Talk:Quantum suicide and immortality/Archive 1

message: It would mean, that I will live up to about 80, and then I will get older and older but not die, miraculously avoiding death from aging (with telomeres somehow not shortening). As probability of such miracles is extremely small, only my consciousness will get into these parallel universes. Therefore, all people I will met when I will be about 300 will be p-zombies.
Moreover: Every little moment the world I live in is splitting into a bunch of parallel universes, and my consciousness is going always to one and only one of them. Consciousnesses of other people also are going to one and only one of them, and hardly likely they are going to the same parallel universe I'm going. That means, that almost for sure all people I meet and talk to them are actually p-zombies. -- Anonymous reader.
: Well that's one possibility.  Of course it's rather more likely that by the time you are 80, Bayer will be marketing teleMore®, the miracle telomere extender. Too bad for the zombies but I'm sure that the vampires -- er, I mean the pharmaceutical industry -- will be happy raking in the cash. 
: On more technical point you should also note, that according to the theory, your consciousness ends up in all of the universes that it can, not just in one. The only futures that it doesn't enter are the ones in which you have died. So you can rest assured that you will be dealing with ordinary people rather than zombies (unless some Hollywood Science type disease has gotten loose!) -- Derek Ross
: I kind of assume that by "p-zombie", you mean a person whose consciousness/soul has taken another branch of the tree? Though I'm having trouble telling them apart, that sounds more like many minds than many worlds, does it not? In particular, this whole theory assumes (and tries to reason about) a brain/mind duality which many-worlds does not seem to support. (Actually it occurs to me that this page is independent of many-worlds, though that's where I linked to it from. So maybe the link was decpetive.)
:: P-zombie is probably an abbreviation for philosophical zombie.  --η[ υωρ] 01:09, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: No. I think that isn't always the case because those people exist in your existance until they die, but they do not die if they were to observe from their existence. Because those people must always exist then once they die they shift to the closest univserse in which the event did not happen in which they did not die. This universe would be pretty much the same until up until the event that caused that person to die. Most of this is only a fraction of a second before death, but also events such as terminal illness and other things could also cause this. At that point they no longer have memories of that parallel universe. You experience existence through 1st person perspective and it appears to you that you are not sharing conciousness with any other beings. Although your memory is tied to that conciousness of what you perceive as a being that perceives past and future (linear beings) although this is tied to your brain. The problem with this answer is that it doesn't answer why you are you and not someone else (or other sentient being) in the universe. Maybe because we exist as us now it is more likley that our existence would move non-linearly (as in not being reborn as another being on this plane of existence) but rather shifting to the next closest state of being. Since information, energy, or matter can be exchanged, only the ability to be concious can do this. --James 68.80.190.94 23:52, 19 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Living with p-zombies

message: Are there practical uses for quantum immortality? Just as a lottery draw was being made, could you hook yourself into some sort of mechanism which would kill you in all the universes where your numbers didn't come up? Thus, from your point of view, you would be guaranteed to win the lottery? Evercat 22:21, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Winning a lottery in such a manner would be possible, but not guaranteed.  The mechanism might simply fail, and its failure may be much more likely than the possibility of variation in the lottery draw.  --η[ υωρ] 22:57, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: The Copenhagen interpretation has been disproven by Shahriar Afshar's double-slit experiment.  --η[ υωρ] 00:09, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  So far as I know that experiment is still rather controversal, so I wouldn't rewrite all interpretation based on it quite yet. Laura Scudder 06:15, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Practical uses...

message: If the universe actually is spatially infinite (flat or open), and non-periodic, then by Kolmogorov's zero-one law everything that is possible happens somewhere - happens an infinite number of times, in fact. That's pretty simple.
Therefore, there is an infinite number of Earths identical or very similar to this one. In most (assuming no major advances in medicine) I'll die before I reach 100; in some I won't. In general, for any imaginable cause of death, there is some way, however unlikely, that it won't happen. Nuclear bomb goes off next to me? The blast and radiation all travel around me. Bullet in the head? Bounces off. Decapitation? Air molecules spontaneously arrange themselves into a new body.
The "laws" that say all these things are "impossible" are, like the second law of thermodynamics, only statistical. They're so unlikely as to be effectively impossible, but given an infinite number of chances they have to happen. And, obviously, on the Earths where they don't happen I won't notice - I'll be dead. Therefore, no matter what, an infinite number of me are going to live forever.
Can somebody tell me if this is wrong?
Nickptar 02:00, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd just like to clarify what I mean by "the second law is statistical", in case anyone decides to attack that: in most randomly chosen systems with a hot object next to a cold object, heat flows from hot to cold. But the laws of physics are time-reversible, so if I take a system in which heat has been moving from hot to cold for a while, and reverse the direction of every particle, it will go backwards and heat will move from the cold to the hot object. This same argument can work for all sorts of unlikely occurence; if you drop a teacup on the floor, then reverse the direction of every particle in the vicinity, the sound waves, heat, and such released will come back to the teacup and cause it to go back together and jump up to your hand. Etc. As I said, many things are possible but so improbable as to be effectively impossible - but in an infinite universe, they all happen somewhere. Nickptar 02:12, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

text: Well, that starts getting deeper into the philosophical debate over what an "independent consciousness" is. Personally, I would consider someone with the exact same memories and way of thinking as me to be me, I'm not concerned with how that congruence came about in the first place. So if I die but someone somewhere who is exactly like me in every respect (except the dying part) goes on, I'd say that "I" was still alive. I suspect this just comes down to a matter of opinion, though, so if you disagree then you disagree and we should probably just leave it at that. I've participated in some pretty endless debates on this subject on Usenet and it always seems to come down to "yes it is"/"no it isn't" :) Bryan 07:20, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

text: Sounds like an excellent summary to me. In the event that this material goes into the article all we'd need to do is describe out both viewpoints and mention how they differ, and hopefully that would be sufficient. I'm not aware of any definitive way of showing one or the other to be more "correct". Bryan 18:38, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

text: It's a valid position to take -- and it may well be correct. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't throw out the "consciousness as a communication process" concept just yet since there isn't enough evidence to choose between the two approaches at the moment whatever our personal preferences might be. -- Derek Ross |  Talk 03:07, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  You don't even need quantum physics for this, do you? 

message: Some interesting questions are raised though, such as:
*What makes us who we are? If our bodies were to be replaced, and we slowly forget things over time, in 200,000,000,000,000,000 years, would the cyborg evil empire person standing on the deck of the Command Starship Trip the Light Fantastic, overseeing the bombardment of a planet (and death of trillions) and cackling evilly, still be the same person sitting here today typing with a bottle of Sprite?
::Looking forward to it, are we ? <grin> -- Derek Ross |  Talk 03:00, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It could be argued that way if we were more interested in our own feelings than those of others but note that suffering and death are two different things. While we can say that other people will die for sure we can't say that they will suffer for sure, so it would be pretty selfish to ignore other people's suffering if we were in a position to do something about it. -- Derek Ross |  Talk 03:00, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Well like the rest of us, you have the right -- or at least the ability -- to try but bear in mind that if being Evil Overlord Of The Universe reduces your survival prospects (as it probably would) that QI might make it impossible to achieve. -- Derek Ross |  Talk 03:00, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

text: The scary thing about the Many Worlds Interpretation -- even if you ignore Quantum Immortality -- is that it implies that nearly everything, good or bad, moral or immoral, happens to nearly everyone, good or bad, moral or immoral as long as it doesn't violate the microlevel quantum conservation laws. If QI is real, it is a result of the MWI and when we try to figure out what happens at the end of the Universe under MWI, we are getting so speculative that QI seems like relatively firm ground, so all we can say with any certainty is "Who knows ?". -- Derek Ross |  Talk 03:00, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Moral Issues

message: 1. Does it mean that there exist subjective probability and objective probability and they differ?
2. Does it mean that it is possible to build a machine for control on probability ("probability control mashine"), which
has a quantum connection with a mechanism that triggers quantum event of death of the operator?
3. Does it mean that we could with this machine make everybody, who wants, a popstar or a president
or even unlimited dictator - an answer to that class of needs that cannot be realised by classical
means (such as production of food, goods, rising productivity and expansion to the space)?
--Nixer 
:I actually thought of this once. You would make a machine that you would punch in your lottery ticket an hour after the drawing and if you failed to win the jackpot, then it would vaporize you instantly. So technically, the only universes you could exist in were ones that you won the multi-million dollar lottery. However, this also must entail that the probability of you surviving the vaporization but only being serious maimed or injured or the machine itself fails to carry out the death sentence through mechnical failure, must be less than the probability of you winning the lottery. Otherwise to the person in the machine they would observe themselves pushing the button and nothing happens or waking up in a hospital rather than winning the lottery. To the 3rd party observers it would look like you were vaporized instantly and wondering what to do now that they won't be sharing with your profits in this universe. If what you are asking for is too improbable then you will most likely witness machine failure or end up in a universe where such a machine does not exist. --James 68.80.190.94 00:32, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  The probability of machine failure/dissappearance could be reduced to an arbitrary level (eg. by having 1000s of duplicates), couldn't it? Would be interesting to see some calculations for how many duplicates you'd need for a certain feats. Imagining a senario where "magicians" supported by planet sized banks of duplicate machines do battle with their magic powers... Frankd 18:50, 18 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: This was my question. So I expesitely stated that there would be quantum PCM with quantum connection with the operator, not a mechanical guilliotine or atomic bomb, which makes impossible any end-ups other than winning the jack-pot.--Nixer 23:34, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Probability control machine 

message: How terrifying would it be to live in a world where everyone around you dies while you miraculously keep on living.  A few centuries in your deteriorating body, you'll be wishing for death and all to no avail. -- (Anon)
:Yes, it is rather a scary thought. -- Derek Ross |  Talk 15:13, 25 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  I really hope it's not true