This is very good to hear.

In the mid- or late-morning, when I'm full of energy and eager to tackle the challenges and entertainments of the day, death looks like a terrible loss, a fun-stopper to be escaped at any cost.

Late at night, when my brain is exhausted and wavering, the bed is so warm and the silence blissful, never waking up again sounds like a fantastic deal.

I hope to die at night.

Cessation of Existence is incompatible with the leading models of "standard physics" as presented at the level of core grad school physics classes. Now, I don't entirely subscribe to those models but I do understand them well enough to have aced all my core theory classes (lab was a shameful B...) so I actually have 'more weight' to my claim here than it might appear. "Conservation of information" is absolutely a thing in "the Standard Model", it is just that the information becomes non-localized and (in the Everett interpretation) spread across timelines. But the information that was "you" (using the model that seems standard on LW that 'you' are a collection of organized data) should, in theory, persist indefinitely into the future. Many authors subscribe to the idea that information conservation is /more/ fundamental than 'the laws of physics as we know them' and said information should then even survive transitions like symmetry breaking events, aka 'changes in the laws of physics' that might happen.

Now, whether that distributed information is 'experiencing' anything is arguable, but I can tell you that it is a theorem in quantum mechanics that physical information channels are in some sense symmetrical (again, there are variations which I think might be true that espouse breaks in this symmetry - but not in standard QM). This means you can't say (in quantum information theory) "Collection of information A learns about collection of information B, but not vice versa", only "Collections of information A and B become more entangled, in a quantifiable way". So if you lean calculus or classical physics or alchemy or biblical chronology from readings derived from the collection of information called "Sir Isaac Newton", then, if standard QM is valid, the collection of information called "Sir Isaac Newton" learns just as much about you, in real time!

Maybe Isaac Newton doesn't /need/ a meat body any more; he's uploaded as a continuous process into what David Bohm calls "the holomovement" and he influences the world every day, ask any freshman physics student about their homework problems and you'll see his influence in action.

Note this is not mysticism or nonsense, this is Vanilla Quantum Mechanics. I'm not claiming that the current collection of information we call "Sir Isaac Newton" is experiencing a mode of consciousness like that of a meat human right now, but rather that the collection still exists and is interacting with the world at large, becoming more entangled with some collections and less entangled (by some measure) with others, even as the Newtonsphere, current around 371 light years in radius, continues to expand.

Note that the Gentle Reader of this piece might be a human, or an AI, or a Searles Chinese Room type entity, or something else. If you are a living meat human reading this (or a sim that thinks it's a living meat human) you likely have some 'memories' pertaining to 'coming into existence' that date back less than two centuries. Unless you are like the author of this comment, you might not identify very hard with your 350-year-ago 'self', a collapsing 'incoming' wave of information that will eventually converge on your meat body and in some sense, supervise its construction and operation. There is no obligation to do so, and I predict with a moderate degree of confidence that people will consider you rather odd if you say things like "I am an immortal pattern of information in configuration space" but, to physicists of the 'timeless physics' school, that is pretty much what you appear to be. (I myself am happy to accept whatever self-definition you care to advertise to the world, so if you say "I am a human who did not exist before Month Day, Birthyear (or if RC, ConceptionYear)" I'm happy to accept that and say "This person is from a universe where the timeless formulation of quantum mechanics does not apply. How interesting." rather than "This entity's self-narrative is at variance with my very limited understanding of actual physics, so therefore THEY MUST BE CONFUSED, DELUDED, OR LYING and MY LIMITED KNOWLEDGE OF PHYSICS proves them to be so".

So.. as a Standard Physical Human Body Expressed As A Process In Time. cessation of existence not only doesn't scare me, it intrigues me, what would it be like to have that option? I have no idea how I would halt my evolution in the Schrodinger picture, or change my state vector in the Heisenberg (i.e. more or less timeless) picture.

I don't really believe that standard QM is 100 percent correct, it seems unlikely that what I was taught in grad school is the Correct Final Theory (I think 'nothing' is the most likely CFT actually, like asking "What is the last integer?" (spoiler: it's -1) because "there isn't one". However the usual thing to do on LW is to accept the current 'best known model of the laws of physics" as "tentatively true unless you're explicitly speculating about fringe theories or future developments" and so I post this offering as "my understanding of what the best current consensus among physicists tells us about Cessation of Existence".

Another time, if there is interest, I will discuss where new information seems to come from in a (multi? uni?)-verse where information is conserved, but that would be rambling.

That all being said, Cessation of Existence still does scare me and I want to avoid it, even if the best current physics indicates that it is actually impossible :) I'm also afraid of dragons materializing and challenging me to the Duel Draconic, which is almost equally improbable, but not quite impossible. (A quantum fluctuation of very low but distinctly non-zero probability could manifest as a draconic duelist gunning for me in my sensorium, according to standard QM, while the event described by "The Universe loses the collection of information that constitutes a given individual" has exactly zero probability, as it violates the premises of the system by which we calculate probabilities.

No, really, Cessation Of Existence still scares the crap out of mem though I have accepted is as very very probable (barring the Singularity happening very soon). What about you guys?

To the best of my knowledge, it is well with my soul. I enjoy living and seek to continue doing so- but when it comes to lifespan, I start at the present and count up rather than starting at infinity and counting down.

The cessation of existence holds very little fear for me. Existence really isn't all that great, so it ending wouldn't be all that bad.

The one thing I fear about it is that it should happen before I manage to make my net impact on the world positive. I don't want to be one of the >50% of the population that the world would have been better off without.

I fear failure, rather than death.

It seems very likely to me that tribal groups in prehistory observed that "eating some things leads to illness and sometimes death; eating other things seems to lead to health or happiness or greater utility" and some very clever group of people starting compiling a system of eating rules that seemed to work. It became traditional to hand over rules for eating, and other activities, to their children. Rules like "If a garment has a visible spot of mildew, either cut out the mildewed spot with a specified margin around it or discard it entirely, for god's sake don't store it with your other garments" or "don't eat insects that you don't specifically recognize as safe and nutritious" or 'don't eat with unclean hands, for a certain technical definition of 'unclean', for example, don't touch a rotting corpse then stuff your face or deliver a baby with those hands" etc. etc.

Then much much later, some of the descendants of some of those tribes thought to write a bunch of this stuff down before it could be forgotten. They ascribed the origin of the rules to a character representing "The best collective wisdom we have available to us" and used about ten different names for that character, who was seen as a collection of information much like any person is, but the oldest and wisest known collection of information around.

Then when different branches of humanity ran into each other and found out that other branches had different rule sets, different authority figures, and different names for the same thing as well as differing meanings for the same names in many cases, hilarity ensued.

Then a group of very very serious atheists came and said "We have the real truth, and our collective wisdom is much much better than that of the ancient people who actually fought through fire and blood, death and disease and a shitstorm of suffering to hand us a lot of their distilled wisdom on a platter, so we could then take the cream of what they offered, throw away the rest, and make fun of their stupid superstitions while not acknowledging that they actually did extremely well for the conditions they experienced"

Religious minds did most of the heavy lifting to get rationality at least as far as Leibniz and Newton, both of whom were notably religious. I'm not saying that the religious mindset is correct or superior, but the development of rational thought among humans has been like a relay race carrying a torch for a million years, and then when the torch is at the finish line (when it gets passed on to nonhumans) a subset of the people who carried the torch for the last little bit doesn't need to say "Hah we are so much better than the people who fought and died under the banner of beliefs at variance with our own". This is a promulgation of what is /bad/ about religion, and I see a lot of it in this group. I love the group but would really like it even better if people showed a tiny bit of respect for the minds that fought through the eras of slavery and religious war and other evils, instead of proclaiming very loudly about how wonderful they are compared to everyone else.

I mean, you ARE wonderful, you are doing amazing things, but... come on.

Not that I am any better, here I am bashing you lovely people because your customs are at variance with my own - but that's what reading this group has taught me to do!

(I'm neither a theology scholar nor an anthropologist, so I may lack some important background on this.)

I agree that the idea of early church leaders isolating members in order to explicitly limit the introduction of new ideas sounds far-fetched. It strikes me as the kind of thing that would only be said after the fact, by a historian looking for meaning in the details. But attributing those member-isolating rules to something like "preserving group identity" seems like the same thing.

I find myself wondering if something like the anthropic principle is at work here, i.e. the only religious groups to survive that long are the ones who historically isolated their members from outside ideas. There's probably a more general term for what I'm getting at.