Disprove quantum immortality without risking your life (2019)

53 点作者 vankessel超过 5 年前

19 条评论

gwf超过 5 年前

This is a really nice argument and I hope that Kevin and others continue to pursue it. However, I think there is a subtle flaw in the presented argument that is parallel to issues illuminated by Goedel's incompleteness theorem. The problem, I believe, is with the assertion:> 1. The many-worlds interpretation is true.> 2. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.> If all the previous assumptions are true, then at least one of these two must be false.Both of these statements can be simultaneously true if we allow for a third possibility that is logically consistent with the entire argument:3. Having near logical certainty and awareness that quantum immortality is true is fundamentally incompatible with living on the subjective immortal multiverse timeline.This would actually be a robust assumption to have explicitly included at the start, as it also makes intuitive sense. Afterall, if you absolutely knew that quantum immortality was true, then you could (and likely would) walk around taking obviously foolish risks without ever experiencing any consequences. Such a universe would basically lack a coherent sense of cause-and-effect from your subjective point of view. And if it was a universe where cause-and-effect don't hold for you, then how could you have logical certainty about anything?This means that if quantum immortality is true, you can never have logical certainty of its truth.This is very similar to how Goedel's incompleteness requires that there be true statements that can't be proven as true because the existence of an explicit proof would negate the statement itself, breaken the consistency of the system of logic (and, hence, making it incomplete by necessity).

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roywiggins超过 5 年前

Hold on, assumption 2 does not seem right. There should be lots of versions of you cheerfully experiencing timelines that involve an imminent lightning strike, gamma ray burst, etc. Those things haven't happened yet, so those worlds still have a conscious you in them. Retroactively declaring those selves unconscious seems to be a much stronger idea than quantum immortality.Also, there is a way to test quantum immortality for everyone, not just yourself. Build a world-spanning doomsday machine. Give it to highly unstable, paranoid people, and distribute the ability to trigger it widely. Perhaps add in some geopolitical tensions, technical failures, ego, and military-industrial collusion. Make it really unlikely that it will remain untriggered. The longer we experience a world with such a device armed and ready, the more likely quantum immortality is true. There would be all sorts of bizarre close calls, and the world history would get more deranged by the year as timelines trigger the device and drop out, leaving progressively weirder timelines to survive.But that would be crazy, nobody would ever build such a thing.

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mrr54超过 5 年前

I like the idea that we're all immortal from our own perspective. I don't think this article contradicts it.>Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest: Under this assumption we can change the circumstances from a punishment to a reward. Instead of a gun, imagine a doctor has information about your health. If he tells you about it and you act on the information, you will certainly live a longer life. The doctor will only tell you about the information based the result of the quantum event. If the current assumptions are true, then you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about your unknown ailment.No I think this misunderstands the issue. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it exists. There are two types of 'timelines', if you like: those where your consciousness ends, and those where it doesn't. The only one you can possibly be in is the one where it doesn't. You can't 'extend' your life with QI. You won't live a longer life, you'll always life forever.It's not quantum longeivity. It's quantum immortality. If the button you were clicking killed you on a random bit being 1 and not on the bit being 0, then you would survive clicking it.OR, you would just not click on it. Because there're worlds where you click it, and worlds where you don't.

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cdelsolar超过 5 年前

I got the following message:'j/.uG}mzgP8zs_4=q|_nN'{C@EpQ}=lzSt9+'l~SmqVyusft8BGgt)K"XKcly24N1cmZg_iz\z$/pt.`P".W-CwP>w4#2%axJHATmA}xg?d%(8<W[QN&>7`wQCe3jIl^kPHQI#dp.I think it would be just as likely for the message to say "Do the following to extend your life" as it is for the supposedly random characters above being interpreted a certain way. In this case, the characters that jump out at me immediately are JHAT, 4 consecutive uppercase ASCII letters. Googling that shows "'jhat' is a heap analysis tool that parses a Java heap dump and enables web-browsing a parsed heap dump..." which leads me to think that by switching over to being a Java programmer (I mostly code in Python/Go) that I can extend my life. So that's something worth considering.

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jml7c5超过 5 年前

>2. Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.This seems like a very strong version of the quantum immortality idea. I was under the impression that quantum immortality didn't suggest that there was only one path among the splitting universes where someone is "truly" conscious and experiencing reality.

asdfasgasdgasdg超过 5 年前

I don't think this really disproves quantum immortality? You never experience the gun firing because in all the universes where it fires you die so quickly you can't sense it. That doesn't mean the gun never fires. It just means that you only experience it in the event it didn't. This is kind of tautologically true. By definition, if you're alive, you haven't been shot in the head at point blank range.Particularly, assumption 2 is in no way required for the quantum immortality thought experiment to work.

shadowprofile77超过 5 年前

First, obligatory short story (free open access on the site below) for this entire concept. It takes things to their extreme conclusion and I liked it very much with the way it experiments with QI: <a href="https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/" rel="nofollow">https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/</a>This brings me to my second point: in relation to the death of a close family member a couple years ago from cancer. The end lasted a month and largely consisted in its last days of a slow withering of conscious reasoning and awareness. How exactly would something like that square with the notion of consciousness suddenly jumping to the QI state in which it simply "persists"? An argument around this was already made by Max Tegmark, who suggested that the flaw in that reasoning is that dying is not a binary event. Instead it is very often a progressive degeneration, with a continuum of states of steadily decreasing consciousness. In other words, in most real causes of death (and this squares with my experience), one experiences such a gradual loss of self-awareness that an observer defies all odds only within the confines of a very abstract scenario.Furthermore, the obvious: QI does not at all save us from the loss of loved ones who do die in our quantum branch. Even if it were true, and each individual continues to perceive consciousness in a sort of immortal state of constantly branching awareness, we objectively know that we see these people die forever in our perception, with no allowance that I know of for a reunion in the future. Thus, its ultimate outcome if you follow this logic is deeply tragic: We keep living, seeing those we love die to our perception, while these same loved ones go through the same process, even if in some other branch other versions of both get to see said loved ones continue to live for a certain time longer.

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marcofiset超过 5 年前

I've been obsessed with QI ever since I first heard about it. Every time I have a small glimpse of inattention, I always like to think that my consciousness just got transposed to another reality. Sometimes it's while I'm driving my car, and it makes it all the more trippy.However, I'm not sure I understand the logic behind their reasoning.> Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.> you should always experience the reality in which the doctor tells you about your unknown ailment.If you experience the reality in which you live the longest, wouldn't the ailment just never come about?Going back to the gun and bullet example, your consciousness being transposed to the branch where none of that even happens, wouldn't the same thing apply to any disease that would develop within your body? You would just get transposed to the reality in which no such disease develop, extending your life even further.

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ALittleLight超过 5 年前

I think assumption 4 is in error.>There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life.If quantum immortality holds then there is no message which will extend your life because you're already immortal.

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dooglius超过 5 年前

> Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest.This is a huge straw-man. The claim is that it is that it takes a probability distribution that inherits from the underlying multiversal one, but weighted by your existence. All this proves is that the none of the n-bit random messages will cause you to immediately divide into at least 2^n copies of yourself.For more interesting discussion on ideas in this space, see<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle</a> <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain</a> <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument</a>

summerdown2超过 5 年前

There seems to be a gap in the argument between step 2 and steps onwards from 4.The experiment assumes that, given the opportunity, the universe will give a person the knowledge of how to extend their life. But of course that knowledge could have been given at any point in their life up to then, and at any point afterwards. Why hasn't a computer glitch emailed you the contents of an immortality potion before now?The answer I would suggest is that this is not the optimum moment for life extension, and there's no reason the universe has to do anything if a better local minimum can occur.My corollary for this experiment would be:4. There exists a message in the encoding that can extend one's life... but that message will only be given ifa) Having the message actually results in the timeline that does what is needed, andb) There is not in fact a more optimum time that the universe might use later on.The problem is that absent points a and b, the experiment proves nothing. It could well be that you wouldn't have correctly responded to any message given here, but instead the universe will choose a moment when you're 65 to announce a life extension drug has just been released into the upper atmosphere.

klodolph超过 5 年前

I would say that this test is especially vulnerable to error, because all the auxiliary hypotheses being tested. The problem here is known as the Duhem-Quine thesis:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duhem%E2%80%93Quine_thesis</a>> The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions (also called auxiliary assumptions or auxiliary hypotheses). In recent decades the set of associated assumptions supporting a thesis sometimes is called a bundle of hypotheses.I’m not going to enumerate the auxiliary hypotheses being tested, but this is a particularly thorny problem in the philosophy of science, and it becomes less tractable as the problems you are solving become more complicated (like this one).My personal feeling is that the philosophy of science, as a field, is still quite immature.

emtel超过 5 年前

People have pointed out many flaws in this argument, but I haven’t seen what I believe is the simplest flaw: specifically, if QI as defined in the article is true, you can’t conclude that the universe will take every possible opportunity to extend your life, only that you will always fail to experience life-ending events. A failure to receive a message about extending your life is not a life ending event, as your life could be saved later through other means. And it doesn’t matter how unlikely those other means are, because your consciousness will simply follow the path in which it still exists, regardless of the likelihood of that path.And if you think about that for a minute, the prospect of QI ought to horrify you. What sort of being will you be in 1000 years, if the only thing preventing you from dying is the ability to follow infinitesimal paths through the evolving wave function?

vhvjkyhkogvv超过 5 年前

One thing to keep in mind is our understanding of physics is only approximate so it's dangerous to draw too extreme conclusions.Approximate immortality is after all very different from actual immortality.We may well discover that the number of worlds is enormous but ultimately finite, and that the number of worlds you're in decreases exponentially with every risk you take.

zzbzq超过 5 年前

It all hinges on #2, "Consciousness experiences the reality in which it lives the longest" which is a straight-up mistaken understanding of quantum immortality. I feel embarrassed for the author. With QI, you have to actually die, there's no other way around it.

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kd5bjo超过 5 年前

There is an assumption here that all conciousness and experience ceases at the moment of death, which doesn’t agree with many people’s beliefs. If there is an afterlife, it is entirely possible you’ll find yourself in a universe where you have died.

GoblinSlayer超过 5 年前

>Since you can’t possibly experience the timeline in which you are deadDeath is a slow process, of course you experience it from the start to the end.

akvadrako超过 5 年前

As a counter, the best way to “prove” QI is true without risking your life is to live a really long time.A-priori that’s unlikely unless QI is true.

hyfgfh超过 5 年前

Can you prove a negative?

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