Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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This is the civilization-scale Quantum Immortality argument... no civilization can be around that witnessed the end of civilization.

(I refer to it that way rather than a "variant" because Quantum Immortality should always be parameterized by an acceptance function... for any given acceptance function, that function will be preserved in the quantum multiverse, and scoping the precision of the function affects the percentage of universes that retain it rather than whether it will be retained. There's actually nothing in that definition that requires that the acceptance function describe a "conscious system", you can stick something that accepts a "civilization" in there just as easily. Or "this rock over here". Or any other thing you like. Conscious systems are just a particularly interesting case to us conscious systems.)

It's not a vacuous argument, though it is a funky one with very odd characteristics. But if you accept the suppositions underneath it, it does follow and is not vacuous. The suppositions are certainly not completely obviously true on their own terms, though.

>Quantum Immortality argument

I never really understood what is the explanation for ... old people that we notice as dying. In today's times you might have an argument that some kind of life extension could pop up and some of the people alive today could have that as an excuse.

But like 100 years ago? How would people dying of old age "continue living"?

From the point of view of the old people, exponentially large injections of improbability.

This is also where it is important to understand the argument is parameterized. If your acceptance function is "a full human body living a full human life in the way I'm used to", then you're asking for a huge whackload of improbability to keep that body alive. If, on the other hand, you merely ask for "the minimum system that stays conscious", while that is still a huge whackload it is exponentially smaller, by a very substantial factor.

Anyone who takes any sort of comfort in the argument doesn't understand it. It preserves minimal consciousness, for any and all definitions of "minimal consciousness". It does also preserve bodies, but at an exponentially smaller probability. You can even use as your acceptance function "civilization exactly as we know it today, with everyone currently living still alive in 1000 years" and that comes at a yet smaller exponential probability. All of these "exponential probabilities" as separated by numbers of zeros that themselves require exponential notation to write. But the universe itself is making so many splits and branches all the time that it has the "budget" for these probabilities to be true, somewhere in the quantum multiverse.

Or, put another way, any event that you can draw a non-zero probability pathway for occurs. It is not impossible for me to spontaneously have my particular genetic defect reversed in every cell in my body, so there are branches where that happens... they're just exponentially unlikely compared to what we actually experience. It can literally be in %10^(-10^1,000,000,000) of the universes... but if it's not zero, it will happen, if the quantum multiverse is the correct view.

Quantum immortality is just an absurd quasi-religious pretense of physics that caters to those that fear death but feel embarrassed to participate in the traditional socially approved coping mechanisms.

I do not think death exists as a thing. We're shoving a lot of stuff into the concept. Pain, loss of information, of the one who dies. Fear of the unknown, what happens next. Death is a very volatile concept if you really try to pin it down. When you take all the layers off...you are left with nothing really.

But yes, the apparent loss of information seems to be true, for us at this technological level.

I mean sure, in the end you can have some heaven, some benevolent alien species reaching back into some field and copying all of your material structure data right at time of death and rebuilding you in some kind of resurection center. The space of what is possible is wildly vast, we know or can think of very little by comparison. If you give up some day to day coherence then you can almost always find something that would work and make sense once there.

It could even be us, future us, being able to somehow recover past data and literally reassemble all of the humans that ever lived. They aren't as many as you'd think, in the grand scheme of things.

As I said, anyone who takes comfort in the hypothesis doesn't understand it. The dominant probability has nothing to do with benevolent aliens reaching down and inevitably resurrecting you to youth and health. It is you, minimally conscious, with no body, no ability to move or sense the outside world, nothing more than the absolute bare minimum to be "conscious", just barely conscious and never able to stop being minimally conscious, with literally every last extraneous and unnecessary subatomic particle stripped away (so anything like "sensors" or "effectors" being long gone), for whatever your definition of "minimally conscious" is. This outcome dominates the probabilities that even remotely resembles your current existence by those 10^(10^1,000,000,000) sorts of probabilities.

Everyone should very much hope that quantum immortality is false. It is the very opposite of comforting.

I don't understand. Why does my current life win every instant atm? Why is it so much greater than your proposition? Why don't we all instantly collapse to what you described?

That would require a very improbable sequence of events for it to happen right this second.

Moreover, if the theory is true, it is happening all around us, all the time. Every consciousness that has ever existed, human or otherwise, is still in existence in some branch of the multiverse.

It's a pretty horrifying theory.

I think whenever we reach such ludicrous conclusions it's more likely we have made at least one wrong assumption, if not more.

And people seem to be captivated by these memes, because the fear is great. It similar to eternal damnation in hell meme. Just look for how long it worked, and it's still working. The logic is simple, it's too dangerous to ignore such a threat, even with seemingly very small probabilities. But that still doesn't make it possible.

Logical traps founded on wrong assumptions.

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