eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 05:26am on 2006-12-22 under

"When I was a boy of ten I was convinced that I had been killed repeatedly in my own lifetime. I reckoned that most people had been killed pretty often, but each time death approached their consciousness would slip into an alternate timeline where whatever killed them was either nonlethal or nonexistant, leaving observers a dead body, unwise to the escape. How many times, I wondered, had an airplane fallen on my house or crocodiles invaded my room, only to have my mind flee to a safer plane of existence? Where this true, and one also assumed that there are an infinite number of universes to choose from, then every person on Earth would eventually exist in a world where they were the oldest living thing, their apparent immortality unexplained by conventional science. Knowing this, I decided to test my hypothesis: if I were to die, then I was wrong. But if I didn't, my theory was true.

"So far, so good."

-- cartoonist Aaron Diaz, author/artist of Dresden Codak, 2006-03-23

There are 3 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by [identity profile] keith-m043.livejournal.com at 03:23pm on 2006-12-22
Well that's a very interesting form of solipsism served up in a very attractive new bottle. Where one's consiousness persists in a a family of alternative universes because of the observer effect. One problem I see with taking this philosophy to heart is that one will be tempted to put off making provisions for later life that are based on the assumption that one will die eventually. Another is that one might become overly casual about risktaking.

One implication of this worldview is that eventually the set of universes that promote the existence of one person will eventually no longer intersect with the sets of universes that preserve the existences of the that person's contemporaries. Therefore any two people even though they may each be subjectively immortal, will eventually have to part company as their life preserving multiverses diverge.
jducoeur: (Default)
posted by [personal profile] jducoeur at 09:53pm on 2006-12-22
Yep. This is the argument I've occasionally advanced, about why the Strong Anthropic Principle implies apparent personal immortality. The joys of quantum mechanics...
 
posted by [identity profile] en-ki.livejournal.com at 12:07pm on 2006-12-23
Yeah, I definitely have thought this way in moments since I was maybe 10.

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