Quantum immortality does increase the probability of government immortality in the universes where you are still alive. That was why I started with 10^72 identical universes to directly calculate how many branches had living copies after 10 or 11 seconds. It turned out that 10^10 of the universes had a copy that was government-immortal, and 0 had a copy that was quantum-immortal, so any living individual after 11 seconds has a much higher probability of not surviving the last 11 seconds due to quantum immortality. I think you should expect to experience what a majority of your future copies will experience. Of course you never die out of the metaverse completely, but even if I started with 3^^^^3 identical universes after 11 seconds there would still be many orders of magnitude more government-immortals than quantum-immortals, and that ratio would only increase the longer I calculated. Even if I look at each quantum immortal individually it has the same probability tree in its future so it should expect the government immortality to dominate its own future copies even if it’s the result of 3^^^3 seconds of quantum immortality. What am I doing wrong?
You’re taking the end-probability and using it as the probability of arriving at that location; you’re looking at the problem and asking, assuming I’m alive in ten seconds, what’s the most likely way for me to be alive? And asking the question that way, clinical immortality gets a huge boost.
The question, however, comes down to some atomic unit of existence. I don’t know what that atomic unit is, but in order for it to add up to normality, it has to survive things like unconsciousness and sleep. Quantum immortality is going to be the process of slipping from atomic unit to atomic unit, even when they’re not necessarily in the same universe. There isn’t going to be any forward mapping; it will go straight ahead to the “cheapest” next step, which will get incrementally more expensive (unlikely). Maybe the most likely next step is waking up from an unusually realistic dream, maybe it’s waking up in a hospital. If quantum immortality works, long-term probability won’t enter into it. It will follow the cheapest short-term path.
Or, to put it in more general terms, when you start rigging probabilities, you can’t simply count the number of possible paths and assume the most common is the most likely.
The question, however, comes down to some atomic unit of existence. I don’t know what that atomic unit is, but in order for it to add up to normality, it has to survive things like unconsciousness and sleep. Quantum immortality is going to be the process of slipping from atomic unit to atomic unit, even when they’re not necessarily in the same universe. There isn’t going to be any forward mapping; it will go straight ahead to the “cheapest” next step, which will get incrementally more expensive (unlikely). Maybe the most likely next step is waking up from an unusually realistic dream, maybe it’s waking up in a hospital. If quantum immortality works, long-term probability won’t enter into it. It will follow the cheapest short-term path.
This can’t actually be true, though, or else we would never experience any unlikely quantum events. Quantum mechanics works the same whether it makes us immortal or not, so if we expected our experience to only go to the most likely future then we would never see anything unlikely. We would never see radioactive decay because it’s less likely than not-radioactive-decay. If we never, ever detect a proton decay then there might be something to the idea that we only experience unlikely quantum events above a certain threshold (or our model of proton decay is wrong), but otherwise it seems like we do have to count up all possibilities and compute our expected outcome from the measure of our experiences in each possibility.
My language was imprecise; we should -expect- to go to the most likely future. The key point however is short-term probability rather than long-term probability.
Quantum immortality does increase the probability of government immortality in the universes where you are still alive. That was why I started with 10^72 identical universes to directly calculate how many branches had living copies after 10 or 11 seconds. It turned out that 10^10 of the universes had a copy that was government-immortal, and 0 had a copy that was quantum-immortal, so any living individual after 11 seconds has a much higher probability of not surviving the last 11 seconds due to quantum immortality. I think you should expect to experience what a majority of your future copies will experience. Of course you never die out of the metaverse completely, but even if I started with 3^^^^3 identical universes after 11 seconds there would still be many orders of magnitude more government-immortals than quantum-immortals, and that ratio would only increase the longer I calculated. Even if I look at each quantum immortal individually it has the same probability tree in its future so it should expect the government immortality to dominate its own future copies even if it’s the result of 3^^^3 seconds of quantum immortality. What am I doing wrong?
You’re taking the end-probability and using it as the probability of arriving at that location; you’re looking at the problem and asking, assuming I’m alive in ten seconds, what’s the most likely way for me to be alive? And asking the question that way, clinical immortality gets a huge boost.
The question, however, comes down to some atomic unit of existence. I don’t know what that atomic unit is, but in order for it to add up to normality, it has to survive things like unconsciousness and sleep. Quantum immortality is going to be the process of slipping from atomic unit to atomic unit, even when they’re not necessarily in the same universe. There isn’t going to be any forward mapping; it will go straight ahead to the “cheapest” next step, which will get incrementally more expensive (unlikely). Maybe the most likely next step is waking up from an unusually realistic dream, maybe it’s waking up in a hospital. If quantum immortality works, long-term probability won’t enter into it. It will follow the cheapest short-term path.
Or, to put it in more general terms, when you start rigging probabilities, you can’t simply count the number of possible paths and assume the most common is the most likely.
This can’t actually be true, though, or else we would never experience any unlikely quantum events. Quantum mechanics works the same whether it makes us immortal or not, so if we expected our experience to only go to the most likely future then we would never see anything unlikely. We would never see radioactive decay because it’s less likely than not-radioactive-decay. If we never, ever detect a proton decay then there might be something to the idea that we only experience unlikely quantum events above a certain threshold (or our model of proton decay is wrong), but otherwise it seems like we do have to count up all possibilities and compute our expected outcome from the measure of our experiences in each possibility.
My language was imprecise; we should -expect- to go to the most likely future. The key point however is short-term probability rather than long-term probability.