Benquo comments on Cryonics without freezers: resurrection possibilities in a Big World - Less Wrong

40 Post author: Yvain 04 April 2012 10:48PM

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Comment author: Benquo 05 April 2012 02:45:42PM *  2 points [-]

Right now I don't go to bed at night weeping that my father only met my mother through a series of unlikely events and so most universes probably don't contain me; I'm not sure why I should do so after having been resurrected in the far future.

Because you understand that you can't change it:

For nothing is more certain, than that despair has almost the same effect upon us with enjoyment, and that we are no sooner acquainted with the impossibility of satisfying any desire, than the desire itself vanishes.

I don't think this claim is true in all cases, but it seems plausible here. There's no adaptive value to learning about "risks" you were subject to before you were able to do anything about them, so I don't feel how bad it was that I almost wasn't born as myself. But I did feel a kind of possible-worlds regret when I stepped out into the street without looking and almost got hit by a bus, since in some likely possible worlds I did get hit by that bus.

Comment author: Yvain 07 April 2012 03:09:28PM 3 points [-]

Because you understand that you can't change it

As I said below, if Omega offered me a financial deal to increase my measure - $100 per alternate Everett branch to make my father and mother meet and conceive me - this wouldn't seem like a remotely good use of my money.