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Comment by loopies | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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