Okay, basic sanity-check: I sit in Shrödinger box with a radioactive nucleus with half-life one minute for an hour and come out alive from it. I have two possible explanations:
Quantum mechanics is wrong.
Dead mes are unobservable.
And I am pretty damn sure that quantum mechanics work.
OK, technically, there is some tiny chance (i.e. small-weight branch) that you would survive, and conditional on this tiny chance (i.e. conditional on that we are considering your observations only in this small-weight branch), you would have observed it not decaying. But the weight of this branch is no larger than the weight of the branch where it didn’t decay if you did the experiment without the dying part.
When physicists outside the box see you come out, they just observed something that is far greater significance than 5 sigmas. It is almost 9 sigmas, in fact. This is enough to make physicists reject QM (or at least the hypothesis “everything happened as you described and QM is true”). And you can’t agree to disagree once you get outside of the box and meet them. So you’d be a physics crank in this scenario if you tell people the experiment’s result was compatible with QM.
The trick is that, from my perspective, everything is going according to QM every time my death doesn’t depend on it. So I can put someone else inside the box and see them die in 10 minutes.
I mean, there’s plenty of yous that suddenly hear a hiss, see gas filling in the room, start desperately scratching at the sealed door, regretting their stupidity to be coaxed for some reason in this absurd experiment just for the sake of LW cred, grasp at their throat, and eventually slide to the floor spasming as the poison chokes the life out of them. Plenty of experience there! They just don’t get to tell the story.
(it’s interesting though that in a way things DO feel different if instead of poison the decaying atom triggers a nuclear bomb at point blank which obliterates you before any chances to perceive anything at all. But if that meant a real, physical difference that would imply some freaky things about consciousness and quantum mechanics)
Okay, basic sanity-check: I sit in Shrödinger box with a radioactive nucleus with half-life one minute for an hour and come out alive from it. I have two possible explanations:
Quantum mechanics is wrong.
Dead mes are unobservable.
And I am pretty damn sure that quantum mechanics work.
I suppose there are other possible explanations like:
3. Someone messed up the experiment so there was no radiactive nucleus in the box
4. You are mind experiment, simulating exteremely improbable scenario
You don’t observe that. You just die.
OK, technically, there is some tiny chance (i.e. small-weight branch) that you would survive, and conditional on this tiny chance (i.e. conditional on that we are considering your observations only in this small-weight branch), you would have observed it not decaying. But the weight of this branch is no larger than the weight of the branch where it didn’t decay if you did the experiment without the dying part.
When physicists outside the box see you come out, they just observed something that is far greater significance than 5 sigmas. It is almost 9 sigmas, in fact. This is enough to make physicists reject QM (or at least the hypothesis “everything happened as you described and QM is true”). And you can’t agree to disagree once you get outside of the box and meet them. So you’d be a physics crank in this scenario if you tell people the experiment’s result was compatible with QM.
The trick is that, from my perspective, everything is going according to QM every time my death doesn’t depend on it. So I can put someone else inside the box and see them die in 10 minutes.
Right, so this an anthropic angel hypothesis, not anthropic shadow.
I mean, there’s plenty of yous that suddenly hear a hiss, see gas filling in the room, start desperately scratching at the sealed door, regretting their stupidity to be coaxed for some reason in this absurd experiment just for the sake of LW cred, grasp at their throat, and eventually slide to the floor spasming as the poison chokes the life out of them. Plenty of experience there! They just don’t get to tell the story.
(it’s interesting though that in a way things DO feel different if instead of poison the decaying atom triggers a nuclear bomb at point blank which obliterates you before any chances to perceive anything at all. But if that meant a real, physical difference that would imply some freaky things about consciousness and quantum mechanics)