avturchin's Shortform

avturchin

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Quantum immortality of the second type. Classical theory of QI is based on the idea that all possible futures of a given observer do exist because of MWI and thus there will be always a future where he will not die in the next moment, even in the most dangerous situations (e.g. Russian roulette).

QI of the second type makes similar claims but about past. In MWI the same observer could appear via different past histories.

The main claim of QI-2: for any given observer there is a past history where current dangerous situation is not really dangerous. For example, a person has a deadly car accident. But there is another similar observer who is night dreaming about the same accident, or who is having much less severe accident but hallucinate that it is really bad. Interestingly, QI-2 could be reported: a person could say: "I have memory of really bad accident, but it turn out to be nothing. Maybe I died in the parallel world". There are a lot of such report on reddit.

2avturchin5y

The draft is still unpublished. But there are two types of copies, same person, and same observer-moment (OM). Here I meant OM-copies. As they are the same, there is no million different views. They all see the same thing. The idea is that "a OM copy" is not a physical thing which has location, but information, like a number. Number 7 doesn't have location in the physical world. It is present in each place, where 7 objects are presented. But the properties of 7, like that it is odd, are non-local.

This also comes down to our previous discussion on your other paper: it seems impossible to undo past experiences (i.e. by breaking chains of experience or some other way). Nothing will ever change the fact that you experienced x. This just seems as intuitively undeniable to me as a triangle having 3 sides. You can break past chains of information (like erasing history books) but not past chains of experience. Another indication that they might be different.

1superads915y

I think that could only work if you had 2 causal universes (either 2 Hubble volumes or 2 separate universes) exactly equal to each other. Only then could you have 2 persons exactly equal, having the exact same chain of experiences. But we never observe 2 complex macroscopic systems that are exactly equal to the microscopic level. The universe is too complex and chaotic for that. So, the bigger the system, the less likely to happen it becomes. Unless our universe was infinite, which seems impossible since it has been born and it will die. But maybe an infinite amount of universes including many copies of each other? Seems impossible for the same reason (universes end up dying). (And then, even if you have 2 (or even a billion) exactly equal persons experiencing the exact same chain of experiences in exactly equal causal worlds, we can see that the causal effect is the exact same in all of them, so if one dies, all the others will die too.) Now, in MWI it could never work, since we know that the "mes" in all different branches are experiencing different things (if each branch corresponds to a different possibility, then the mes in each branch necessarily have to be experiencing different things). Anyway, even before all of this, I don't believe in any kind of computationalism, because information by itself has no experience. The number 7 has no experience. Consciousness must be something more complex. Information seems to be an interpretation of the physical world by a consciousness entity.