Re: a possible paradox

From: Matt King <m.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2003 11:43:26 +0000

Hi Hal,

    I agree with everything you wrote about duplication...but I have to
take issue with your last point.

Hal Finney wrote:

> Another interesting result of this paper concerned "daughter universes".
> In some models, it may be possible to trigger the formation of new
> inflating regions which would "bud off" from our own space time and
> produce their own infinite-sized level 2 universes. The authors of this
> paper had proposed in an earlier one that this could be a mechanism for
> civilizations to survive heat death, that they could create daughter
> universes and somehow send information into them which could be taken
> up and incorporated by civilizations evolving in the daughter universes.
>
> However, in the context of the multiverse, this won't really work,
> because any finite number of messages are insignificant in the context
> of an infinitely-duplicated multiverse. Only a finite number of regions
> can receive the messages, compared to an infinite number of regions
> that either don't receive them, or receive spontaneously-generated fake
> messages (like our discussion earlier today of "magical" universes).
> Therefore the messages can have only an infinitesimal impact on the
> evolution of the daughter universes and cannot be considered a meaningful
> form of survival.
>
>

   I think that the survival would be meaningful for the civilisation
doing the broadcasting so long as at least one daughter universe is able
to replicate the civilisation, just as I have meaningfully survived so
long as future versions of me exist somewhere in the multiverse, even if
I only survive in an infinitessimally small fraction of the universes
(Quantum Immortality).

   Matt.


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When God plays dice with the Universe, He throws every number at once...

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Received on Thu Oct 30 2003 - 07:48:40 PST

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