Yes, you can save the ``conventional´´ quantum immortality theorem by extending the definition of a person, but is a person with an astronomical amount of data stored in his brain plus all of my memory really me? I would say not.
I would go even further: The person I was when I was 3 years old is dead. He died because too much new information was added to his brain. A different version of quantum immortality is more reasonable (meaning that it has a much higher probability than the conventional version). The process of death necessarily involves the destruction of the brain. The dying person thus looses information. At a certain point the information that he is dying is lost to the person. At that time the information still present in the brain will be exactly identical to the information present in another person's brain somewhere else in the multiverse. Let's call him X. There will be an infinite number of X's There is then a high probability that X is not dying, that in fact he is almost identical to the original person at a younger age. The dying person thus walks away in X's body. Saibal Russel wrote: A reasonable argument, but it does have a flaw. I vaguely remember a discussion on the evrything list related to the finiteness of someone's memory, which I think is the same argument. Why assume that person retains a constant configuration throughout er life? Could not memory be augmented over time to allow the person to get older unboundedly? Cheers Saibal Mitra wrote: > > The total number of states a certain person can be in is bounded. One might argue that according to quantum mechanics a certain person will always find himself alive, but all that means is that that person will always find himself in one out of a finite number of states. This implies that there can be no continuous evolution such that the person becomes older and older ad infinitum. > > Saibal > > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > > > > Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Russell Standish Director High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967 UNSW SYDNEY 2052 Fax 9385 6965 Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] Room 2075, Red Centre http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Sponsor Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.