At the moment of death, my cell membranes begin to break down, in my brain, and information is lost. The process of freezing exacerbates the brain damage. It is not quite as bad as the ancient Egyptians drawing my brain out through my nose, but it is still – yes I will say impossible – to bring the frozen brain back to life.

Eliezer, when you claim to believe in Cryogenics, are you making a deliberate error, so that your most star-struck fans (including me) cannot think you incapable of error, and must test your statements for ourselves? Or do you really believe in it?

He does say:
“before measurements, identical copies of the observer exist in parallel universes”
– (which is a not at all the conventional way to think of many worlds, but probably would not lead to an incorrect result in this case, although it would in an epr experiment)
“a Bayesian probability density … is NOT a relative frequency”
– (but by repeating the experiment over and over the relative frequency interpretation would come to the same result; Tipler doesn’t seem to realize that you can repeat the whole experiment, not just have repeated observations in one experiment)

I suspect that Tipler does make the mistake you suggested he might have made, though.

Anyway, he’s wrong in stating that there would be a difference between many worlds and Copenhagen in this case, and his result in eq(1) is clearly wrong for any interpretation.

Non-Many-Worlds quantum mechanics, based on the Born Interpretation of the wave function, gives only relative frequencies asymptotically as the number of observations goes to infinity. In actual measurements, the Born frequencies are seen to gradually build up as the number of measurements increases, but standard theory gives no way to compute the rate of convergence.

…seems to defeat his own thesis. The results of the test he proposes might well be what the MWI predicts – but he himself claims that other theories are vague on the issue – so what’s the point? The conventional wisdom is here.

Testing Many-Worlds Quantum Theory By Measuring Pattern Convergence Rates

http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4422

This was published recently, but it seems to have received very few discussion. The paper is really short (2 pages, without abstract and references it would be a single page) and claims to use Bayesian theory to provide a testable formula that should either prove or discard Many Worlds.

I didn’t understand it, but I suspect Tipler may be trying to measure, in one world, how fast the pattern converges summed over many worlds, which I think would be a mistake.

I also suspect Tipler’s ideas won’t be given as careful an examination as they would have if someone else had put them forward.

Is there a physicist in the house?

http://arxivblog.com/?p=656
http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.4422

This was published recently, but it seems to have received very few discussion. The paper is really short (2 pages, without abstract and references it would be a single page) and claims to use Bayesian theory to provide a testable formula that should either prove or discard Many Worlds.

Very interesting stuff, especially in light of the current credit crisis – how much of our economy is dependent on fragile cooperation mechanisms?

Of course if you define intelligence in a sufficiently narrow way (ie optimally achieving goals), then you can fix your definition so its fully captured by Bayes (M.Hutter, S.Legg etc.). But that doesn’t mean that your conception of intelligence is neccessarily fully correct….

Let me suggest an alternative definition of intelligence, (which blog readers may well all find highly peculiar at first):

Intelligence is the ability to form effective representations of your own intentions/values – Marc Geddes

Folks should keep an open mind about the current ‘Bayesian Induction’ craze. There could be further advances still in store…