Correct; and the point of specifying coherent quantum superposition, as would exist in a large-scale quantum computer, is that so that both branches “go on existing”—which I think they do anyway, but I wasn’t sure about the quantum suicide aspect—actually, the more I think about this, the more I start to think that quantum suicide ought to work, since could you really say someone was 50% dead if they lived on a still-coherent quantum computer and only existed in half the branches? Maybe you could. I don’t understand Born probabilities or anthropics.
Your original proposal is extremely close to quantum suicide; in particular the phrase “at the expense of smaller measure” is the key assumption of quantum suicide. This is, as far as I can tell, the rejection of the Born measure. But we observe the Born measure and our normal decision theory values it as probability. To reject Born measure is to say that it does not “all add up to normality.”
Correct; and the point of specifying coherent quantum superposition, as would exist in a large-scale quantum computer, is that so that both branches “go on existing”—which I think they do anyway, but I wasn’t sure about the quantum suicide aspect—actually, the more I think about this, the more I start to think that quantum suicide ought to work, since could you really say someone was 50% dead if they lived on a still-coherent quantum computer and only existed in half the branches? Maybe you could. I don’t understand Born probabilities or anthropics.
Your original proposal is extremely close to quantum suicide; in particular the phrase “at the expense of smaller measure” is the key assumption of quantum suicide. This is, as far as I can tell, the rejection of the Born measure. But we observe the Born measure and our normal decision theory values it as probability. To reject Born measure is to say that it does not “all add up to normality.”