Brent Meeker writes:> Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 17:00:11 -0800> From: meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden> Subject: Re: ASSA and Many-Worlds> > > Stathis Papaioannou wrote:> > > > Johnathan Corgan writes:> > > >> Stathis Papaioannou wrote:> >>> >>> If some multiverse theory happens to be true then by your way of argument we > >>> should all be extremely anxious all the time, because every moment terrible things > >>> are definitely happening to some copy of us. For example, we should be constantly > >>> be worrying that we will be struck by lightning, because we *will* be struck by lightning. > >> If MWI is true, *and* there isn't a lowest quantum of> >> probability/measure as Brent Meeker speculates, there is an interesting> >> corollary to the quantum theory of immortality.> >>> >> While one branch always exists which continues our consciousness> >> forward, indeed we are constantly "shedding" branches where the most> >> brutal and horrific things happen to us and result in our death. Their> >> measure is extremely small, so from a subjectively probability> >> perspective, we don't worry about them.> >>> >> I'd speculate that there are far more logically possible ways to> >> experience an agonizing, lingering death than to live. Some have a> >> relatively high measure, like getting hit by a car, or getting lung> >> cancer (if you're a smoker), so we take steps to avoid these (though> >> they still happen in some branch.) Others, like having all our> >> particles spontaneously quantum tunnel into the heart of a burning> >> furnace, are so low in measure, we can blissfully ignore the> >> possibility. Yet if MWI is true, there is some branch where this has> >> just happened to us. (modulo Brent's probability quantum.)> >>> >> If there are many more ways to die than to live, even of low individual> >> measure, I wonder how the "integral of the measure" across all of them> >> comes out.> > > > It's not death that is the problem (you always get out of that), it's suffering. Final death > > would be better than a living hell, but QTI denies you final death. I take comfort in the > > speculation that if I'm still alive in a few hundred years, most likely this will be as a result > > of some advanced medical or cybernetic intervention, and if science understands the brain > > well enough to do that, it would be a relatively simple matter by comparison to ensure that I > > am content. I think the hellish routes to immortality would occur mostly by chance and would > > be of much lower total measure than the deliberate, happy routes. > > I think Bruno already remarked that it may well be more probable that a continuation of your consciousness arises in some other branch of the multiverse "by chance", rather than as a state of "your" erstwhile body. This would seem particularly more probable as your consciousness simplifies due to deterioration of your brain - how hard can it be to find a continuation of a near coma. Perhaps this continuation is the consciousness of a fish - and it's the Hindus rather than the Bhuddists who are right.Then we come up against the question of what we can expect to experience in the case of duplication with partial memory loss. For example, if you are duplicated 101 times such that one copy has 100% of your memories while the other 100 copies each have 1% of your memories, does this mean that you have an even chance of ending up as either the 100% or the 1% version of yourself? We need not invoke duplication experiments or the MWI to ask this question either. Suppose there are a billion people in the world each with 1/billion of my memories: does this mean I will find myself becoming one of these people either now or after I have died? Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Fri Jan 26 2007 - 03:16:01 PST