I think I’m hung up on the lottery example in Eliezer’s original post—what is meant by a quantum lottery? He said ‘every ticket wins somewhere’ - does that mean that every ticket wins in some future timeline (such that if you could split yourself and populate multiple future timelines, you could increase your probability of winning)? If not, what does it mean? Lacking some special provision for the ticket, the outcome is determined by the ticket you bought before you queued up the split, rather than the individual probability of winning.
What is meant is n tickets are sold, and then you do something like ‘each ticket bought a particular plutonium atom out of n atoms; whichever atom decays first is a winning ticket’. Many Worlds says that each atom decays first in some world-line.
The idea is to, like the least convenient possible world, to avoid a cheap rhetorical escape like ‘I deny the trilemma because in my world the possibility of winning has already been foreclosed by my buying a predetermined losing ticket! Hah!’
I think I’m hung up on the lottery example in Eliezer’s original post—what is meant by a quantum lottery? He said ‘every ticket wins somewhere’ - does that mean that every ticket wins in some future timeline (such that if you could split yourself and populate multiple future timelines, you could increase your probability of winning)? If not, what does it mean? Lacking some special provision for the ticket, the outcome is determined by the ticket you bought before you queued up the split, rather than the individual probability of winning.
If anyone could clarify this, I’d be grateful.
What is meant is n tickets are sold, and then you do something like ‘each ticket bought a particular plutonium atom out of n atoms; whichever atom decays first is a winning ticket’. Many Worlds says that each atom decays first in some world-line.
The idea is to, like the least convenient possible world, to avoid a cheap rhetorical escape like ‘I deny the trilemma because in my world the possibility of winning has already been foreclosed by my buying a predetermined losing ticket! Hah!’
Ahh, that makes sense. Thank you.