>Stathis Papaioannou writes:
> > QM or QTI do not imply
> > that you can never lose consciousness. The idea is that you can never
> > *experience* loss of consciousness. You can fall asleep, but when you
>wake
> > up, you don't remember being asleep. If you never wake up - i.e. if you
>die
> > in your sleep - then you never experience that particular branch of the
>MW.
> > In other words, you can only experience those worlds where the loss of
> > consciousness is temporary.
>
>How about impairment of consciousness? Can you experience that? Can you
>experience going crazy, or having a reduced level of consciousness where
>you are drugged or barely alive? That's how death is for most people,
>it's not like flicking off a light. Will Quantum Immortality protect you
>from spending an eternity in a near-coma? Exactly how much consciousness
>does it guarantee you?
>
>Hal Finney
>
Alas, you are right. Immortality is not all fun and games, and in some
worlds you may experience a drawn out fizzling out, reduced to the
consciousness of an infant, then a fish, then an amoeba. I believe Max
Tegmark aknowledged this in a commentary on his original paper. If you're
really unlucky, you will experience eternal torment in the flames of hell.
And unlike the Christian Hell, you don't actually have to do something wrong
to end up in QTI hell: it all depends on the fall of the cosmic dice.
One question which comes up is, when do you stop being you? I suppose this
is an answer to your "how much consciousness is guaranteed" question: when
you lose enough consciousness that you forget who you are, that is the
cutoff where you can really be said to have lost consciousness. QTI then
guarantees that there will always be a branch of the MW where you still
maintain a sense of your identity. Still, this doesn't save you from hell.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Apr 14 2005 - 03:50:59 PDT