There is no rational argument against quantum suicide and the truth of it easily tested. The longer you live without knowing about quantum suicide, the less optimal your life will turn out. At the same time, you cannot look to anyone else’s success as social proof for you to do it, you have to be the first.
I don’t know if this is a common counter-argument or not, but you have to be very careful with your suicide, so that the next most likely outcome is not to give you horrible permanent injuries. It seems to me that if the whole multi-universe theory is correct, then at the end of your life, the next most likely outcome to death is another painful last gasp. And another. And so forth..
Also, many people include the happiness of others in their utility function and a quantum suicide would do harm to your friends and family.
If you have worked out the suicide correctly, you should also make bets that you’re going to survive. If you lose, you’ve lost nothing, and if quantum suicide works then you come out richer.
This idea feel a lot like manifesting/affirmations to me.
That doesn’t require quantum suicide. It’s a good idea regardless.
Unless, of course, you care more about your next of kin having the money than you, but in that case, why are you waiting until you die to give it away?
Does anyone know where they do that? The reverse (life insurance) seems oddly more common.
If anything like Robin’s Mangled Worlds theory is true, quantum suicide would be a bad idea. You would end up living only in worlds of small measure that get mangled by worlds with larger measure in which you are dead.
I believe personal identity is an illusion. Given that, quantum suicide, as it is normally given, clearly wouldn’t work. You could do something similar by ending the universe if it’s suboptimal, and getting something good by the anthropic principle, but you have to take into account that there’s a lot of observer-moment-probability-density before it starts branching and you start destroying it, so you have to take that into account.
Aside from the nice rational argument “I assign large negative utility to dying, and the expected chance of dying if I blow myself up is very high, so I assign negative expected utility to blowing myself up.” Utility functions are over the state of the world.
Under the Everett interpretation that’s accepted by the majority of LW, there’s no such thing as collapse. Here’s an index of LW posts dealing with the topic.
Your question does have a valid rephrasing without the word “collapse”, and the answer is kinda yes, you can’t rule out the possibility of the gun firing. Quantum immortality is only the (controversial) idea that your consciousness cannot disappear completely, but you still end up horribly disfigured or brain-damaged with higher probability than get out unharmed.
There is no rational argument against quantum suicide and the truth of it easily tested. The longer you live without knowing about quantum suicide, the less optimal your life will turn out. At the same time, you cannot look to anyone else’s success as social proof for you to do it, you have to be the first.
If you think you’re going to have a net positive impact on the world, it makes sense to be present in all the Everett branches you can.
Especially if you consider your own alive-and-well presence a positive property of the world.
I don’t know if this is a common counter-argument or not, but you have to be very careful with your suicide, so that the next most likely outcome is not to give you horrible permanent injuries. It seems to me that if the whole multi-universe theory is correct, then at the end of your life, the next most likely outcome to death is another painful last gasp. And another. And so forth..
Also, many people include the happiness of others in their utility function and a quantum suicide would do harm to your friends and family.
If you have worked out the suicide correctly, you should also make bets that you’re going to survive. If you lose, you’ve lost nothing, and if quantum suicide works then you come out richer.
This idea feel a lot like manifesting/affirmations to me.
That doesn’t require quantum suicide. It’s a good idea regardless.
Unless, of course, you care more about your next of kin having the money than you, but in that case, why are you waiting until you die to give it away?
Does anyone know where they do that? The reverse (life insurance) seems oddly more common.
If anything like Robin’s Mangled Worlds theory is true, quantum suicide would be a bad idea. You would end up living only in worlds of small measure that get mangled by worlds with larger measure in which you are dead.
I believe personal identity is an illusion. Given that, quantum suicide, as it is normally given, clearly wouldn’t work. You could do something similar by ending the universe if it’s suboptimal, and getting something good by the anthropic principle, but you have to take into account that there’s a lot of observer-moment-probability-density before it starts branching and you start destroying it, so you have to take that into account.
Aside from the nice rational argument “I assign large negative utility to dying, and the expected chance of dying if I blow myself up is very high, so I assign negative expected utility to blowing myself up.” Utility functions are over the state of the world.
wouldn’t the fact that you would indirectly observe the spin by the effect of the gun, collapse the probability wave?
Under the Everett interpretation that’s accepted by the majority of LW, there’s no such thing as collapse. Here’s an index of LW posts dealing with the topic.
Your question does have a valid rephrasing without the word “collapse”, and the answer is kinda yes, you can’t rule out the possibility of the gun firing. Quantum immortality is only the (controversial) idea that your consciousness cannot disappear completely, but you still end up horribly disfigured or brain-damaged with higher probability than get out unharmed.