On Tue, Sep 17, 2019 at 8:25 AM Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> > On 13 Sep 2019, at 23:27, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I have a modest proposal, it's a low tech way to find out once and for all > if the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is correct, and as > a side effect make you rich. First you buy one Powerball lottery ticket, > the next drawing of the winning number is at 11pm tonight. Then make a > simple machine that will monitor the internet and pull the trigger on a 44 > magnum aimed at your head at exactly 11.01pm UNLESS yours is the winning > ticket. If Many Worlds is correct your subjective experience can only be > that at 11.01pm, despite 80 million to one odds stacked against you, a > miracle occurs and the gun does not go off and you're rich beyond the > dreams of avarice. After that as you fly on your private jet to your > private island you can contemplate the fact that you are the only person in > the world who knows the true nature of reality and knows it with absolute > certainty. And it only cost you a few hundred dollars to make the machine, > the most expensive part being the gun itself. > > Of course for every universe you're rich in there are 80 million in which > your friends watch your head explode, but that's a minor point, your > consciousness no longer exists in any of those worlds so you never have to > see the mess; somebody else will have to clean up the thousands of itty > bitty bits of brain splattered all over the room, it's their problem not > yours. > > > > The problem is that the probability is higher to get mad and believe you > did get the winning lottery, when the bullet did not kill you. But in > principle this works, yet, not in any practical sense. Because il all > worlds where the bullet go through your brain, you survive there too. You > would need a self-annihilating deice which is infallible, and that cannot > exist. We survive no matter what. Perfect self-annihilation works only in > thought experience, and are used only in theoretical reasoning. > > Perhaps it could work for an uploaded brain. Pause the VM in the case your numbers don't come up. But then you need to ensure no one in that branch ever unpauses it, which is the real difficulty. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CA%2BBCJUhDKKNq%3DfNb8Q43UO-S2kvw2B64oaKS979oX0STe0sbAA%40mail.gmail.com.
