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Saturday, 26 December 2015

7. Many Worlds, Convincing Indirect Evidence via Quantum Apathy

I found myself pondering the other day. "Isn't it strange," I thought, "that I have never carried out the quantum suicide confirmation."
Now, the quantum suicide confirmation is a well-known thought experiment, easily performed as an actual experiment experiment. The procedure is simplicity itself: construct an apparatus in which a firearm is pointed at the experimenter's head and arrange that the weapon is triggered by a quantum event with a probability of between one and zero. Normally this is assumed to be a probability  of around 0.5, but 0.99 or higher would make for a rather swifter confirmation. The device is activated and what happens? According to the many worlds view, all possible outcomes are actualised. In 99 out of 100 possible worlds the experimenter is instantly killed, but in 1/100 he survives. From the subjective point of view of the observer/experimenter he always survives; he always finds himself in the fork of the universe where, however unlikely, he survives, no matter whether the machine is run once or ten thousand times. On the other hand, if some variation of De Broglie or Bohm's hidden variable theory actually reflects our ontology, then the experimenter just dies.
Of course, this is the very principle by which time-travel is to be accomplished, and it is not without ethical ramifications which have been previously highlighted for consideration by the putative time-traveller. I believe we have very strong reasons for accepting a branching ontology and have often considered performing the experiment (on myself of course, as there is no other way to perform it) as the materials are readily and easily available to me.
Isn't it strange, then, that I have never done so? I'm exactly the sort of person who would try this. If anyone would, I would! I still remain very keen to conduct the trial but have never got round to it for one reason or another.
Then it occurred to me. There is a vary small subset of possible worlds in which I have attempted the experiment and observed the results. There is a much larger subset of possible worlds in which I simply don't get round to it.
To put some numbers on this, consider the following.
1: I am exactly the sort of person who would carry out the experiment, E. Let us say that P(E) is 0.99. In 99 out out 100 worlds I conduct the experiment.
2: I would arrange death probabilty of around 99%, so  P(Death)=0.99 per iteration.

To be satisfied I would probably run the trial around 4 times or more. So the subset of universes in which I confirm many worlds is \(0.01^{4}\) or 0.00000001 of the total. Of course, this is several orders of magnitude less likely than the case where I simply don't bother

It is rather sad that I will never be able to witness experimental confirmation. I hope this does not frustrate my forays into time travel for similar reasons. Perhaps the reason my life has been largely free of dangerous and exciting acts is that I am far more likely to find myself if the branch of reality where I just sat on the sofa. Quantum suicide, quantum immortality? Quantum apathy.

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