Hal,
It is possible that "miracles" will be as uncommon and surprising in your
QTI-guaranteed future as they seem to be today. If you live to 1000,
unlikely as it sounds at present, shouldn't you expect it to happen in the
*least* unlikely way? This may involve advances in medicine initially, then
when you are, say, 200 and terminally ill, mind uploading may finally become
possible. Your best chance of these things happening is to live in a world
where life-prolonging technology becomes generally available (or at least
available to the wealthy, which is nothing new), so you are probably *not*
going to be unique in living to a very advanced age. So, in answer to your
question, finding yourself miraculously alive at 1000 while everyone else
dies young would be something extremely unlikely and surprising, no less so
if QTI is true, and therefore not evidence in its favour.
--Stathis Papaioannou
>Let me pose the puzzle like this, which is a form we have discussed
>before:
>
>Suppose you found yourself extremely old, due to a near-miraculous set
>of circumstances that had kept you alive. Time after time when you were
>about to die of old age or some other cause, something happened and you
>were able to continue living. Now you are 1000 years old in a world
>where no one else lives past 120. (We will ignore medical progress for
>the purposes of this thought experiment.)
>
>Now, one of the predictions of QTI is that in fact you will experience
>much this state, eventually. But the question is this: given that you
>find yourself in this circumstances, is this fact *evidence* for the
>truth of the QTI? In other words, should people who find themselves
>extremely old through miraculous circumstances take it as more likely
>that the QTI is true?
>
>Hal Finney
>
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Received on Wed Jun 01 2005 - 03:33:11 PDT