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Relsqui comments on Help: Is there a quick and dirty way to explain quantum immortality? - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: erratio 20 October 2010 03:00AM

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Comment author: Relsqui 20 October 2010 08:42:47AM 1 point [-]

How much background do you have in the relevant nerdy stuff though?

More than your friend, but maybe not a lot more. I'm one of the least nerdy nerds I know, and probably the least educated if you normalize age. Computer games yes, hard sci fi rarely, quantum physics pretty much none.

As for why you should care, depends on how you view continuity of identity.

True. I have trouble imagining anything being "me" which does/did/will not share the same stream of consciousness which is doing the imagining.

Comment author: erratio 20 October 2010 09:49:36AM 1 point [-]

So do you view the 'you' that wakes up in the morning as the same as the 'you' that went to bed?

Comment author: DSimon 20 October 2010 05:36:04PM *  6 points [-]

DSimon woke up this morning. From that point on, there have been a lot of diverging universes, one of which involved DSimon going to work, one of which involved DSimon getting hit by a car, and one of which involved DSimon founding a new town called "Shinypants" where the president lands Air Force One the very same day and makes him emperor of the world on a whim. There's also many many other divergent DSimons, but let's not worry about them.

So we'll call those derivatives DSimonWork, DSimonDead, and DSimonEmperor. All three of these DSimons feel that they are the same as the DSimon that woke up this morning. However, they do not feel that they are the same as each other.

So actually "the same as" isn't quite the right concept here, because then I would be saying that A = B and B = C but A != C. "Identify with" might be better. The main point though is that this feeling of identification proceeds backwards up the divergence tree, but not sideways across it.

Comment author: Relsqui 20 October 2010 05:45:14PM -1 points [-]

What DSimon said.