= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Relsqui comments on Help: Is there a quick and dirty way to explain quantum immortality? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (46)
How much background do you have in the relevant nerdy stuff though? This is someone who can basically be described as the polar opposite of a nerd. She'd never heard of the idea of multiple timelines/realities except really vaguely from mainstream pop culture, has no idea about quantum or any other types of physics, and afaik has never played a computer game in her life. I would also bet that she's never watched any hard sci fi.
Basically I am curious as to whether it's a problem of inferential distance or whether I just didn't explain it clearly enough :p
As for why you should care, depends on how you view continuity of identity.
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.
True. I have trouble imagining anything being "me" which does/did/will not share the same stream of consciousness which is doing the imagining.
So do you view the 'you' that wakes up in the morning as the same as the 'you' that went to bed?
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.
What DSimon said.