Tom Caylor writes:
Stathis wrote:
> How is this basically different to surviving the next minute? You are
*far*
more likely to be dead almost everywhere in the universe than you are to
be
alive. The "common sense" answer to this would be that you survive the
next
minute due to the continuous existence of your physical body. But once you
accept that this is not necessary for survival, because as we have
discussed
before your physical body completely changes over time, and because if
something like teleportation were possible it would mean destroying your
body in one place and rebuilding it in a different place, possibly also a
different time, then I think the conclusion above is inevitable. The only
way you could *not* be immortal is if there is no successor OM after your
earthly demise, anywhere or ever.
In fact, Stathis, you and Hal concluded that everyone is immortal (in the
"death" thread). I take this to mean that every person that is associated
with
every OM is immortal, since every OM has a successor. This implies to me
that we don't need to worry about copying, or which copying method is good
for
creating more successor OMs, since we are guaranteed to always have a
successor OM. It sounds like this discussion probably would go into
dividing in
infinity of one cardinality by an infinity with another cardinality. This
is
very problematic to say the least, since you have to get the cardinalities
of
both infinities right. This leads me to believe that the chances of
coming up
with the right answer are almost like the chances of coming up with the
right answer to a problem by dividing by zero.
I don't think Hal Finney was agreeing with me, I think he was pointing out
how absurd my position was to lead to this conclusion! But I don't really
understand your objection: are you disagreeing that your consciousness will
continue as long as there is a successor OM somewhere, or are you
disagreeing that there will be a successor OM somewhere if everything
exists, or are you simply disagreeing that everything exists?
I should add that immortality by this mechanism (or probably any other) will
not necessarily involve frolicking in paradise for eternity. It may involve
extreme unpleasantness, or you may progressively become more and more
demented until your consciousness sort of fizzles out, for example. That is
why it is important to do all the normal things people do to make life
better for themselves and their descendants. What you want to do is increase
the relative measure of good experiences and/or decrease the relative
measure of bad experiences.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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