It seems like you’re assuming a value system where the ratio of positive to negative experience matters but where the ratio of positive to null (dead timelines) experiences doesn’t matter. I don’t think that’s the right way to salvage the human utility function, personally.
There may be a sense in which amplitude is a finite resource. Decay your branch enough, and your future anticipated experience might come to be dominated by some alien with higher amplitude simulating you, or even just by your inner product with quantum noise in a more mainline branch of the wave function. At that point, you lose pretty much all ability to control your future anticipated experience. Which seems very bad. This is a barrier I ran into when thinking about ways to use quantum immortality to cheat heat death.
The assumption that being totally dead/being aerosolised/being decayed vacuum can’t be a future experience is unprovable. Panpsychism should be our null hypothesis[1], and there never has and never can be any direct measurement of consciousness that could take us away from the null hypothesis.
Which is to say, I believe it’s possible to be dead.
the negation, that there’s something special about humans that makes them eligible to experience, is clearly held up by a conflation of having experiences and reporting experiences and the fact that humans are the only things that report anything.
It seems like you’re assuming a value system where the ratio of positive to negative experience matters but where the ratio of positive to null (dead timelines) experiences doesn’t matter. I don’t think that’s the right way to salvage the human utility function, personally.
I don’t think Lucius is claiming we’d be happy about it. Maybe the no anticipated impact carries that implicit claim, I guess.
There may be a sense in which amplitude is a finite resource. Decay your branch enough, and your future anticipated experience might come to be dominated by some alien with higher amplitude simulating you, or even just by your inner product with quantum noise in a more mainline branch of the wave function. At that point, you lose pretty much all ability to control your future anticipated experience. Which seems very bad. This is a barrier I ran into when thinking about ways to use quantum immortality to cheat heat death.
The assumption that being totally dead/being aerosolised/being decayed vacuum can’t be a future experience is unprovable. Panpsychism should be our null hypothesis[1], and there never has and never can be any direct measurement of consciousness that could take us away from the null hypothesis.
Which is to say, I believe it’s possible to be dead.
the negation, that there’s something special about humans that makes them eligible to experience, is clearly held up by a conflation of having experiences and reporting experiences and the fact that humans are the only things that report anything.
It’s the old argument by Epicurus from his letter to Menoeceus:
I have preferences about how things are after I stop existing. Mostly about other people, who I love, and at times, want there to be more of.
I am not an epicurean, and I am somewhat skeptical of the reality of epicureans.
Exactly. That’s also why it’s bad for humanity to be replaced by AIs after we die: We don’t want it to happen.