I honestly don’t see what the argument for quantum immortality even is. You don’t randomly become one of your successors, you become all of them, including the dead ones.
The argument is this: if having living successors is just as good as our naive concept of survival, then it seems we’re guaranteed to always have something as good as that naive concept. It seems like MWI is telling us that, in almost any circumstances, we will always have some successors that are still alive.
The dead ones don’t enter into it. You can’t experience being dead.
But it’s not exactly obvious to a man-on-the-street like me that we would always have successors: one could imagine someone whose situation was so dire that he had zero successors.
(Of course, he himself is a successor to someone who has successors other than him, but that’s not as good.)
I honestly don’t see what the argument for quantum immortality even is. You don’t randomly become one of your successors, you become all of them, including the dead ones.
The argument is this: if having living successors is just as good as our naive concept of survival, then it seems we’re guaranteed to always have something as good as that naive concept. It seems like MWI is telling us that, in almost any circumstances, we will always have some successors that are still alive.
The dead ones don’t enter into it. You can’t experience being dead.
But it’s not exactly obvious to a man-on-the-street like me that we would always have successors: one could imagine someone whose situation was so dire that he had zero successors.
(Of course, he himself is a successor to someone who has successors other than him, but that’s not as good.)