> Are suicides sometimes beneficial to the society?
i attempted to commit suicide a number of times, and it never worked. someone or something always came along at the last minute.
after a while of that, i started to get suspicious and suspected perhaps i'd already died. i then later stumbled into believing in something i thought was even more crazy - that death was impossible - but found out that there are perfectly rational people who believe in quantum immortality.
believing i could never die helped me stop thinking seriously about suicide - i figured my life would just get worse as i'd lose any progress i'd made and end up in the mental hopsital again. so i instead focused on trying to live better, not because i felt like i wanted to live instead of dying, but because i felt like i had no choice.
i still don't know whether this is possible, but i can imagine huge societal benefit from an experiment confirming the many worlds hypothesis: a room full of people build a device that has an infinitesimally small probability of letting them all walk out alive. If they all walk out of the room, they'll all know they survived against extreme numeric odds, which means the many worlds hypothesis holds true.
If observers see them die in the room, it doesn't really tell us anything. I can imagine a group of elderly scientists, convinced that the many worlds hypothesis is true, willing to engage in this experiment - but you'd also need a bunch of observers willing to watch them die.
i attempted to commit suicide a number of times, and it never worked. someone or something always came along at the last minute.
after a while of that, i started to get suspicious and suspected perhaps i'd already died. i then later stumbled into believing in something i thought was even more crazy - that death was impossible - but found out that there are perfectly rational people who believe in quantum immortality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality
believing i could never die helped me stop thinking seriously about suicide - i figured my life would just get worse as i'd lose any progress i'd made and end up in the mental hopsital again. so i instead focused on trying to live better, not because i felt like i wanted to live instead of dying, but because i felt like i had no choice.
i still don't know whether this is possible, but i can imagine huge societal benefit from an experiment confirming the many worlds hypothesis: a room full of people build a device that has an infinitesimally small probability of letting them all walk out alive. If they all walk out of the room, they'll all know they survived against extreme numeric odds, which means the many worlds hypothesis holds true.
If observers see them die in the room, it doesn't really tell us anything. I can imagine a group of elderly scientists, convinced that the many worlds hypothesis is true, willing to engage in this experiment - but you'd also need a bunch of observers willing to watch them die.