From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Aug 18 2002 - 23:34:51 MDT
No doubt this is way off topic, but it's intriguing.
At 07:52 AM 8/17/02 -0700, Tomaz Kristan <me2icq@icqmail.com> wrote:
>If I decide to conduct the experiment ONLY if I win a lottery, I should be
(nearly) alone, if there is a finite number of parallel worlds.
But how do you know this *isn't* the case? Suppose you really set this up,
and could do the experiment twice a week when Lotto is drawn (or even every
day in some places). It will take several million weeks before you, as an
average experimenter, get the green light to try it in a given week. I
can't see anyone actually having the patience to attempt this intriguing
test. Hmm. Maybe it doesn't matter. The theory is that *one* of them will
perform the experiment in the first week, while all of your variants are
still interested--except, of course, that this version of you will be a
little distracted perhaps by having just won a million bucks. :) Still, at
least one of your millions of variants might learn the answer...
Damien Broderick
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