“Immortality is cool and all, but our universe is going to run down from entropy eventually”
I consider this argument wrong for two reasons. The first is the obvious reason, which is that even if immortality is impossible, it’s still better to live for a long time.
The second reason why I think this argument is wrong is because I’m currently convinced that literal physical immortality is possible in our universe. Usually when I say this out loud I get an audible “what” or something to that effect, but I’m not kidding.
It’s going to be hard to explain my intuitions for why I think real immortality is possible, so bear with me. First, this is what I’m not saying:
I’m not saying that we can outlast the heat death of the universe somehow
I’m not saying that we just need to shift our conception of immortality to be something like, “We live in the hearts of our countrymen” or anything like that.
I’m not saying that I have a specific plan for how to become immortal personally, and
I’m not saying that my proposal has no flaws whatsoever and that this is a valid line of research to be conducting at the moment.
So what am I saying?
A typical model of our life as humans is that we are something like a worm in 4 dimensional space. On one side of the worm there’s our birth, and on the other side of the worm is our untimely death. We ‘live through’ this worm, and that is our life. The length of our life is measured by considering the length of the worm in 4 dimensional space, measured just like a yardstick.
Now just change the perspective a little bit. If we could somehow abandon our current way of living, then maybe we can alter the geometry of this worm so that we are immortal. Consider: a circle has no starting point and no end. If someone could somehow ‘live through’ a circle, then their life would consist of an eternal loop through experiences, repeating endlessly.
The idea is that we somehow construct a physical manifestation of this immortality circle. I think of it like an actual loop in 4 dimensional space because it’s difficult to visualize without an analogy. A superintelligence could perhaps predict what type of actions would be necessary to construct this immortal loop. And once it is constructed, it’ll be there forever.
From an outside view in our 3d mind’s eye, the construction of this loop would look very strange. It could look like something popping into existence suddenly and getting larger, and then suddenly popping out of existence. I don’t really know; that’s just the intuition.
What matters is that within this loop someone will be living their life on repeat. True Déjà vu. Each moment they live is in their future, and in their past. There are no new experiences and no novelty, but the superintelligence can construct it so that this part is not unenjoyable. There would be no right answer to the question “how old are you.” And in my view, it is perfectly valid to say that this person is truly, actually immortal.
Perhaps someone who valued immortality would want one of these loops to be constructed for themselves. Perhaps for some reason constructing one of these things is impossible in our universe (though I suspect that it’s not). There are anthropic reasons that I have considered for why constructing it might not be worth it… but that would be too much to go into for this shortform post.
To close, I currently see no knockdown reasons to believe that this sort of scheme is impossible.
In one scene in Egan’s Permutation City, the Peer character experienced “infinity” when he set himself up in an infinite loop such that his later experience matched up perfectly with the start of the loop (walking down the side of an infinitely tall building, if I recall). But he also experienced the loop ending.
I don’t know of physics rules ruling this out. However, I suspect this doesn’t resolve the problems that the people I know who care most about immortality are worried about. (I’m not sure – I haven’t heard them express clear preferences about what exactly they prefer on the billions/trillions year timescale. But they seem more concerned running out of ability to have new experiences than not-wanting-to-die-in-particular.)
My impression is many of the people who care about this sort of thing also tend to think that if you have multiple instances of the exact same thing, it just counts as a single instance. (Or, something more complicated about many worlds and increasing your measure)
I agree with the objection. :) Personally I’m not sure whether I’d want to be stuck in a loop of experiences repeating over and over forever.
However, even if we considered “true” immortality, repeat experiences are inevitable simply because there’s a finite number of possible experiences. So, we’d have to start repeating things eventually.
Virtual particles “pop into existence” in matter/antimatter pairs and then “pop out” as they annihilate each other all the time. In one interpretation, an electron positron pair (for example) can be thought of as one electron that loops around and goes back in time. Due to CPS symmetry, this backward path looks like a positron. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk
It sounds like you’re talking about time travel. These “worms” are called “worldlines”. Spacetime is not simply R^4. You can rotate in the fourth dimension—this is just acceleration. But you can’t accelerate enough to turn around and bite your own tail because rotations in the fourth dimension are hyperbolic rather than circular. You can’t exceed or even reach light speed. There are solutions to General Relativity that contain closed timelike curves, but it’s not clear if they correspond to anything physically realizable.
I have a previous high impliciation uncertainty about this (that would be a crux?). ” you can’t accelerate enough to turn around ” seems false to me. The mathematical rotation seems like it ought to exist. The prevoius reasons I thought such a mathematical rotation would be impossible I have signficantly less faith in. If I draw a unit sphere analog in spacetime having a visual observation from the space-time diagram drawn on euclid paper is not sufficient to conclude that the future cone is far from past cone. And thinking that a sphere is “all within r distance” it would seem it should be continuous and simply connected under most instances. I think there also should exist a transformation that when repeated enough times returns to the original configuration. And I find it surprising that a boost like transformation would fail to be like that if it is a rotation analog.
I have started to believe that the standrd reasoning why you can’t go faster than light relies on a kind of faulty logic. With normal euclidean geometry it would go like: there is a maximum angle you can reach by increasing the y-coordinate and slope is just the ratio of x to y so at that maximum y maximum slope is reached so maximum angle that you can have is 90 degrees. So if you try to go at 100 degrees you have lesser y and are actually going slower. And in a way 90 degrees is kind of the maximum amount you can point in another direction. But normally degrees go up to 180 or 360 degrees.
In the relativity side c is the maximum ratio but that is for coordinate time. If somebodys proper time would start pointing in a direction that would project negatively on the coordinate time axis the comparison between x per coordinate time and x per proper time would become significant.
There is also a trajectory which seems to be timelike in all segments. A=(0,0,0,0),(2,1,0,0),B=(4,2,0,0),(2,3,0,0),C=(0,4,0,0),(2,5,0,0),D=(4,6,0,0). It would seem awfully a lot like the “corner” A B C would be of equal magnitude but opposite sign from B C D. Now I get why physcially such a trajectory would be challenging. But from a mathematical point of view it is hard to understand why it would be ill-defined. It would also be very strange if there is no boost you can make at B to go from direction AB to direction BC. I get why you can’t rotate from AB to BD (can’t rotate a timelike distance to spacelike distance if rotation preserves length).
I also kind of get why yo woudl need infninte energy make such “impossibly sharp” turns. But as energy is the conserved charge of time translation, the definition of time might depend on which time you choose to derive it from. If you were to gain energy from an external source it would have to be tachyon or going backwards in time (which are either impossible or hard to produce). But if you had a thruster with you with fuel the “proper time energy” might behave differently. That is if you are going at signficant C and the whole universe is frozen and whissing by you should still be able to fire your rockets according to your time (1 second of your engines might take the entire age of the universe to external observers but does that prevent things happening from your perspective?). If acceleration “turns your time direction” and not “increases displacement per spent second” at some finite amount of acceleration experienced you would come full circle or atleast long enough that you are now going to the negative direction that you started in.
I agree I would not be able to actually accomplish time travel. The point is whether we could construct some object in Minkowski space (or whatever General Relativity uses, I’m not a physicist) that we considered to be loop-like. I don’t think it’s worth my time to figure out whether this is really possible, but I suspect that something like it may be.
Edit: I want to say that I do not have an intuition for physics or spacetime at all. My main reason for thinking this is possible is mainly that I think my idea is fairly minimal: I think you might be able to do this even in R^3.
“Immortality is cool and all, but our universe is going to run down from entropy eventually”
I consider this argument wrong for two reasons. The first is the obvious reason, which is that even if immortality is impossible, it’s still better to live for a long time.
The second reason why I think this argument is wrong is because I’m currently convinced that literal physical immortality is possible in our universe. Usually when I say this out loud I get an audible “what” or something to that effect, but I’m not kidding.
It’s going to be hard to explain my intuitions for why I think real immortality is possible, so bear with me. First, this is what I’m not saying:
I’m not saying that we can outlast the heat death of the universe somehow
I’m not saying that we just need to shift our conception of immortality to be something like, “We live in the hearts of our countrymen” or anything like that.
I’m not saying that I have a specific plan for how to become immortal personally, and
I’m not saying that my proposal has no flaws whatsoever and that this is a valid line of research to be conducting at the moment.
So what am I saying?
A typical model of our life as humans is that we are something like a worm in 4 dimensional space. On one side of the worm there’s our birth, and on the other side of the worm is our untimely death. We ‘live through’ this worm, and that is our life. The length of our life is measured by considering the length of the worm in 4 dimensional space, measured just like a yardstick.
Now just change the perspective a little bit. If we could somehow abandon our current way of living, then maybe we can alter the geometry of this worm so that we are immortal. Consider: a circle has no starting point and no end. If someone could somehow ‘live through’ a circle, then their life would consist of an eternal loop through experiences, repeating endlessly.
The idea is that we somehow construct a physical manifestation of this immortality circle. I think of it like an actual loop in 4 dimensional space because it’s difficult to visualize without an analogy. A superintelligence could perhaps predict what type of actions would be necessary to construct this immortal loop. And once it is constructed, it’ll be there forever.
From an outside view in our 3d mind’s eye, the construction of this loop would look very strange. It could look like something popping into existence suddenly and getting larger, and then suddenly popping out of existence. I don’t really know; that’s just the intuition.
What matters is that within this loop someone will be living their life on repeat. True Déjà vu. Each moment they live is in their future, and in their past. There are no new experiences and no novelty, but the superintelligence can construct it so that this part is not unenjoyable. There would be no right answer to the question “how old are you.” And in my view, it is perfectly valid to say that this person is truly, actually immortal.
Perhaps someone who valued immortality would want one of these loops to be constructed for themselves. Perhaps for some reason constructing one of these things is impossible in our universe (though I suspect that it’s not). There are anthropic reasons that I have considered for why constructing it might not be worth it… but that would be too much to go into for this shortform post.
To close, I currently see no knockdown reasons to believe that this sort of scheme is impossible.
In one scene in Egan’s Permutation City, the Peer character experienced “infinity” when he set himself up in an infinite loop such that his later experience matched up perfectly with the start of the loop (walking down the side of an infinitely tall building, if I recall). But he also experienced the loop ending.
I don’t know of physics rules ruling this out. However, I suspect this doesn’t resolve the problems that the people I know who care most about immortality are worried about. (I’m not sure – I haven’t heard them express clear preferences about what exactly they prefer on the billions/trillions year timescale. But they seem more concerned running out of ability to have new experiences than not-wanting-to-die-in-particular.)
My impression is many of the people who care about this sort of thing also tend to think that if you have multiple instances of the exact same thing, it just counts as a single instance. (Or, something more complicated about many worlds and increasing your measure)
I agree with the objection. :) Personally I’m not sure whether I’d want to be stuck in a loop of experiences repeating over and over forever.
However, even if we considered “true” immortality, repeat experiences are inevitable simply because there’s a finite number of possible experiences. So, we’d have to start repeating things eventually.
Virtual particles “pop into existence” in matter/antimatter pairs and then “pop out” as they annihilate each other all the time. In one interpretation, an electron positron pair (for example) can be thought of as one electron that loops around and goes back in time. Due to CPS symmetry, this backward path looks like a positron. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk
It sounds like you’re talking about time travel. These “worms” are called “worldlines”. Spacetime is not simply R^4. You can rotate in the fourth dimension—this is just acceleration. But you can’t accelerate enough to turn around and bite your own tail because rotations in the fourth dimension are hyperbolic rather than circular. You can’t exceed or even reach light speed. There are solutions to General Relativity that contain closed timelike curves, but it’s not clear if they correspond to anything physically realizable.
I have a previous high impliciation uncertainty about this (that would be a crux?). ” you can’t accelerate enough to turn around ” seems false to me. The mathematical rotation seems like it ought to exist. The prevoius reasons I thought such a mathematical rotation would be impossible I have signficantly less faith in. If I draw a unit sphere analog in spacetime having a visual observation from the space-time diagram drawn on euclid paper is not sufficient to conclude that the future cone is far from past cone. And thinking that a sphere is “all within r distance” it would seem it should be continuous and simply connected under most instances. I think there also should exist a transformation that when repeated enough times returns to the original configuration. And I find it surprising that a boost like transformation would fail to be like that if it is a rotation analog.
I have started to believe that the standrd reasoning why you can’t go faster than light relies on a kind of faulty logic. With normal euclidean geometry it would go like: there is a maximum angle you can reach by increasing the y-coordinate and slope is just the ratio of x to y so at that maximum y maximum slope is reached so maximum angle that you can have is 90 degrees. So if you try to go at 100 degrees you have lesser y and are actually going slower. And in a way 90 degrees is kind of the maximum amount you can point in another direction. But normally degrees go up to 180 or 360 degrees.
In the relativity side c is the maximum ratio but that is for coordinate time. If somebodys proper time would start pointing in a direction that would project negatively on the coordinate time axis the comparison between x per coordinate time and x per proper time would become significant.
There is also a trajectory which seems to be timelike in all segments. A=(0,0,0,0),(2,1,0,0),B=(4,2,0,0),(2,3,0,0),C=(0,4,0,0),(2,5,0,0),D=(4,6,0,0). It would seem awfully a lot like the “corner” A B C would be of equal magnitude but opposite sign from B C D. Now I get why physcially such a trajectory would be challenging. But from a mathematical point of view it is hard to understand why it would be ill-defined. It would also be very strange if there is no boost you can make at B to go from direction AB to direction BC. I get why you can’t rotate from AB to BD (can’t rotate a timelike distance to spacelike distance if rotation preserves length).
I also kind of get why yo woudl need infninte energy make such “impossibly sharp” turns. But as energy is the conserved charge of time translation, the definition of time might depend on which time you choose to derive it from. If you were to gain energy from an external source it would have to be tachyon or going backwards in time (which are either impossible or hard to produce). But if you had a thruster with you with fuel the “proper time energy” might behave differently. That is if you are going at signficant C and the whole universe is frozen and whissing by you should still be able to fire your rockets according to your time (1 second of your engines might take the entire age of the universe to external observers but does that prevent things happening from your perspective?). If acceleration “turns your time direction” and not “increases displacement per spent second” at some finite amount of acceleration experienced you would come full circle or atleast long enough that you are now going to the negative direction that you started in.
I agree I would not be able to actually accomplish time travel. The point is whether we could construct some object in Minkowski space (or whatever General Relativity uses, I’m not a physicist) that we considered to be loop-like. I don’t think it’s worth my time to figure out whether this is really possible, but I suspect that something like it may be.
Edit: I want to say that I do not have an intuition for physics or spacetime at all. My main reason for thinking this is possible is mainly that I think my idea is fairly minimal: I think you might be able to do this even in R^3.
Nietzsche go to the there first. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return