Talk:Quantum suicide and immortality/Archive 2

message: Many video game characters are an example of this, especially in 1-player first person shooters and CRPGs. If the player finishes the game, than the character has survived a ton of dangerous events. But if it's a hard game, than they've also died in tons of alternate realities. The player reloads and tries again. So for the one Parker who miraculously beat the final boss without a vehicle, about a dozen were gunned down, and more died throughout the course of the game. At the end, Parker should feel amazed that he was able to fight through so many missions, killing hundreds of enemies, without permananent injury. Even if the character is logically able to do something like that, such as in Halo or Republic Commando, there would be a ton of extremely close calls after a long campaign. -LtNOWIS 05:30, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Video Games 

message: I am removing these three paragraphs:
:Detractors regard this idea as nonsense, and argue that this outcome does not fall out naturally from the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. They say that in the vast majority of universes, the physicist would cease to exist and therefore the most likely experience of a physicist standing next to a nuclear explosion would be the experience (or lack of experience) of ceasing to exist. The counterargument to this is that lack of experience is not itself an experience.
:The critics also argue that the continuity of consciousness, and the possibility of it enduring forever, are actually assumptions in this scenario, and ones with no physical basis. They also claim that the logic of the thought experiment would suggest that a conscious observer can never become unconscious, and therefore can never sleep. A counterargument to this is that the theory does not claim that one can never experience worlds where one loses consciousness, but rather that one can never experience the period of unconsciousness itself. The observer will therefore never experience a world where he dies in his sleep, but if he wakes up again he will simply note that there was a gap in his conscious experience.
:Another counter argument is that, given an infinite number of situations, at some point a situation would occur where the person could not survive (or remain consious) without breaking at least one law of physics. There will not be a split of universes because the one that wants to split off can't do so without creating a universe where the now broken laws of physics do not exist. Even if assumed that a jump to a more "lenient" universe would happen, as more and more laws would be erased, one would be left with a universe with no laws at all. A universe without physical laws is either impossible or exists as complete chaos because there is nothing to base any form of order on. Any person entering this universe would cease to exist as a person in every sense of the word.
These paragraphs violate Wikipedia policy on verifiability and original research. All these arguments and counterarguments are attributed to nameless "critics" and "detractors," and thus there is no verifiable claim that anybody of any notability has ever argued along these lines. If anyone notable has, then these arguments should be reinserted with proper attribution and citation. -- Schaefer 07:53, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: In these sort of cases the best course of action is to search for examples of "critics" and "detractors", yourself. Merely removing the offending paragraphs is a very lazy way of fixing the problem. -- Derek Ross | Talk 04:38, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Any Wikipedia editor could, of course, do the same. Maybe one of us will, eventually, but until that happens I see no reason to assume these are anything but original research. Quantum immortality is an obscure subject. The phrase "quantum immortality" (in quotes) currently returns less than a thousand hits on Google, and the very first hit is this article. I think it's likely these criticisms, upon a thorough search of everything within Google's reach, would reveal themselves to have no notable proponents, and I don't want to spend so much time looking for something I believe not to exist. If you think I'm wrong, which I may very well be, feel free to look for these notable people and re-add their claims, properly attributed, and the article will be better off for it. But leaving unsourced views in Wikipedia hurts its credibility, so I would rather these stay out of the article until then. -- Schaefer 06:19, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed criticism paragraphs 

message: there have been a few instances where executions have failed, for a list see: http://www.phadp.org/botched.html and http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=8&did=478 (I can't vouch for the validity of these websites, but for the sake of argument, assume that the botched executions listed really did take place.)
Isn't it possible that the reason that some of these people failed to die on the first attempt is because of QI?
I'm no expert on the human body, electric chair, or executions in general, but isn't it possible that some of them were not killed because of the extremely small chance that they would live, just like the quantum suicide experiment where it seems to the subject that something has gone wrong when the gun does not kill him? The difference is that we would have to be in the same universe as the subject is in during a few of the failed execution attempts, so we witness a few failed execution attempts before it finally works. Do you guys think this is likely?
--24.110.50.200 02:14, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, I don't. And this is off-topic for an article talk page, anyway. Please discuss it elsewhere. -- Schaefer 02:18, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well that was harsh. And to the GP: from the prisoner's point of view, they might survive multiple attempts. But it's much more likely that they live in a universe where they never committed the crime, or never got caught. So surviving an execution attempt would for a third person observer just seem like extraordinarily luck. Another example of this would be people who have survived falling out of planes without parachutes. --85.157.224.228 03:42, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, it was. I don't recall intending it the way it reads to me now. My apologies to 24.110.50.200. -- Schaefer 09:20, 11 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  possible indication of the validity of QI (and the MWI)  

message: This is probably wrong since I don't really know the physics or the math behind this idea.  But it seems to me that each quantum flip essentially creates a powerset of alternative universes, and if the universe is infinite in size, the resulting powerset would be uncountibly infinte.  So each instance of that universe could try to solve a subset of the halting problem.  I guess what matters is if the size of this powerset of universes is equal or greater then then number of problems there are to solve.
It also seems to me that if the universe is not infinite in size, then there is only a finite number of purmuntations that could possibly arise from the quantum flip. Seems like that leads to some contridiction some where.  What happends if we go through all the possible combinations? -- User317 08:07, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The largest problem with your idea is that there is no way to know what is happening in other universes, and no way to designate our own in comparison to them.  Hence, not only would we be unable to determine which part of the problem we should work on, we would also be unable to recombine the results into a final solution.It's true that many worlds would seem to have inconsistent physics for at least a brief period, but that's only because they exist on the edge of the bell curve.  The odds of any world staying on that edge, however, are statistically insignificant--unless, of course, your survival depended on the laws of physics being wonky. =) --Algorithm 02:02, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

text: There are a couple of flaws in that argument.
# A person is finite and thus incapable of knowing all the digits of a Real number. It is only possible to know the first N digits where N depends upon the person concerned. Thus people can only know rational approximations to Real numbers. The only way that we can handle Real numbers is by naming them pi, e, etc.
# Even if a person could somehow know all the digits of a real number, that person will only have written down a finite number of them at any given time in the lifetime of the universe.
# You assume that we can apply our mathematics to universes where the mathematical axioms are completely different from ours. That's a big assumption. 
So I wouldn't be so certain of my conclusions if I were you. -- Derek Ross | Talk 00:09, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

text: I mean that such a universe may not be countable. It may be partial or multiple in some way or may have a stranger form of wholeness such as being [1-0.7i..15.3+3i) or even some representation which is too complex for us to understand. That is what is implied when you state that "the way math is understoood in one is contridctory to the way its understood in another". -- Derek Ross | Talk 05:12, 26 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Could QI lead to a solution to the Halting Problem? 

message: I was thinking that if you was to join a nuclear weapon/s, a computer and the lottery, you could get rich.
First, write a program that will allow you to detonate a bomb in super fast time if it receives off the internet lottery numbers which YOU HAVE NOT CHOSEN.
So you buy a ticket before a draw, with one row of numbers, and you tell that program to ignore all lines except for your own.
Then get as many hydrogen bombs as you can, fit them up round your home, like your kitchen,bedroom...all the rooms and lastly strap yourself to one with your brain as close to the main explosive area.
Hopefully if you set it up correctly you will always win the lottery, because the only worlds where you can possibly survive are the ones in which your ticket number is anounced the winner.
Of course if it goes wrong you'll be remembered forever as "that damn genocidal maniac" so some immortality in that sense too. (said someone who didn't sign it.)
:The New Scientist letters page has already discussed this at length although they recommended a machine gun rather an H-bomb (it's so much easier to get hold of). -- Derek Ross | Talk 07:07, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course, you will be remembered as "that damn genocidal maniac" in the vast majority of the worlds parallel to the few ones you survive/win in.
You will be a lottery winner in one universe out of every 5 million, or 10 million, or whatever, depending on the odds against winning the particular lottery that you have entered, but for every one of these universes there will be a lot more where your internet connection fails. That is, most of the universes that you are alive in will be ones where the ISP went down, or the computer froze up, and you did not win the lotto. Therefore, I recommend betting on basketball, where you have a greater chance of making the correct choice than your internet connection has of failing.   ; )    Lionel Nashe 06:37, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Test it and get rich 

message: Perhaps this article could be tied or at least mention the Anthropic principle. Even though AP doesn't really cover multi-verse, it does contend we can only exist in a universe that is favorable for us existing. If our reality does not allow us to exist (through personal death, global, or galactic catastrophe), then we wouldn't be around to observe the fact. So QI is the more personal (if you put a gun to your head and pull the trigger chances are that it will fail or we end up in a scenario of nuclear war etc) and AP is the higher level versions of this (but more on the lines of if our solar system was slightly different that life would cease to form and we still wouldn't be discussing this issue, but that maybe that is more on the lines of the Rare Earth hypothesis). Either way it is amazing that any of us are alive and concious if you consider the magnitude of infinite things that could have went wrong in the universe and at our local and personal levels. --Vertinox 21:34, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Anthropic principle 

message: Article says:
:Most physical laws of the universe still cannot be broken - for example, the second law of thermodynamics is still considered to be conserved in all probabilities, theoretically preventing a parallel universe in which this law is violated from ever branching off.
Arguably, that is not true. The second law of thermodynamics is a statistical law. One can prove from certain assumptions that for a system of any significant size that violations of the second law of thermodynamics are extremely (astronmically) unlikely. But that does not mean it is obeyed in every universe; it merely means that the universes in which it is obeyed astronomically outnumber the universes in which it was violated. But, if QI is true, you will continue to exist in whichever universes permit your continued existence; so if the only universe in which you still exist is one in which the second law is violated, you will (by QI) exist in that universe, even though the number (or density) of such universes is astronomically less than that of universes in which 2nd law is conserved.
Furthermore, the claim "most physical laws of the universe still cannot be broken" seems doubtful to me. Certaintly if the MWH is to be a coherent physical theory, there must be some physical laws conserved across all universes (otherwise MWH becomes identical to Lewis' modal realism or Tegmark's ultimate ensemble theory.) But, it is possible that some of the apparent physical laws of our universe are actually varying across universes (e.g. they may be the consequence of the way symmetry broke in the early universe; or the vacuum state we are in; or some similar process as yet unknown.) The problem is that being unable to observe the other MWH universes we can't say what physical laws are absolute across all universes and what ones can vary. So, the claim that "most" doesn't seem justifiable. Certainly some should laws should be unbreakable, but I cannot see how (with our current limited understanding of physics) we can say which are and which aren't, or how many are and how many aren't. --SJK 20:43, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: How is this arguable? Is there any doubt that the second law of thermodynamics is anything but a statistical observation? Surely there have been experiments recording small "violations" of the 2nd law? If so then perhaps the paragraph should be removed rather than having SJK's counter-argument inserted rather messily in parentheses. Or maybe the whole paragraph could be reworded to make the above quote not sound so authoritative. Frankd 11:49, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Second law of thermodynamics 

message: No physicist I know, including those dealing with quantum philosophy (and I know quite a few), pays any attention to this ridiculous idea.
Shokopuma 20:08, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Why do they say it's ridiculous? 65.87.191.214 04:50, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

text: No physicist I know, including those dealing with geocentrism (and I know quite a few), pays any attention to this ridiculous idea of the earth traveling around the sun. --85.157.224.88 20:33, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Most ridiculous idea 

message: Even with classical physics, at all times that you exist you exist. Any person would have reason to say that he is immortal, as he has never died. The average age wouldn't be any less then with the MWI, as in the MWI as the age increases the fraction of worlds in which one has lasted that long decreases. It seems to me that the basis of QI can be put simply as 'one observes only when and where one observes' and it applies for any physical interpretation in which that is true. I admit, I do have a tendancy to omit common sense that I have never proven false, and QI might be a bit more complicated then that, but in all probability, it's close enough. It should be noted, however, that the worlds which one does not observe still exist, and I see no reson why they should be any less important. QS wouldn't make you any more likely to be a lottery winner; it would only make you more likely to be dead. — Daniel 01:27, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  What does MWI have to do with it? 

message: I know, I know - if QI is real then someone undergoing the process of 'surviving' an event that was fatal in one or more other universes shouldn't ever experience any sort of shift from one to the other; and shouldn't have any idea that they've left a dead 'self' behind along the way.
So I'm not going to draw any conclusions - I'll just mention this and let readers make their own minds up on an odd story I read.  It was in an old anthology of 'spooky' stories called Dancing With The Dark - short stories of (supposedly) real experiences that real-life writers of spooky stories had had.  One short account - and I'm afraid I can't remember the name of the author involved - was called Never Say Die.  The author explained how, as a soldier in Vietnam, he'd been evacuated from a combat area by helicopter.  As the helicopter turned away, it rolled sharply and the author (according to his account) fell out.  That's to say, he experienced pitching forward out of the helicopter and beginning to fall - and then he says he found himself sitting back inside with the heli back on an even keel.  The author didn't make any particular claims about what he'd experienced, as I remember, and there are no doubt numerous other possible explanations for what he described.  But reading this article and the associated article on Quantum Suicide did make me wonder...  - Shrivenzale 11:31, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Quantum Immortality experienced?

message: Here's something that could perhaps be added to the article.
In "The First International RoShamBo Programming Competition", there was an "Unofficial Super-Modified Class" for programs that cheat in one way or another.  One of the contestants was the Fork Bot, which split the process into three, made a different move in each, and destroyed the ones in which it did not win.  Reference: Darse Billings, "The First International RoShamBo Programming Competition Results (Part 2)", http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~darse/rsb-results2.html, last updated October 4 1999, viewed July 14 2006.  213.216.199.2 04:40, 14 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fork Bot in RoShamBo programming competition 

message: "A potential criticism of the theory is that the second assumption is not a necessary consequence of the many-worlds interpretation and may require the violation of laws that are still thought to be conserved across all possible realities.  The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics does not necessarily imply that everything is possible, only that all outcomes of quantum processes that are possible will branch off from any given instant in time.  Most physical laws of the universe still cannot be broken — for example, the first law of thermodynamics is still considered to be conserved in all probabilities, theoretically preventing a parallel universe in which this law is violated from ever branching off.  This has implications that, from the point of view of the physicist, it is possible to reach a particular configuration of reality where the physicist's survival actually becomes impossible, because a survival scenario in that reality would at that point require a violation of a law of the universe that is not considered to be transgressible in any possible reality.  
For example, in the nuclear-bomb scenario above, once the physicist has perceived the flash of light from the bomb's detonation, it is difficult to effectively describe a scenario in which the physicist continues living that does not violate basic biological principles.  Living cells simply cannot remain alive at the temperatures found at the core of a nuclear reaction under any known subsets of modern science.  For quantum immortality to be true, either the bomb would have to misfire (or otherwise not detonate) or an event would have to take place which made use of scientific principles that are not yet proven or discovered. Another example is natural biological death from old age, which may not be escapable in any parallel universe (at least without more advanced technology than is currently known)."
I removed this because:
"According to the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics, there is never a scenario in which something has exactly zero probability. A particular future event might have a vanishingly infinitesimal probability of occurring—say, odds of one in a googleplex, for example—but that probability still is non-zero. Therefore, if the many-worlds interpretation of QED is accurate, then there is always some universe in which even that incredibly unlikely event occurs. That is the powerful and sobering (not to mention seemingly absurd) implication of the many-worlds interpretation of QED." -- Ryanaxp (Talk:Quantum Suicide)
:And you were correct in doing so. :) - green_meklar 01:55, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed info 

message: For a small but interesting example of gender stereotyping in action, take a look at the history of this article. Note the way that the physicist in the thought experiment -- who was originally female when I added her to the article -- gradually became male. Interesting stuff. -- Derek Ross | Talk 06:28, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Hardly surprising. People use he even for sex-neutral terms like citizen, and physicists are predominantly male. -- Schaefer (Talk) 14:59, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

text: According to the Oxford dictionary, the pronoun "he" is also used for living beings of unknown gender. 24. 10. 2006
Yes, but when I invented the example I knew the gender of the physicist. She was female and I made that clear by using the pronoun "she". -- Derek Ross | Talk 15:12, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Study in sexism

message: This is the same as Quantum Suicide: should we merge the articles?  A lot of the text is the same.  I've added a merge tag.  --Michael C. Price talk 20:14, 18 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: —-— .:Seth Nimbosa:. (talk • contribs) 08:42, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Quantum Suicide]]

message: I do not think there can be only 2 branches because there are at least 4 different chances.
1. The gun is triggered and he dies.
2. It isn't triggered.
3. It is triggered and he is hurt but lives.
4. It is triggered and he just happens to be out of the path of the bullet when it is fired and it hits the wall behind him.
Just a thought.
Dylan Telfer, December 11th, 2006
:The idea of branches is just for ease of thinking. Separate branches don't actually exist. In fact there is a whole spread of possibilities. for instance in your example there are many, many different possibilities corresponding to how much injury the bullet did, or by how much it missed -- far, far more than 4. But the possibilities aren't split into branches. Each merges imperceptibly into its neighbours. -- Derek Ross | Talk 16:24, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In an idealised experiment (i.e. with perfect measurements) the branches are completely discrete from each other. --Michael C. Price talk 08:59, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Can there be only 2 different branches?

message: The idea of quantum immortality is similar to considering the amoeba immortal. If amoeba's had minds, they would likely consider that both of the offspring of reproduction by fission were the original amoeba. Splitting off into parallel universes is similar to reproduction by fission. Any amoeba could claim not to be merely a descendant of the original amoeba, but actually to be that amoeba. Now, amoebas do die, and it would probably be pretty cold comfort to those dead amoebas to know that copies of themselves still live. If I tried this experiment, there might be a copy of me that goes on living, but *I* would be dead. In any case, there would still be the possibility that the gun had merely malfunctioned an unlikely number of times. --RLent 23:07, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The immortal amoeba

message: Is this example appropriate? I can understand the gun experiment, but can anyone reasonably claim there would be any universe where a person can survive a direct explosion of a nuclear weapon? I'm not certain of the physics in question, but isn't this about as likely as light travelling between stars instantly? Surely the survival of the person would be impossible given the intense heat, radiation etc? Richard001 21:21, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This issue is already explained above under the heading "Removed info". -- Schaefer (talk) 23:13, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Nuclear weapon example

message: Giving this a little more thought, it seems to be a probability experiment mimicking the number 0.999... - in any universe there will have been a finite number of events in which the survival scenario prevailed, but for immortality an infinite number of survival scenarios is needed, not just a large number. This is like starting off with a probability of 0.5 of living, dividing by 2 an infinite number of times. This would produce 0.000..., which is the same as 0, just as 0.999... is the same as 1. Is this not mathematical proof that there can be no such thing as quantum immortality? Richard001 21:32, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This talk page is for discussing changes to its associated Wikipedia article. It is not a general forum for discussing new insights into quantum immortality. That being said, you may wish to read The Everett FAQ. -- Schaefer (talk) 23:43, 2 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Mathematics of QI

message: How do you resolve that human beings apparently die after no more than 120 years when their body or brain stops working?  Quantum immortality is only clear in these few extreme and violent cases.  12.41.40.20 20:22, 3 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Need another example 

message: Would the physicist be able to avoid the dreary fate of "survives terribly disfigured, badly disabled, and so on" if he adopted the plan of committing suicide (or quantum suicide) every time he found himself in a future that was suboptimal?  This may significantly decrease the number of futures that the physicist survives to, but among those futures wouldn't the physicist be in good shape with high probability?
Quantling 20:47, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  David Lewis argument flawed? 

message: Because QI suggests the possiblity of eternal life from one's own perspective, wouldn't we all eventually be in a universe where we would be infinitely old and decrepit? 
Example: I die of heart failure at age 70 in one world, but I continue to live in another and die of cancer at age 82, but I continue to live in that world and die of renal failure at age 85 and so on. Wouldn't death challenge me more frequently and I would keep evading it while becoming infinitely old?
69.160.1.4 07:52, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Does Quantum Immortality suggest this?