We only live once, but we live forever There is no afterlife - only life eternal
Kim Jones On 11/02/2009, at 4:27 AM, Michael Rosefield wrote: > I wrote it for my friends, but feel free to criticise! > http://rosyatrandom.livejournal.com/35445.html > _____________________________________ > > Perhaps it's time I had another go at explaining all that weird > stuff I believe in and why. > > Well, for those few that don't know, I reckon that all possible > universes exist and that everyone's immortal. > > I admit, this does sound rather odd. It would have sounded odd to me > about 10 years ago, too. Since about the age of 8 I was a pretty > hardcore rational scientific naturalist: everything is simply matter > and energy, and we but its dreams. What was real? Well, a chair. An > atom. Something you can touch. After all, when you think of reality, > you think of something... there. Something that sits there, quietly > existing to itself. > > But what does that mean, really? Everyone knows that matter is > almost entirely empty space, anyway - the solidity is just the > feather-touch of far-extended electromagnetic fields. Electrons > popping in and out of existence as the energy fields knot so charge > can be transferred in quantised lumps. Particles do not behave as > billiard balls - they are ghosts, obeying strange equations, lacking > hard and fast surfaces or reliable locations. Matter, energy, space, > time... they all begin to seem a bit ethereal when you look at them. > > Time. There's another one. I don't really believe in that, either. > Spacetime is just a barely distinguishable fabric woven by the > universe. Events do not occur at a time or a place - most of the > observables we see arise kaleidoscope like out of an intricate web > of possibilities, their form imposed by our own consciousness. And > by that, I mean that our minds are embedded within the universe, > constructed in such a way that the metaphysical structure of the > cosmos is implied by our design - the word without reflects the > world within. This has an aspect of the anthropic principle to it - > that we observe a world capable of supporting our existence because > if it didn't, we wouldn't. > > But this still has no bearing on how I started thinking things like > this, so I shall get that out of the way. > > The short story is that I read some stories by a science-fiction > author called Greg Egan. Before you laugh too much, a lot of sci-fi > is essentially just window-dressing to convey an idea - the > implications of some item of technology, turn of events or > scientific/philosophical argument. And Greg Egan is a 'hard' science- > fiction author, an ideas merchant. Well, you get the drift. > > The first story I read was called Wang's Carpets (later included as > a chapter of the book Diaspora), in which some spacefarers > (themselves software) find a planet whose major life-form are > floating mats that take the form of Wang Tiles - tesselating objects > whose patterns can implement a universal turing machine. But that's > just the set-up for the idea: when someone analyses the Carpets, by > taking various abstract variables (appearance of certain tiles and > features, etc) and putting them through frequency transforms, it > turns out that the computations the Carpets encode as part of their > reproductive habits give rise to a fully realised n-dimensional > space containing self-aware creatures. > > The thought-provoking part here was not that consciousness could be > digitalised and run as software - I had already pretty much accepted > that - but that the mathematical transformations necessary to do > this could be pretty strange, and come from processes that were > essentially plucked arbitrarily from the environment. That, > largely, consciousness could be a matter of perspective. > > The second story was the book, Permutation City. A great deal of > this book concerns one of the protagonists who wakes up one day and > finds he is simply a downloaded copy - and that the 'real' him is > running experiments. After being run at different speeds, and > distributed in space and time, backwards, in chunks of different > sizes, etc., the argument becomes that it doesn't matter what or how > the program is run - it is all the same from the perspective of the > consciousness being implemented, and that this is so abstract that > one can find the relevant computational processes within any > physical substrate. That all consciousnesses can be found within a > grain of sand. That there is not even any physical bedrock to fall > back upon - there is no way ever to verify, even in principle, that > one is on the 'fundamental' metapysical level. At the end of the > book, the characters have escaped into their own computational > world, completely divorced from any physical hardware. Their > universe contains a simulation of another world, whose very alien > inhabitants find their own physical principles for the cosmos they > observe - principles radically different from the computational ones > 'running' it, and so compelling they start to take over the > character's world, too. > > So when you get down to it, I no longer believe in the physical > world - or rather, I believe in all of them. While I used to require > reasons to believe in the existence of parallel worlds, I now > require them not to. Existence, after all, can have no overseers. No > arbiters to conjure it from nowhere. Time, remember, is just > something created from within our cosmos - on a more fundamental > level, nothing changes, nothing is created or destroyed. Things > simply are, or are not. Either they satisfy the criteria for > existing, or not. Either they are possible, and exist, or they are > impossible, and do not. > > Assuming just our world exists is like, to me, saying just the > number 532 exists, and that there is no proof for any other number. > > The Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics is like a very > diluted version of this. All it says is that the equations of QM and > our observations are consistent with the idea that, rather than the > myriad possibilities inherent in a quantum system mysteriously > collapsing into one observed outcome, all outcomes are realised. At > first, this seems a little too much to believe. Where do they come > from? Well, the key word there was mysterious. Nowhere in the > equations of QM is the collapse predicted. That's our own kludge, > inserted to explain the fact that we somehow only see single, > classical, outcomes. QM predicts that all these outcomes exist > anyway, interacting within the wavefunction. The MWI simply asks: > what if they don't stop existing? What if the act of observation > simply causes our own wavefunction to split along those pre-existing > lines? If those decohered elements don't interact much, we would get > precisely what we do see anyway. > > Now, if I exist in multiple worlds, how many me's are there? I would > say: only 1. My consciousness, such that I observe it, is unique. > While it might appear in an infinite number of possibile realities, > it is a constant, a fulcrum. I carry along with me a train of all > possible universes. So I don't think of myself as existing in 'this > world', not really. I am in all of them. > > Now: immortality. Or 'quantum immortality', as the idea is known. I > am running out of time, so I shall just say this: amongst all these > universes I inhabit, there are possible future trajectories that > take me into universes in which I am dead. However, I shall not be > around to observe this; I can only witness universes in which I am > alive. And there will always be possible trajectories into sets of > universes in which I am alive. And that is what I will witness: I > cannot die. Not in my world, anyway. > > Anyway, gotta dash now. > > -------------------------- > - Did you ever hear of "The Seattle Seven"? > - Mmm. > - That was me... and six other guys. > > > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
