Document comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Will_Newsome 20 January 2011 12:18AM

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Tags: antitheism atheism contrarianism philosophy religion singularity

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Comment author: Document 20 January 2011 06:42:37AM *  2 points [-]

One way to make sense of this is to think about humanity as a region in mind space, with yourself and your listener as points in that region. The atheist who hasn't heard about Bostrom/Tegmark yet is sitting between you and your listener, and you're just using atheism as a convenient landmark while trying to point your listener in your general direction.

The listener in this case being a theist you're trying to explain your epistemic position to, I assume. (It took me a moment to figure out the context.)

I don't think anyone has gone mad or otherwise suffered really bad consequences from thinking about Bostrom/Tegmark-like ideas..

Possibly related: "(Hugh) Everett's daughter, Elizabeth, suffered from manic depression and committed suicide in 1996 (saying in her suicide note that she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father" (via rwallace).

Comment author: shokwave 20 January 2011 01:08:27PM 3 points [-]

Possibly related:

My gut feeling is the causal flow goes "manic depression -> suicide, alternate universes" rather than "alternate universes -> manic depression -> suicide".

Comment author: Vaniver 20 January 2011 06:26:00PM 4 points [-]

Honestly, I wouldn't be that sure. On this very site I've seen people say their reason for signing up for cryonics was their belief in MWI.

It would not surprise me if "suicide -> hell" decreases the overall number of suicides and "suicide -> anthropic principle leaves you in other universes" increases the overall number of suicides.

Comment author: ata 20 January 2011 06:45:15PM 1 point [-]

Honestly, I wouldn't be that sure. On this very site I've seen people say their reason for signing up for cryonics was their belief in MWI.

Really? What's the reasoning there (if you remember)?

Comment author: Vaniver 20 January 2011 07:13:28PM *  1 point [-]

The post is here. The reasoning as written is:

Cryonics is reasonable - Due to reading and understanding the quantum physics sequence, I ended up contacting Rudi Hoffman for a life insurance quote to fund cryonics. It’s only a few hundred dollars a year for me. It’s well within my budget for caring about myself and others... such as my future selves in forward branching multi-verses.

My comments on the subject (having cut out the tree debating MWI) can be found here.

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