RE: Suicide experiment (fwd)

From: Higgo James <james.higgo.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 11:38:37 -0000

Gilles, Russell,

Both points are valid, and I think we all agree that neither of them
provides any theoretical reason why we should not expect that an arbitrarily
large number of arbitrarily old Gilleses, Russells and Jameses are out
there.

The really interesting issue from my point of view is whether we can be sure
that we will 'end up' as one of them, and if so, how our consciousness
evolves from the point where 10^500 universes have us alive and riding our
motorcycle to the point just afterwards where we are dead in 0.9*10^500
universes, and alive (but possible battered) in 0.1*10^500 universes.

Although we can see this in the Tegmark equation, this is pretty hard to
conceptualise and any new ideas would be welcome.
James

 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gilles HENRI [SMTP:Gilles.Henri.domain.name.hidden]
> Sent: 23 November 1998 09:57
> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> Subject: RE: Suicide experiment (fwd)
>
> >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
>
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Received on Mon Nov 23 1998 - 03:42:46 PST