RE: Suicide experiment (fwd)

From: Gilles HENRI <Gilles.Henri.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 10:57:22 +0100

>Actually, another thought I had on the Quantum Theory of Immortality,
>was to look at the actual distribution of human lifetimes. There is a
>theory about distributions of improbably events, and a write up of it
>appeared in one of New Scientist's Inside Science supplements maybe a
>year or two ago. The point was that if there was a definite time span
>for human life (in a statistical sense), then the distribution of ages
>when people die should drop off at least as fast as an exponential. In
>reality, the distribution drops off a lot slower - ie people never
>seem to die of "old-age" they always die of something - disease,
>misadevnture, whatever. This certainly seemed to point to the
>possibility of human lives on average being extended considerably more
>than the current upper bound (about 120 years or so, if you discount
>the accounts in the bible).

A potential caveat (which would make this perspective less attractive than
what could be expected) is that we are made of a finite number of atoms. So
most probably the number of different mind states we are able to experiment
is also finite; so even if the theoretical lifetime is infinite, we won't
be able to remember our life after some time, and we will only be able to
experiment a finite interval of ages.

A possibility is that you could evolve biologically to more and more
complex systems, which could record more and more data. I think we are
lacking here a real theory of consciousness that could tell us which
possibilities are compatible with physical laws, and what is the maximal
complexity (if any?) you can reach . Of course MWI isn't saying that
everything imaginable is realized in some world, only what is possible
physically (to be defined!) is realized.

Gilles

******************
Gilles HENRI

Laboratoire d'Astrophysique
Observatoire de Grenoble
414, rue de la Piscine-BP 53
F 38041 GRENOBLE Cedex 9
FRANCE
Maître de Conférences à l'Université Grenoble I (Joseph Fourier)
Membre junior de l'Institut Universitaire de France

Tel (33)-0-476-51-42-11
Fax (33) 0-476-44-88-21
mailto:Gilles.Henri.domain.name.hidden
******************
Received on Mon Nov 23 1998 - 02:02:24 PST