If you accept the idea of quantum suicide then you should be open to the idea of using it for editing reality. You could construct some system that monitored events for you and would immediately cause you to cease to exist if events did not happen as you wanted them. The idea would be that you would continue to exist only in those future worlds in which events happened as desired, so that from your point of view, events would always happen as you wanted. You would be using quantum suicide to control your reality.
Quantum Suicide Computing
Suppose you had some computing problem which would take a long time to solve, but you have some way of checking possible answers. You could set up some system which uses quantum events to generate a random answer to the computation and then automatically causes you to cease to exist if the answer is not the correct answer, or if it is not better, in some sense, than the previous answer that you obtained. The idea would be that future worlds would exist in which all possible answers were generated and you would only exist in those worlds where the answer was correct or better than previously generated hours, thereby giving you the perception of having enormous computing power.
Could be a pretty wild dystopia for the people who aren’t hooked up—elites constantly disappearing and the clocks are all wrong. Come to think of it, did I say DYStopia?
“Now two physicists claim in a new study that no matter how hard we try, we may never turn the LHC on at all.
The study is authored by Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, who argue that the very particles the LHC produces will prevent the accelerator from ever being used. Harvard post-doc and CERN collaborator Kevin Black relates their argument to the grandfather paradox—that a particle like the Higgs boson goes back in time and prevents its own birth (i.e. the future changes the events of the present).”
It’s not exactly quantum suicide, but a similar effect is claimed to actually reach into the past to cancel out any branch where lots of Higgs bosons are produced, as the LHC arguably will do. The prediction is that the LHC (nor any similarly powerful collider) will never successfully operate at full power, and so far it’s coming true!
Another fun read: Civilization-Level Quantum Suicide
Scott Aaronson calls this anthropic computing (under the heading The Anthropic Principle).
Could be a pretty wild dystopia for the people who aren’t hooked up—elites constantly disappearing and the clocks are all wrong. Come to think of it, did I say DYStopia?
Another idea along these lines is mentioned in this blog post:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/08/11/will-the-lhc’s-future-cancel-out-its-past/
“Now two physicists claim in a new study that no matter how hard we try, we may never turn the LHC on at all. The study is authored by Holger Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya, who argue that the very particles the LHC produces will prevent the accelerator from ever being used. Harvard post-doc and CERN collaborator Kevin Black relates their argument to the grandfather paradox—that a particle like the Higgs boson goes back in time and prevents its own birth (i.e. the future changes the events of the present).”
It’s not exactly quantum suicide, but a similar effect is claimed to actually reach into the past to cancel out any branch where lots of Higgs bosons are produced, as the LHC arguably will do. The prediction is that the LHC (nor any similarly powerful collider) will never successfully operate at full power, and so far it’s coming true!
(Original paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/0802.2991 )