Re: "Quantum immortality" - pragmatics again.

From: Eric Hawthorne <egh.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2003 01:36:59 -0800

All this talk of quantum immortality seems like anthropocentric wishful
thinking to me.

You are a process. All physical objects are best understood as slow
processes.

A life process is a very complex physical pattern, which is an
arrangement of matter and energy in space-time,
that has properties that allow it to cannibalize other matter and energy
in its vicinity to retain its form for
a while, but only for a while...

The kind of process, or pattern, that you are has built-in time limits
in it, which have to do with the
imperfect maintenance of order in your bodily subprocesses (cellular
processes).

In other words, the kind of hoops that (Earthly) organic processes go
through to be self-reproducing, and
form-differentiating, and non-destructively evolvable, and so forth,
seem to have limitations in their
perfection of operation, as far as maintaining the existence of the
individual organism. The individual
organism's form does not HAVE to persist immortally, to ensure
persistence of the self-reproducing
pattern (species, ecosystems) as a whole. In fact it would be
counterproductive to the persistence of the
species and ecosystem as a whole if the individual organism patterns
persisted indefinitely. So the pattern
rules allow the intercession of disorder to eventually destroy each
individual organism pattern. (When
that process has run its useful (i.e. reproductive, and possibly
meme-contributing) course.)

I cannot imagine an alternate possible world in which a process would be
constructed
essentially as you are (as your process is), and yet would somehow
miraculously avoid
the cell replication errors and cell replication cessation that comes
with age in our
organic bodies. It would seem to be that only ridiculously small-measure
scenarios could
permit this kind of implausible immortality of organic structures, at
least or organic structures
bearing any great similarity to ours.
Received on Thu Nov 13 2003 - 04:41:33 PST