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passive_fist comments on Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's often entertained on LessWrong that if we live in some sort of a big world, then conscious observers will necessarily be immortal in a subjective sense. The most familiar form of this idea is quantum immortality in the context of MWI, but arguably a similar sort of what I would call 'big world immortality' is also implied if, for example, we live in another sort of multiverse or in a simulation.
It seems to me that big world scenarios are well accepted here, but that a lot of people don't take big world immortality very seriously. This confuses me, and I wonder if I'm missing something. I suppose that there are good counterarguments that I haven't come across or that haven't actually been presented yet because people haven't spent that much time thinking about stuff like this. The ones I have read are from Max Tegmark, who's stated that he doesn't believe quantum immortality to be true because death is a gradual, not a binary process, and (in Our Mathematical Universe) because he doesn't expect the necessary infinities to actually occur in nature. I'm not sure how credible I find these.
So, should we take big world immortality seriously? I'd appreciate any input, as this has been bothering me quite a bit as of late and had a rather detrimental effect on my life. Note that I'm not exactly very thrilled about this; to me, this kind of involuntary immortality, that nevertheless doesn't guarantee that anyone else will survive from an observers point of view, sounds pretty horrible. David Lewis presented a very pessimistic scenario in 'How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat' as well.
Some tangential food for thought: My grandfather died recently after a slow and gradual eight-year decline in health. He suffered from a kind of neurodegenerative disorder with symptoms including various clots and plaques in his brain that gradually increased in size and number while the functioning proportion of his brain tissue decreased.
During the first year he had simple forgetfulness. In the second year it progressed to wandering and excessive eating. It then slowly progressed to incontinence, lack of ability to speak, and soon, lack of ability to move. During his final three years he was entirely bedridden and rarely made any voluntary motor movements even when he was fully awake. His muscle mass had decreased to virtually nothing. During his last month he could not even perform the necessary motor movements to eat food and had to go on life support. When he finally did die, many in the family said it didn't make any difference because he was already dead. I was amazed that he held out as long as he did; surely his heart should have given out a long time ago.
Was I a witness to his gradual dissolution in a sequence of ever-increasingly-unlikely universes? Maybe in some other thread he had a quick and painless death. Maybe in an even less likely thread, he continued declining in health to an even less likely state of bodily function.
Well, that's just sad. But I suppose you should believe that you witnessed a relatively normal course of decline. In more unlikely threads there possibly were quick and painless deaths, continuing declining, and also miraculous recoveries.
I guess the interesting question your example raises, in this context, is this: is there a way to draw a line from your grandfather in a mentally declined state to a state of having miraculously recovered, or is there a fuzzy border somewhere that can only be crossed once?
It seems to me that a disease that inflicts gross damage to substantial volumes of brain pretty much destroys the relevant information, in which case there probably isn't much more line from "mentally declined grandfather" to "miraculously restored grandfather" than from "mentally declined grandfather" to "grandfather miraculously restored to someone else's state of normal mental functioning" (complete with wrong memories, different personality, etc.).