From: Marc Geddes (marc_geddes@yahoo.co.nz)
Date: Fri Dec 10 2004 - 20:57:02 MST
Hope no one here is annoyed by this, but I have to ask
the question, since many here profess to believe in
the 'Many Worlds' interpretation of qauntum mechanics,
yet at the same time, several leading transhumanists
(Eli and Klein) were recently lamenting the death of
loved ones.
Isn't it really the case that lost loved ones have
*not* in fact been obliterated, *if* in fact, MWI is
true? Their consciousness has simply concentrated in
the QM branches where they survived has it not?
I've really been thinking hard about the MWI of late.
One major hypothesis I'm favoring is that the strength
of consciousness in a given time track is *weighed*
according the frequency of qauntum states
corresponding to that particular time track. For
instance this implies that low probability time tracks
wouldn't have strongly conscious observers associated
with them. Any thoughts on this?
Another thought that has occurred to me is that MWI
seems to create difficulties for the ethics of
computer simulations. For instance, a major argument
against ancestral simulations is that it would be
unethical because of the suffering created. But if
MWI is true, all these computations already exist with
a certain frequency anyway, and if we run an ancestral
simulation which matches the real universe then we
will not have changed the frequency of time tracks
where suffering is occuring, so why would it be
unethical?
Food for thought.
=====
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