| Well, yes. Those examples were chosen to be cartoonish stereotypes. Extremely statistically unlikely events would look... strange, to say the least. Sort of like the flapping of a butterfly's wings resulting in a hurricane. Also there has been some discussion about how quantum events would only affect the microscopic and the macroscopic would remain the same. This is false, quantum events can only occur in the microscopic, but their effects can propagate to the macroscopic in ways beyond our comprehension. Take the experiment itself, the outcome of a quantum event propagates to the life or death of a human being. Lastly there have also been remarks about how death needs to be guaranteed because QI only promises consciousness not health or a lack of suffering. I will address that here too. That is a perfectly fine way of viewing QI but there is a distinction we should formalize to make it clear. Greedy QI and Perfect QI. Greedy QI just branches from the present moment to whichever consciousness will persist. This can result in a local optimum where you are maimed but alive. Perfect QI always picks the best branch point of every present moment to account for all future possibilities. I argue this in assumption #2. Once the bullet has say, pierced the brain stem, there is no greedy choice from there that will save you. Perfect QI likely won't maim you as that would limit your survival possibilities. It's the global optimum. There is still a problem with this though. What if there is more than one timeline where you always live? How is one chosen? My guess would be either it's randomly chosen, or there is only one timeline. Let me elaborate on the latter with a mathematical analogy. You have an infinite list of real numbers. These numbers represent different timelines, the value being how long you survive. If you order them, you can always find a larger finite number looking at the next one, but none of them are infinite in value. Since QI assumes immortality not longevity we will assume the limit of this ordered list is infinity and not a finite number. Thus there is one reality in which you live infinitely, and that's the limit of this ordered set. The only chance for approaching this limit is through a mechanism like perfect QI. |