Critique of the quantum suicide experiment

[Ken G]

To follow up on that last point, my contention is that QS is not a ramification of MWI, indeed it is incompatible with MWI. If QS is true, then the following will be the future of whoever is reading these words: You will live to 200, and medical science will start to do tests on you. They will not find anything unusual about you, other than that you are a statistical anomaly. When you reach 300, you will begin to know that QS was correct, and still no one else will be able to treat you as anything but an oddity-- nothing useful will be learned about the aging process by studying you because you are not like other people, you are very highly statistically outlying. Also, your quality of life will probably be awful-- you'll crave death but none comes. When you reach 500, you will have long since given up on your fate-- you already know QS was right, and that virtual immortality is your destiny, indeed the ultimate destiny of all conscious beings. What is not clear is whether you will still possesses the mental faculties to appreciate all this-- this is one of the many things QS is vague about, what counts as "you surviving."

The reason this is not what will actually happen to you is that QS makes additional assumptions about who "you" are that are not compatible with either QM or MWI. QS imagines that "you" are any future thing that can trace a continuous history to your current state here and now, reading this. But MWI says that there would then be very many "yous" a second from now, but it fails to find any particular connection between all those "yous". It has no important or significant way to even distinguish those "yous" from anybody else in the world, other than the nearness of their memories. Is what "I" am simply defined by my memories? If I have temporary amnesia, I'm not "me" any more, but I will be again when my amnesia subsides?

Whatever "I" am is not a question answered by MWI, and so the assumption about how it would work that is made by QS has nothing to do with MWI. The ramifications of QS are more absurd than MWI, so they must not be compatible with each other.

 

[bobonumbnuts]

This idea that you are immortal (in fact the only immortal in your experience of the universe) is completely idiotic, you were in a state of non existence prior to your birth which is the equivalence of being dead. To claim that it is impossible to return to that state of non existence by means of some quantum loophole is paradoxical and smells of Kurzweillian BS.