I’m signed up for cryonics. I’m a bit worried about what happens to everyone else.
Going on the basic anthropic assumption that we’re trying to do a sum over conditional probabilities while eliminating Death events to get your anticipated future, then depending on to what degree causal continuity is required for personal identity, once someone’s measure gets small enough, you might be able to simulate them and then insert a rescue experience for almost all of their subjective conditional probability. The trouble is if you die via a route that degrades the detail and complexity of your subjective experience before it gets small enough to be rescued, in which case you merge into a lot of other people with dying experiences indistinguishable from yours and only get rescued as a group. Furthermore, anyone with computing power can try to grab a share of your soul and not all of them may be what we would consider “nice”, just like if we kindly rescued a Babyeater we wouldn’t go on letting them eat babies. As the Doctor observes of this proposition in the Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover, “Hell of a scary afterlife you got here, missy.”
The only actual recommendations that emerge from this set of assumptions seem to amount to:
1) Sign up for cryonics. All of your subjective future will continue into quantum worlds that care enough to revive you, without regard for worlds where the cryonics organization went bankrupt or there was a nuclear war.
2) If you can’t be suspended, try to die only by routes that kill you very quickly with certainty, or (this is possibly better) kill almost all of your measure over a continuous period without degrading your processing power. In other words, the ideal disease has a quantum 50% probability of killing you while you sleep, but has no visible effects when you wake up, and finally kills you with certainty after a couple of months. Your soul’s measure will be so small that almost all of its subjective quantity will at this point be in worlds simulated by whatever Tegmark Level IV parties have an interest in your soul, if you believe that’s a good thing. If you don’t think that’s a good thing, try to die only by routes that kill you very quickly with certainty, so that it requires a violation of physical law rather than a quantum improbability to save you.
I keep remembering mine but am totally daunted by the prospect of claiming it. I feel like I should have some really good stuff lined up to ask about first.
No, it’s precisely because I want to use it a lot that I don’t use it :)
Anyway, Robin might reasonably feel that all other things being equal, he prefers to spend time talking to the sort of person who does sign up than the sort of person who doesn’t.
Robin was the one who suggested selling it in his original post http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/my-cryonics-hour.html (and I think most people would not have thought of selling at all), so apparently he disagrees—talking to a person who would pay for an hour of conversation may also be interesting.
Sign up for cryonics. All of your subjective future will continue into quantum worlds that care enough to revive you, without regard for worlds where the cryonics organization went bankrupt or there was a nuclear war.
Doesn’t this mean that you should deliberately avoid finding out whether cryonics can actually preserve your information in a retrievable way, because if it can’t it would eliminate the vast majority of the worlds that would have brought you back? Whereas if you don’t know it remains undetermined. Am I getting this right?
You’re confusing subjective probability and objective quantum measure. If you flip a quantum coin, half your measure goes to worlds where it comes up heads and half goes to where it comes up tails. This is an objective fact, and we know it solidly. If you don’t know whether cryonics works, you’re probably still already localized by your memories and sensory information to either worlds where it works or worlds where it doesn’t; all or nothing, even if you’re ignorant of which.
How far do “memories and sensory information” extend? I’m worried about what happens during sleep. It’s been argued that dreams are a stability mechanism that prevent self-change, but I don’t know if that applies to the external world.
Following this line of argument, our memories could change while we are awake if we aren’t actively remembering them.
You mean you’re not?
Seriously Eliezer, without you and Max Tegmark I probably wouldn’t even take MWI seriously. You gotta help me. :)
Okay.
I’m signed up for cryonics. I’m a bit worried about what happens to everyone else.
Going on the basic anthropic assumption that we’re trying to do a sum over conditional probabilities while eliminating Death events to get your anticipated future, then depending on to what degree causal continuity is required for personal identity, once someone’s measure gets small enough, you might be able to simulate them and then insert a rescue experience for almost all of their subjective conditional probability. The trouble is if you die via a route that degrades the detail and complexity of your subjective experience before it gets small enough to be rescued, in which case you merge into a lot of other people with dying experiences indistinguishable from yours and only get rescued as a group. Furthermore, anyone with computing power can try to grab a share of your soul and not all of them may be what we would consider “nice”, just like if we kindly rescued a Babyeater we wouldn’t go on letting them eat babies. As the Doctor observes of this proposition in the Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover, “Hell of a scary afterlife you got here, missy.”
The only actual recommendations that emerge from this set of assumptions seem to amount to:
1) Sign up for cryonics. All of your subjective future will continue into quantum worlds that care enough to revive you, without regard for worlds where the cryonics organization went bankrupt or there was a nuclear war.
2) If you can’t be suspended, try to die only by routes that kill you very quickly with certainty, or (this is possibly better) kill almost all of your measure over a continuous period without degrading your processing power. In other words, the ideal disease has a quantum 50% probability of killing you while you sleep, but has no visible effects when you wake up, and finally kills you with certainty after a couple of months. Your soul’s measure will be so small that almost all of its subjective quantity will at this point be in worlds simulated by whatever Tegmark Level IV parties have an interest in your soul, if you believe that’s a good thing. If you don’t think that’s a good thing, try to die only by routes that kill you very quickly with certainty, so that it requires a violation of physical law rather than a quantum improbability to save you.
3) In other words, sign up for cryonics.
Thanks Eliezer. I’ll let you know when I’ve signed up, if you’re interested.
Don’t forget to claim your Hanson hour, either.
I keep remembering mine but am totally daunted by the prospect of claiming it. I feel like I should have some really good stuff lined up to ask about first.
You could always sell it.
No, it’s precisely because I want to use it a lot that I don’t use it :)
Anyway, Robin might reasonably feel that all other things being equal, he prefers to spend time talking to the sort of person who does sign up than the sort of person who doesn’t.
Robin was the one who suggested selling it in his original post http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/03/my-cryonics-hour.html (and I think most people would not have thought of selling at all), so apparently he disagrees—talking to a person who would pay for an hour of conversation may also be interesting.
! ! !
Be honest. Are you prescient? And are you using your eldritch powers to troll us?
Doesn’t this mean that you should deliberately avoid finding out whether cryonics can actually preserve your information in a retrievable way, because if it can’t it would eliminate the vast majority of the worlds that would have brought you back? Whereas if you don’t know it remains undetermined. Am I getting this right?
You’re confusing subjective probability and objective quantum measure. If you flip a quantum coin, half your measure goes to worlds where it comes up heads and half goes to where it comes up tails. This is an objective fact, and we know it solidly. If you don’t know whether cryonics works, you’re probably still already localized by your memories and sensory information to either worlds where it works or worlds where it doesn’t; all or nothing, even if you’re ignorant of which.
How far do “memories and sensory information” extend? I’m worried about what happens during sleep. It’s been argued that dreams are a stability mechanism that prevent self-change, but I don’t know if that applies to the external world.
Following this line of argument, our memories could change while we are awake if we aren’t actively remembering them.