The same way one “should expect” to wake up from sleep the next morning. “You” of this instant is a particular observer-moment that is being computed in a multitude of quantum branches or universes. Here the argument is that when you die, there will be quantum branches or other universes computing observer-moments of you being revived, and hence you are guaranteed to be “revived” after death from a subjective point of view.
Could you elaborate on the ground truth part? I’m not sure I understand.
I’m not convinced that there is a single “way” one should expect to wake up in the morning. If we’re talking about things like observer-moments and exotic theories of identity, I don’t think we can reliably communicate by analogy to mundane situations, since our intuitions might differ in subtle ways that don’t matter in those situations.
For instance, should I believe that I will wake up because that will lead me to make decisions that lead to world-states I prefer, or should I expect to wake up because it is true that I will probably wake up? If the latter, does that just mean that there will exist an observer-moment in my bed tomorrow that is a close match to my current self, or am I actually expecting to be the same as that observer-moment in some important sense that that would not apply to other observer-moments in the same epistemic state? Different answers to these questions will mostly add up to similar bedtime behavior, but they diverge if the situation gets far out of distribution.
If I just care about doing things that help similar observer-moments, the assumption that “I” am distributed across multiple worlds doesn’t matter much. I’ll just act under the assumption that I’ll live another day (or eventually be revived), and in worlds I don’t, there aren’t any observer-moments I care about to complain I guessed wrong. In that sense, I “should” expect to continue to exist (But if you’re selfish enough, this means you “should” expect to be immortal even in a single, deterministic universe. When you inevitably die, you aren’t around to regret your expectation!) But if you only “should” expect things as much as they are likely to actually happen, being distributed over multiple universes is a big issue, since it is likely that in any given time period you will actually die in some universes AND actually survive in others. You could decide to weight your belief according to how many universes you expect to survive in, but only if you have a measure over universes. (this is also an issue for the first kind of “should”; once you decide to act like you’ll live, you might find yourself facing decisions that incline you to weigh one set of worlds against another.)
What does it mean to “should expect” something, if your identity is transmitted across multiple universes with different ground truths?
The same way one “should expect” to wake up from sleep the next morning. “You” of this instant is a particular observer-moment that is being computed in a multitude of quantum branches or universes. Here the argument is that when you die, there will be quantum branches or other universes computing observer-moments of you being revived, and hence you are guaranteed to be “revived” after death from a subjective point of view.
Could you elaborate on the ground truth part? I’m not sure I understand.
I’m not convinced that there is a single “way” one should expect to wake up in the morning. If we’re talking about things like observer-moments and exotic theories of identity, I don’t think we can reliably communicate by analogy to mundane situations, since our intuitions might differ in subtle ways that don’t matter in those situations.
For instance, should I believe that I will wake up because that will lead me to make decisions that lead to world-states I prefer, or should I expect to wake up because it is true that I will probably wake up? If the latter, does that just mean that there will exist an observer-moment in my bed tomorrow that is a close match to my current self, or am I actually expecting to be the same as that observer-moment in some important sense that that would not apply to other observer-moments in the same epistemic state? Different answers to these questions will mostly add up to similar bedtime behavior, but they diverge if the situation gets far out of distribution.
If I just care about doing things that help similar observer-moments, the assumption that “I” am distributed across multiple worlds doesn’t matter much. I’ll just act under the assumption that I’ll live another day (or eventually be revived), and in worlds I don’t, there aren’t any observer-moments I care about to complain I guessed wrong. In that sense, I “should” expect to continue to exist (But if you’re selfish enough, this means you “should” expect to be immortal even in a single, deterministic universe. When you inevitably die, you aren’t around to regret your expectation!) But if you only “should” expect things as much as they are likely to actually happen, being distributed over multiple universes is a big issue, since it is likely that in any given time period you will actually die in some universes AND actually survive in others. You could decide to weight your belief according to how many universes you expect to survive in, but only if you have a measure over universes. (this is also an issue for the first kind of “should”; once you decide to act like you’ll live, you might find yourself facing decisions that incline you to weigh one set of worlds against another.)