2 weeks ago Saibal Mitra wrote:
> I don't think that the MW immortality is correct at all! In a certain
>sense
>we are
> immortal, because the enseble of all possible worlds is a fixed static
>entity. So,
> you ''always'' find yourselve alive in one state or another. However, you
>won't
> experience youself evolving in the infinite far future.
>
>
> If you encounter a ''branching'' in which one of the possibilities is
>death, that
> branch cannot be said to be nonexistent relative to you. Quantum
>mechanics
>doesn't
> imply that you can never become unconscious, otherwise you could never
>fall
>asleep!
>
>
> Of course, you can never experience being unconscious. So, what to do
>with
>the branch
> leading to (almost) certain death? The more information your brain
>contains, the smaller the set of branches is in which you are alive (and
>consistent with your experiences stored in your brain). The set of all
>branches in which you could be alive doesn't contain any information at
>all.
>Since death involves complete
> memory loss, the branch leading to death should be replaced by the
>complete
>set of all possibilities.
...and despite reading the last paragraph several times slowly, I'm afraid I
don't understand it. Are you saying there may never be a "next moment" at
the point where you are facing near-certain death? It seems to me that all
that is required is an observer moment in which (a) you believe that you are
you, however this may be defined (it's problematic even in "normal" life
what constitutes continuity of identity), and (b) you remember facing the
said episode of near-certain death (ncd), and it will seem to you that you
have miraculously escaped, even if there is no actual physical connection
between the pre-ncd and the post-ncd observer moment. Or, another way to
escape is as you have suggested in a more recent post, that there is an
observer moment somewhere in the multiverse in which the ncd episode has
been somehow deleted from your memory. Perhaps the latter is more likely, in
which case you can look forward to never, or extremely rarely, facing ncd in
your life.
It all gets very muddled. If we try to ruthlessly dispense with every
derivative, ill-defined, superfluous concept and assumption in an effort to
simplify the discussion, the one thing we are left with is the individual
observer-moments. We then try to sort these observer-moments into sets which
constitute lives, identities, birth, death, amnesia, mind duplication, mind
melding, multiple world branchings, and essentially every possible variation
on these and other themes. No wonder it's confusing! And who is to judge
where a particular individual's identity/life/body/memory begins and ends
when even the most detailed, passed by committee of philosophers set of
rules fails, as it inevitably will?
The radical solution is to accept that only the observer-moments are real,
and how we sort them then is seen for what it is: essentially arbitrary, a
matter of convention. You can dismiss the question of immortality, quantum
or otherwise, by observing that the only non-problematic definition of an
individual is identification with a single observer-moment, so that no
individual can ever "really" live for longer than a moment. Certainly, this
goes against intuition, because I feel that I was alive a few minutes ago as
well as ten years ago, but *of course* I feel that; this is simply reporting
on my current thought processes, like saying I feel hungry or tired, and
beyond this cannot be taken as a falsifiable statement about the state of
affairs in the real world unless recourse is taken to some arbitrary
definition of personal identity, such as would satisfy a court, for example.
Let me put it a different way. Situation (a) life as usual: I die every
moment and a peson is reborn every moment complete with (most) memories and
other attributes of the individual who has just died. Situation (b) I am
killed instantly, painlessly, with an axe every moment, and a person is
reconstituted the next moment complete with (most) memories and other
attributes of the individual who has just died, such that he experiences no
discontinuity. Aside from the blood and mess in (b), is there a difference?
Should I worry more about (b) than (a)? This is of course a commonplace
thought experiment on this list, but I draw from it a slightly different
conclusion: we all die all the time; death doesn't really matter, otherwise
we should all be in a constant panic.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Tue May 03 2005 - 09:53:07 PDT