If quantum immortality is correct, and assuming life extension technologies and uploading are delayed for a long time, wouldn’t each of us, in our main worldline, become more and more decrepit and injured as time goes on, until living would be terribly and constantly painful, with no hope of escape?
We frequently become unconscious (sleep) in our threads of experience. There is no obvious reason we couldn’t fall comatose after becoming sufficiently battered.
I present for your consideration a delightful quote, courtesy of a discussion on another site:
The Sibyl of Cumae, who led Aeneas on his journey to the underworld, for which he collected the Golden Bough, was the most famous prophetess of the ancient world. Beloved of Apollo, she was given anything she might desire. She asked for eternal life. Sadly, Apollo granted her wish, for she had forgotten to ask for eternal youth. Now dried, dessicated, and shrunken, she is carried in a cricket cage, and when the boys ask her what she desires, she says: “I want to die.”
I think the moral of the story is: stay healthy and able-bodied as much as possible. If, at some point, you should find yourself surviving far beyond what would be reasonably expected, it might be wise to attempt some strategic quantum suicide reality editing while you still have the capacity to do so...
A superhuman intelligence that understood the nature of human consciousness and subjective experience would presumably know whether QI was correct, incorrect, or somehow a wrong question. Consciousness and experience all happen within physics, they just currently confuse the hell out of us.
As I understand it, it makes a prediction about your future experience (and the MWI measure of that experience)--not dying. Is that not falsifiable? I suppose you could argue that it’s a logical and inescapable consequence of MWI, and not in itself falsifiable, but that doesn’t seem like an important distinction.
I don’t see how Tegmark’s paper is relevant to this question.
I suppose you could argue that it’s a logical and inescapable consequence of MWI
It is. If you believe MWI, you believe that Schrodinger’s cat will experience survival every time, even if you repeated the experiment 100 times, but that you will observe the cat dead if you repeat the experiment enough times.
There is no falsifiable fact above and beyond MWI as far as I can see, apart from the general air of confusion about subjective experience, which hasn’t coalesced into anything sufficiently definite enough to be falsified.
“The author recommends that anyone reading this story sign up with Alcor or the Cryonics Institute to have their brain preserved after death for later revival under controlled conditions.”
Even supposing this unpleasant scenario is true, it is not hopeless. There are things we can do to improve matters. The timescale to develop life extension and uploading is not a prior constant; we can work to speed it up, and we should be doing this anyway. And we can sign up for cryonics to obtain a better alternative worldline.
Not if, as is at least conceivable*, enough Friendly superintelligences model the past and reconstruct people from it that eventually most of your measure comes from them. (Or other, mostly less pleasant but seemingly much less likely possibilities.)
* It actually seems a lot more than “at least conceivable” to me, but I trust this seeming very little, since the idea is so comforting.
That requires a double assumption about not just quantum immortality, but about “subjective measure / what happens next” continuing into all copies of a computation, rather than just the local causal future of a computation.
Right, MWI has a different causal structure than other multiverses and quantum immortality is a distinct case of, call it ‘modal-realist immortality’. I do tend to forget that.
If quantum immortality is correct, and assuming life extension technologies and uploading are delayed for a long time, wouldn’t each of us, in our main worldline, become more and more decrepit and injured as time goes on, until living would be terribly and constantly painful, with no hope of escape?
We frequently become unconscious (sleep) in our threads of experience. There is no obvious reason we couldn’t fall comatose after becoming sufficiently battered.
I present for your consideration a delightful quote, courtesy of a discussion on another site:
I think the moral of the story is: stay healthy and able-bodied as much as possible. If, at some point, you should find yourself surviving far beyond what would be reasonably expected, it might be wise to attempt some strategic quantum suicide reality editing while you still have the capacity to do so...
How could it be “correct” or “incorrect”? QI doesn’t make a falsifiable factual claim, as far as I know…
A superhuman intelligence that understood the nature of human consciousness and subjective experience would presumably know whether QI was correct, incorrect, or somehow a wrong question. Consciousness and experience all happen within physics, they just currently confuse the hell out of us.
I think it is becoming clear that it is a wrong question.
see Max Tegmark on MWI
Neat paper!
As I understand it, it makes a prediction about your future experience (and the MWI measure of that experience)--not dying. Is that not falsifiable? I suppose you could argue that it’s a logical and inescapable consequence of MWI, and not in itself falsifiable, but that doesn’t seem like an important distinction.
I don’t see how Tegmark’s paper is relevant to this question.
It is. If you believe MWI, you believe that Schrodinger’s cat will experience survival every time, even if you repeated the experiment 100 times, but that you will observe the cat dead if you repeat the experiment enough times.
There is no falsifiable fact above and beyond MWI as far as I can see, apart from the general air of confusion about subjective experience, which hasn’t coalesced into anything sufficiently definite enough to be falsified.
“The author recommends that anyone reading this story sign up with Alcor or the Cryonics Institute to have their brain preserved after death for later revival under controlled conditions.”
(From a little story which assumes QTI.)
Even supposing this unpleasant scenario is true, it is not hopeless. There are things we can do to improve matters. The timescale to develop life extension and uploading is not a prior constant; we can work to speed it up, and we should be doing this anyway. And we can sign up for cryonics to obtain a better alternative worldline.
Not if, as is at least conceivable*, enough Friendly superintelligences model the past and reconstruct people from it that eventually most of your measure comes from them. (Or other, mostly less pleasant but seemingly much less likely possibilities.)
* It actually seems a lot more than “at least conceivable” to me, but I trust this seeming very little, since the idea is so comforting.
That requires a double assumption about not just quantum immortality, but about “subjective measure / what happens next” continuing into all copies of a computation, rather than just the local causal future of a computation.
Right, MWI has a different causal structure than other multiverses and quantum immortality is a distinct case of, call it ‘modal-realist immortality’. I do tend to forget that.
Sorry, could you repeat that? Both clauses?