Sorry for the double post, but I just had a “Eureka moment”, and I think I can now explain the intuitive appeal of the idea of Quantum Immortality. It might still be wrong, but I can explain the appeal.
As above, a “successor” is a being who is psychologically continuous with you and remembers being you, et cetera. I want to consider 4 cases:
Case 1: MWI is false. In almost any normal circumstances (i.e. not involving teleporters or uploading), a person either has one successor or zero.
Case 2: MWI is true. In normal circumstances, a person has a huge number of successors.
Case 3: MWI is true. A person undergoes the 50⁄50 experiment, and still has a very large number of successors (though only half as many as in Case 2).
Case 4: MWI is true. A person undergoes a 1000⁄1 experiment, in which he dies with 99.9% probability. But because MWI is true, he still has a large number of successors (though only 0.1% of the number in Case 2).
Quantum Immortality is appealing insofar as Case 4 still seems to be better than Case 1. In other words, the combination of [MWI true, event with high chance of death] intuitively seems better than [MWI false, ordinary boring event].
As I said, it can still be wrong, but I think it’s appealing for reasons along these lines.
Sorry for the double post, but I just had a “Eureka moment”, and I think I can now explain the intuitive appeal of the idea of Quantum Immortality. It might still be wrong, but I can explain the appeal.
As above, a “successor” is a being who is psychologically continuous with you and remembers being you, et cetera. I want to consider 4 cases:
Case 1: MWI is false. In almost any normal circumstances (i.e. not involving teleporters or uploading), a person either has one successor or zero.
Case 2: MWI is true. In normal circumstances, a person has a huge number of successors.
Case 3: MWI is true. A person undergoes the 50⁄50 experiment, and still has a very large number of successors (though only half as many as in Case 2).
Case 4: MWI is true. A person undergoes a 1000⁄1 experiment, in which he dies with 99.9% probability. But because MWI is true, he still has a large number of successors (though only 0.1% of the number in Case 2).
Quantum Immortality is appealing insofar as Case 4 still seems to be better than Case 1. In other words, the combination of [MWI true, event with high chance of death] intuitively seems better than [MWI false, ordinary boring event].
As I said, it can still be wrong, but I think it’s appealing for reasons along these lines.