter into it. It will follow the cheapest short-term path.
Or, to put it in more general terms, when you start rigging probabilities, you can’t simply count the number of possible paths and assume the most common is the most likely.
The question, however, comes down to some atomic unit of existence. I don’t know what that atomic unit is, but in order for it to add up to normality, it has to survive things like unconsciousness and sleep. Quantum immortality is going to be the process of slipping from atomic unit to atomic unit, even when they’re not necessarily in the same universe. There isn’t going to be any forward mapping; it will go straight ahead to the “cheapest” next step, which will get incrementally more expensive (unlikely). Maybe the most likely next step is waking up from an unusually realistic dream, maybe it’s waking up in a hospital. If quantum immortality works, long-term probability won’t enter into it. It will follow the cheapest short-term path.
This can’t actually be true, though, or else we would never experience any unlikely quantum events. Quantum mechanics works the same whether it makes us immortal or not, so if we expected our experience to only go to the most likely future then we would never see anything unlikely. We would never see radioactive decay because it’s less likely than not-radioactive-decay. If we never, ever detect a proton decay then there might be something to the idea that we only experience unlikely quantum events above a certain threshold (or our model of proton decay is wrong), but otherwise it seems like we do have to count up all possibilities and compute our expected outcome from the measure of our experiences in each possibility.
My language was imprecise; we should -expect- to go to the most likely future. The key point however is short-term probability rather than long-term probability.
I was addressing the horror inherent in quantum immortality as a reason to continue fearing death events; we’re not talking about universes you aren’t perceiving, but the only universes in which you survive a specific event.
Quantum immortality gave me hope at first, until I thought about it. Now it sounds positively hellish. Given quantum immortality, clinical immortality is a moral imperative.
I think the probability that someone survives 2 weeks due only to quantum immortality is absolutely dwarfed by the probability that they survive 2 weeks due to someone else (maybe an AI) having an ah-ha moment and inventing a clinical cure sometime during those 2 weeks. The probability of a secret government project inventing immortality and regeneration in the ’50s and randomly deciding to give it to everyone 60 years later starts to look fairly likely versus months of random quantum events sustaining human life and consciousness against the laws of thermodynamics.
Dying with quantum immortality would be very strange and world-altering but probably not completely hellish. The experience of the dying person would rapidly get caught up in the majority of remaining universes where they didn’t die for random but semi-plausible reasons. Sure, in a Tegmark IV universe some branches just keep on being hellish forever but those are also so rare that someone experiencing it should legitimately expect things to get better in the majority of their futures.
If quantum mechanics really does add up to normality then at any point in the multiverse’s configuration space we should expect normality in the future.
Miraculous survivals happen every day; every day, patients in all sorts of conditions beat the odds and live one more day, one more hour, one more minute, one more second. I don’t know what odds you’re looking at, but the ones I’m looking at aren’t even billion-to-one odds, and they get reset constantly; every moment experienced hits the reset button.
To properly calculate the odds on this kind of survival, you don’t get to use the odds of surviving a year, a month, a week, a day, or even an hour or a minute. You have to use the odds of surviving through the next momentary experience, the next thought. Consciousness is going to flow down the probability path of least resistance; even if your odds of year-long survival are dominated by secret government projects saving your life and rebuilding you, you’re still most likely to end the year surviving through the hellish route, because for any given moment, that’s the most likely path to continue existence through.
To explain this counterintuitive result, imagine two lotteries: one has million-to-one odds, one trillion-to-one odds. You -must- win. You get to keep playing until you win. If you win the million-to-one, you start over, and play again. If you win the trillion-to-one game AND the million-to-one game in the same round (any route of existence in which the government agent steps in and then you die before he does his work doesn’t count), the game ends. Even if it’s more likely to win the trillion and million deal in round 1 than to beat the odds some arbitrarily large number of times, you’re still more likely to end up in a universe in which you merely beat the odds some arbitrarily large number of times, because all you need to do to end up in that universe is win the million-to-one odds on round 1, rather than the million and trillion odds. The issue with quantum immortality is that you don’t get to compute odds properly; the most likely universe isn’t necessarily the universe you’re most likely to end up in.
A discontinuous existence may be preferable in such situations, therefore, to stack the odds. A year-long coma would break the continuum, for instance; then you get to calculate the total odds rather than the continuous odds.
Once the government invents immortality the probability of it succeeding every second is much better than the probability of it being invented in the first place. Assume you have a 10^-6 probability of surviving through quantum immortality every second and a 10^-12 probability of surviving due to the invention of government immortality and a 10^-5 probability of surviving due to the prior existence of government immortality (we’ll pretend it’s terribly risky but more likely to keep working than quantum immortality). Out of 10^72 initially identical universes, after one second there are 10^60 government immortals and 10^66 quantum immortals.
After 2 seconds there are 10^55 prior-government immortals and (10^60 + 10^66) * 10^-6 quantum immortals. I’m going to drop the number of quantum immortals who become government immortals after this point since they’re much smaller and make the totals too complex.
After 3 seconds there are 10^50 prior-government immortals and (10^55 + 10^54 + 10^60) * 10^-6 quantum immortals.
After 4 seconds there are 10^45 prior-government immortals and (10^50 + 10^49 + 10^48 + 10^54) * 10^-6 quantum immortals.
After 5 seconds there are 10^40 prior-government immortals and (10^45 + 10^44 + 10^43 + 10^42 + 10^48) * 10^-6 quantum immortals.
After 6 seconds there are 10^35 prior-government immortals and (10^40 + 10^39 + 10^38 + 10^37 + 10^36 + 10^42) * 10^-6 quantum immortals.
After 7 seconds there are 10^30 prior-government immortals and (10^35 + 10^34 + 10^33 + 10^32 + 10^31 + 10^30 + 10^36) * 10^-6 = 1.111111 * 10^-30 quantum immortals, or almost even odds.
After 8 seconds there are 10^25 prior-government immortals and only 2.111111 * 10 ^ 10^24 quantum immortals.
By the time there are no quantum immortals left in these 10^72 universes there are still ~ 10^10 government immortals.
Basically, any time the universe changes, your lotteries change. The invention of government immortality affects all future universes sharing that history whereas simply maintaining a quantum-hellish existence doesn’t change the universe enough to alter the lotteries. I also didn’t account for the fact that quantum immortality becomes more likely once government immortality exists (whatever changes government immortality causes raises your overall chances of survival, so they have to raise the probability that random quantum events can cause you to survive) but as long as surviving one second after government immortality has already been invented is more likely than surviving through quantum immortality it eventually becomes much more likely to have survived because of government immortality.
My point was that quantum immortality doesn’t raise the odds of government immortality. Your odds of being saved by government don’t improve in the event of quantum immortality.
What’s happening in other universes don’t change what’s happening in yours. Quantum immortality is going to operate on the same terms as evolution; the cheapest short-term path, even if the long-term path is more expensive, in this case in terms of probabilities.
If the odds of government having already invented clinical immortality spontaneously are one in a trillion, your odds of being saved by that remain one in a trillion, because your short-term survival doesn’t take into account the long-term probability costs. Just because your probable futures are 99.9999% government-discovered clinical immortality doesn’t mean your odds of getting that clinical immortality are 99.9999%. Quantum immortality only guarantees your survival; it doesn’t prefer any means, and it only operates on a moment-by-moment basis. A major component of quantum immortality is that it skips probability assessments in favor of immediate short-term survival. The lottery is rigged. Not all lotteries are rigged equally, however; long-term survival lotteries don’t get any weight at all. Only short-term survival lotteries get rigged.
Quantum immortality does increase the probability of government immortality in the universes where you are still alive. That was why I started with 10^72 identical universes to directly calculate how many branches had living copies after 10 or 11 seconds. It turned out that 10^10 of the universes had a copy that was government-immortal, and 0 had a copy that was quantum-immortal, so any living individual after 11 seconds has a much higher probability of not surviving the last 11 seconds due to quantum immortality. I think you should expect to experience what a majority of your future copies will experience. Of course you never die out of the metaverse completely, but even if I started with 3^^^^3 identical universes after 11 seconds there would still be many orders of magnitude more government-immortals than quantum-immortals, and that ratio would only increase the longer I calculated. Even if I look at each quantum immortal individually it has the same probability tree in its future so it should expect the government immortality to dominate its own future copies even if it’s the result of 3^^^3 seconds of quantum immortality. What am I doing wrong?
You’re taking the end-probability and using it as the probability of arriving at that location; you’re looking at the problem and asking, assuming I’m alive in ten seconds, what’s the most likely way for me to be alive? And asking the question that way, clinical immortality gets a huge boost.
The question, however, comes down to some atomic unit of existence. I don’t know what that atomic unit is, but in order for it to add up to normality, it has to survive things like unconsciousness and sleep. Quantum immortality is going to be the process of slipping from atomic unit to atomic unit, even when they’re not necessarily in the same universe. There isn’t going to be any forward mapping; it will go straight ahead to the “cheapest” next step, which will get incrementally more expensive (unlikely). Maybe the most likely next step is waking up from an unusually realistic dream, maybe it’s waking up in a hospital. If quantum immortality works, long-term probability won’t enter into it. It will follow the cheapest short-term path.
Or, to put it in more general terms, when you start rigging probabilities, you can’t simply count the number of possible paths and assume the most common is the most likely.
This can’t actually be true, though, or else we would never experience any unlikely quantum events. Quantum mechanics works the same whether it makes us immortal or not, so if we expected our experience to only go to the most likely future then we would never see anything unlikely. We would never see radioactive decay because it’s less likely than not-radioactive-decay. If we never, ever detect a proton decay then there might be something to the idea that we only experience unlikely quantum events above a certain threshold (or our model of proton decay is wrong), but otherwise it seems like we do have to count up all possibilities and compute our expected outcome from the measure of our experiences in each possibility.
My language was imprecise; we should -expect- to go to the most likely future. The key point however is short-term probability rather than long-term probability.