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shminux comments on Open thread, 18-24 March 2014 - Less Wrong
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That's the opposite of comforting.
How so? Don't people find it comforting believing that there are universes where they survive against impossible odds?
Mere survival doesn't sound all that great. Surviving in a way that is comforting is a very small target in the general space of survival.
Beats dying if you believe that some day you will be saved BY THE POWER OF SCIENCE!
So let's say you're a soldier in battle in 2000 BCE. Someone just slashed your stomach open with a sword, you're in horrible pain, your internal organs are spilling out, but you're still conscious and aware of what's happening. How are quantum immortality and the power of science going to work out for you now?
EDIT: I thought quantum immortality was thought as a thing that applies to everyone everywhere. Are we discussing some sort of more constrained version here that doesn't apply to "your chest just got smashed by an engine block but you're still conscious for a little while" but does apply to cryonics, uploading etc. information theoretic undeath shenanigans?
The answer is the most likely miracle, but I am not sure what exactly that would be. All necessary miracles are so improbably that I don't trust my ability to evaluate their relative probabilities.
It could be something like: By random movement of atoms, your organs jump inside and your wounds heal (and your body overcomes the infection). All wittnesses stop fighting and start worshiping you as a god. You don't understand the situation, but successfully use your new situation to stop the war or escape from the war. You collect smart people around you, supported by your followers' donations, and together you invent science relatively slowly. It still takes a hundred years or more, that you miraculously survive with sufficient brain function. At the end your team develops a recursively self-improving AI (not necessarily a Friendly one, only one that wants to keep you alive).
Despite all the miracles, this seems like the least miraculous path from "cut with a sword" to "immortality". (Assuming that the damage really happened, because otherwise the most likely path starts with "you wake up from the nightmate".)
This is curiously detailed for something where basically the only requirement is that you stay aware of every moment, constant horrible pain and debilitating injuries aren't any sort of problem unless they keep you from staying conscious, and there's basically no lookahead beyond whatever the duration between consecutive states of subjective consciousness is, definitely something less than a second.
Sure, someone in the multiverse is going to get the happy shiny human-friendly thermodynamic miracle starting up for them, but it seems like there'd be countless quite a bit less improbable quivering masses of horrible injuries and pain who Just. Can't. Die.
I mean, think of the lookahead. Sure, the miracle scenario has you having a lot bigger measure of existence after the miracle has taken place, but there doesn't seem to be a point going directly forward from the lethal injury state where it's more likely to go down the path of the miracle starting to happen than to just stay improbably aware in your current rapidly decaying state. You'd probably end up with some incredibly measure-sparse weird Boltzmann-brain-like states in the end, but isn't it possible that at every step along the way there are a lot more pseudo-Boltzmann-brain futures than there are body-repairing thermodynamic miracle futures?