posted on September 07, 2022 10:55 AM by
u/IHateReddit_9001
92
u/luisffoliveira54 pointsat 1662552664.000000
“Someone hears about cryonics and thinks for 10 seconds and says,”But
if you’re frozen and then revived, are you really the same person?”
And if they happened to know all about quantum physics and could
apply the abstract knowledge to real life, and they had followed the
whole debate about zombies and resolved it against epiphenomenalism in
general, then they would be able to visualize the braids in the river
that never flows, and say, “Yes.”
Or, if they got high once and watched *The Prestige*, they would also be able to confidently say, "yes".
But cryonics is expensive, storage depends so much on the living, no evidence that modern cryogenic techniques will be reversible with any level of advanced future technology, and no guarantee that [you won't wake up as a test subject in a bodily horror beyond all comprehension](https://qntm.org/mmacevedo).
So they die.
Couldn’t you just as easily flip this argument the other way? As long
as there’s some version of me out there in the many universes that
did sign up for cryonics, why should I waste my money?
After all, that version is indistinguishable from me and
they’ll live forever, which means I will as well so I might as
well go spend my money on something actually useful to me now.
there's a version of me that didn't read the OP and didn't suffer the resulting brain damage and went on to lead an incredibly fulfilling, meaningful, immortal life
Signing up for cryonics, having your severed, unrefrigerated head
transported in a trunk of a car on a hot summer day in heavy traffic,
injected with old hand sanitiser and stored in a meat freezer for a
couple years before getting tossed into a dumpster at night is
less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting
your dreams when you wake up.
If you can viscerally dispel the… internal narrative of… high level
pattern… of something something.
What I love is that he’s such a many worlds fundamentalist yet the
many worlds interpretation is an incredibly frequentist point of view.
Also the combination of not believing in zero as a probability combined
with many worlds leads to quite a lot of nonsense since you can use it
to argue for arbitrarily absurd scenarios being inevitable
Add modal realism into the mix and you can argue there is a non-zero probability some version of you does experience favorable violations of the currently known laws physics! ~~This is totally legit reasoning and not the technobabble opening premise to an isekai portal fantasy~~
~~Obviously modal realism would be a squishy soft philosophy and not hard mathematical truth but Tegmark added some math to it so I can believe it without invalidating my hard science identity~~
Ah remember when the rise of tech still had some hope behind it,
people thought they would become immortal, not that there would only be
5 sites and they all milk their users for advertisement money and
fascism.
Remember when the singularity was near? (Coming soon, the singularity
is nearer, lol).
But sadly it always was just a new religion after all.
Unrelated to all that, I do wonder if the cryonics places have ‘we
have to deal with climate change’ plans in place.
>Ah remember when the rise of tech still had some hope behind it
Even our dystopian cyberpunk reality turned out to be way more boring than the dystopian cyberpunk fiction. All this technological development and, aside from figuring out more expensive ways to bomb hospitals on the other side of the world, the main use case is some bluetooth device that notifies your boss if you're pooping too often.
Ow and the bluetooth doesn't actually work properly. (They researched the 'spy on students so they are not cheating' software, and it doesn't work properly).
What is Yud talking about with there being no such thing as
individual particles? Obviously there’s the whole particle-wave deal,
but I don’t see why we can’t talk about individual waves, even if their
edges are blurred.
He says that the non-existence of individual particles can be
empirically tested. I followed the link. It’s to another article by him
where he imagines some silly dialogues with non-existent philosophers.
Nowhere does he describe any experiments, nor does he link to any
studies.
Is he talking total nonsense, or do I just not understand that he’s
touched on the corner of something interesting?
No, he did touch on a real, and interesting fact about the universe, mixed in with all the incoherent and unrelated rambling. [Fundamental particles don't have identity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles); they are completely indistinguishable from each other. There's no way you can grab an electron, attach a tag to it, release it back into the wild, come back a week later and know that it's the same electron.
Coupled with the fact that in quantum mechanics, particles do not have well-defined positions or momenta until they are observed/detected/interact with another particle -- it is meaningless to ask where they were in the meantime or where they were going. They also can exist in superposition with each other; it is a bit like pointing to a spot in the ocean and asking "which wave is this" -- the answer is that it is the superposition of many waves all the same time, going in different directions with different amplitudes.
In a system with many interacting particles, it is meaningless to ask, and even unnecessary to suppose that there is an answer to "which particle was this, last time I observed the system", even though total number of particles did not change.
I don’t get it. If particles have no identity and there’s nothing
special about his particular cells that make up his identity, then why
get cryonics at all? I mean, there’s plenty of other living humans with
neurons to go on after he dies and if their particles and cells have no
identity then wouldn’t they be just as much “him” as he is?
And if his identity is the same as the many worlds clones of him,
there’s gonna be a few that did sign up for cryonics, so why bother
doing it in this world?
By the way, although I’m criticizing Parfit’s reasoning here, I
really liked Parfit’s discussion of personal identity. It really
surprised me. I was expecting a rehash of the same arguments I’ve seen
on transhumanist mailing lists over the last decade or more. Parfit
gets much further than I’ve seen the mailing lists get.
One of the most accomplished philosophers of the 20th century has
better arguments about one of the things he’s spent decades thinking
about professionally than a bunch of techbros on an email list? Who
would have predicted that?!
Wait does EY really say that quantum mechanics means that teleporters
can spread your consciousness across multiple bodies? Because it
definitely sounds like that.
Oh wait I forgot EY doesn’t really believe in consciousness, does
he?
Remember that he has a super-secret definition of consciousness resolving the hard problem but he's not sharing it because dangerous forbidden knowledge oooooo spooky
“Someone hears about cryonics and thinks for 10 seconds and says,”But if you’re frozen and then revived, are you really the same person?”
And if they happened to know all about quantum physics and could apply the abstract knowledge to real life, and they had followed the whole debate about zombies and resolved it against epiphenomenalism in general, then they would be able to visualize the braids in the river that never flows, and say, “Yes.”
But this knowledge is not common.
So they die.”
Couldn’t you just as easily flip this argument the other way? As long as there’s some version of me out there in the many universes that did sign up for cryonics, why should I waste my money? After all, that version is indistinguishable from me and they’ll live forever, which means I will as well so I might as well go spend my money on something actually useful to me now.
Signing up for cryonics, having your severed, unrefrigerated head transported in a trunk of a car on a hot summer day in heavy traffic, injected with old hand sanitiser and stored in a meat freezer for a couple years before getting tossed into a dumpster at night is less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.
If you can viscerally dispel the… internal narrative of… high level pattern… of something something.
What I love is that he’s such a many worlds fundamentalist yet the many worlds interpretation is an incredibly frequentist point of view. Also the combination of not believing in zero as a probability combined with many worlds leads to quite a lot of nonsense since you can use it to argue for arbitrarily absurd scenarios being inevitable
Glad he clarified that for anyone who wasn’t quite sure how long 50 years is.
Exactly! If people just knew how to quantum tunnel through that oncoming car, traffic deaths would be greatly reduced!
Ah remember when the rise of tech still had some hope behind it, people thought they would become immortal, not that there would only be 5 sites and they all milk their users for advertisement money and fascism.
Remember when the singularity was near? (Coming soon, the singularity is nearer, lol).
But sadly it always was just a new religion after all.
Unrelated to all that, I do wonder if the cryonics places have ‘we have to deal with climate change’ plans in place.
worse than The Secret
What is Yud talking about with there being no such thing as individual particles? Obviously there’s the whole particle-wave deal, but I don’t see why we can’t talk about individual waves, even if their edges are blurred.
He says that the non-existence of individual particles can be empirically tested. I followed the link. It’s to another article by him where he imagines some silly dialogues with non-existent philosophers. Nowhere does he describe any experiments, nor does he link to any studies.
Is he talking total nonsense, or do I just not understand that he’s touched on the corner of something interesting?
Millions now living will never die.
I don’t get it. If particles have no identity and there’s nothing special about his particular cells that make up his identity, then why get cryonics at all? I mean, there’s plenty of other living humans with neurons to go on after he dies and if their particles and cells have no identity then wouldn’t they be just as much “him” as he is?
And if his identity is the same as the many worlds clones of him, there’s gonna be a few that did sign up for cryonics, so why bother doing it in this world?
Anyone rational.
One of the most accomplished philosophers of the 20th century has better arguments about one of the things he’s spent decades thinking about professionally than a bunch of techbros on an email list? Who would have predicted that?!
Wait does EY really say that quantum mechanics means that teleporters can spread your consciousness across multiple bodies? Because it definitely sounds like that.
Oh wait I forgot EY doesn’t really believe in consciousness, does he?
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