You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Baughn 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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (46)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Baughn 22 October 2010 08:56:40PM 1 point [-]

You seem to be identifying yourself with only those beings like you that exist in universes like this one. I don't think that's necessarily valid, and removing the requirement adds more interesting options.

Let's say you exist in distribution of laws of physics, not just locations in this one. Then, attempting to kill yourself could change that distribution for those of you that survive.. in particular, it could vastly increase the measure of those extremely complex worlds that care about intelligent life.

For reasons that have been thoroughly explained previously, this would not necessarily be a good thing..

Another way to put it, then: If quantum immortality holds, even for non-quantum deaths, then there's a good chance that "death" really means "having your soul eaten by cthulhu", even if cthulhu has to invent it first. Fun stuff.