From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Nov 21 2002 - 12:23:43 MST
Lee Corbin wrote to Hal:
> Well, believers in MWI *should* fight to avoid loss of 99%
> of their possible futures (or, equivalently IMO, 99% of their
> duplicates or running selves).
That's exactly right, Lee, and this is why I would fight like the
dickens to stay out of your 999/1000 die chamber. I can experience only
one future and that future is a matter of chance. If you're going to
destroy me immediately in 99% of my possible futures then I will have a
99% chance of having no future.
> But recall the notorious
> Suicide Lottery, where mislead believers in MWI opt to
> win the lottery by picking a random number, and then
> killing themselves in all universes where they don't win.
If you really understood the logical error of these lottery players then
you would understand why your chamber gives one only a .001 chance of
survival. The people in the suicide lottery have the same
misunderstanding as you. The odds for each such lottery player are
astronomically in favor of an outcome in which he will lose and commit
suicide, just as the odds for your chamber are 999/1000 that the
original subject will die.
Hal wrote:
>> This also suggests that when it becomes possible, people might
>> fight as hard to gain a 100-fold increase in possibilities as to
>> avoid a 100-fold loss.
Of course, but this is already possible. We do it anytime we take a
safety precaution that increases of our chances of survival 100-fold.
Consider an idealized situation in which you will be forced to swallow
one of 100 pills, all of which are poisonous. Regardless of your belief
or non-belief in MWI, you would fight very hard to first have 99 of
those 100 pills replaced by non-poisonous pills. In so doing you would
have replaced 0 possible futures with 99 possible futures.
>> In the past this wasn't really an option.
On the contrary, it has always been an option, as in the situation I
describe above. You expand the number of your future possible existences
each time you choose to obey the traffic laws.
MWI does not change the world. It only changes our interpretation of it.
-gts
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