On 28/06/07, Niels-Jeroen Vandamme <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
An interesting thought experiment: if the universe is infinite, according to a ballpark estimate there would be an exact copy of you at a distance of 10^(10^29) m: because of the Bekenstein bound of the information of matter, there are only a limited (though inconceivably large) number of configurations your energy can have, so that you can, in principle, have an exact duplicate. In fact, according to the ergodic hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_hypothesis), in a universe of infinite volume there would be an infinite number of such exact copies. What would happen if you'd die? Would you just live on in one of those copies, as if uploaded? If so, which one? Is this merely stochastic? What would this depend on? If consciousness is nothing else than patterns, then the "selection" of this copy is purely random, and therefore acausal.
Yes, you would live on in one of the copies as if uploaded, and yes the selection of which copy would be purely random, dependent on the relative frequency of each copy (you can still define a measure to derive probabilities even though we are talking infinite subsets of infinite sets). What do you think would happen? -- Stathis Papaioannou ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
