Is Death Paradise?

[Dumbass]

I have this view that we will live after death, wheather by quantum immortality, mind simulation, eternal reccurence or the omega point, mortality for me is too mystical, immortality is logical and scientific.

That being said, I am very sad, very much so, for I am realizing that death is truly the only comfort we will ever have, except we wont, becouse we are immortal, we will live with our misery and pain for ever, even suicide wont end it, we are, in the words of Schopenhauer, a pendulum oscillating between pain and bordem. We are scared of death but the alternative is horrifying. Whats even more terrifying is the lack of any options, it is something you have to accept, this time, there is not way out.

I really wish am wrong, and the end is the end.

[ErlyRisa]

I personally think, that by recording a time of death: The living get to know an approximation into "The Transition". It is as if society is hoping to resurrect the past. In time as technology gets more accurate the recording of death and birth becomes more accurate (for what I am unsure). I would think that by the time robots rule the universe that there would have to be a system created too denote "Your worth in time". Problem with the universe: its so huge, and we are so small...so if the universe is so huge, it means that it can accommodate alot of information... In other words, relatively speaking, we are ALL WORTHY: and it makes no sense, the manner in which our history has played out (human and evolutionary/animal); what are our future brethren supposed todo? Read only 10000years worth of fairly loosely accurate history for billions of years? I would imagine they would get bored. So how do you accommodate (in your society) for creativity for entities that are know it alls and live forever? (AKA GOD) ie. Once God there is no point...even God itself has to run an algorithm which creates something "hidden" in order for itself to not have a headache.

[CraigD]

I have this view that we will live after death, wheather by quantum immortality, mind simulation, eternal reccurence or the omega point, mortality for me is too mystical, immortality is logical and scientific.

A defining characteristic of a scientific hypothesis is that an experiment can be conducted to determine if it is false. This is pretty easy to do with the hypothesis/null hypothesis pair “we will live after death” and “we will not live after death”.

 

Start by defining the terms in the hypothesis. Let’s define “live” as “give proof of identity”, and “death” by the usual medical definition: cessation of heartbeat and the necrosis of oxygen-hungry tissues, especially of the brain.

 

One of many possible experiments to determine that the hypothesis “we will not live after death”, is false is:

• Alice shares a secret only with Bob
• Bob dies
• An entity – let’s name it Bob-2 – proves he is Bob by telling her the secret

To “blind” the experiment against experimenter bias, it can be improved by making it the following:

• Alice shares a secret only with Bob
• Bob dies
• Bob-2 tells the secret to Carol
• Carol tells the secret to Alice, proving that Bob-2 is Bob

A famous example of these experiments had Bess Houdini as Alice, Harry Houdini as Bob, the coded phrase "Rosabelle believe" as the secret, and Arthur Ford as Carol. Bess continued the experiment for 3 to 10 years (reports vary), ultimately claiming steps 3 or 3 and 4 failed, though earlier both she and Ford claimed it was successful, and some claims that Bess shared the secret with Ford, ruining the experiment. this Skeptical Inquirer article describes Houdini’s “we will not live after death” falsifying experiment.

 

Another defining characteristic of a scientific hypothesis is that its falsifying experiment is reproducible, and that the necessary participants in it be truthful. In the above experiment, Alice and Bob must be truthful, in that Bob must not tell the secret to Carol before he dies, and Alice must not tell it to Carol ever. To be reproducible, many people must do it.

 

The hypothesis “we will not live after death” has not been falsified, so scientifically, it’s true – like all scientific hypothesis, provisionally.

 

So I wouldn’t describe this hypothesis – which we could term “mortality” as “mystical”.

 

Designing an experiment to falsify the hypothesis “we will live after death” is more difficult. A variation of rhe preceding experiments can’t be used, because there is not action Bob-2 can do to show he doesn’t know the secret. Such an experiment must introduce more and more complicated terms, and theories, such as the theory that living requires a functioning mind, a functioning mind a functioning brain, so death, which is defined as the cessation of brain function, implies that living after death is impossible.

 

I don’t think the other ideas you name support the claim that we will live after death

Quantum immortality is outcome of the quantum suicide thought experiment. This thought experiment doesn’t offer to prove that we are immortal, but rather show some intuitive difficulties with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which suggests that there are an arbitrarily number of people who have lived many times a normal human lifetime and may live practically forever, because each quantum uncertain event that could lead to their death has a non-zero probability of not occurring. That there appear to be no such people suggests that such an application of the MWI is naive and incorrect.

 

My “mind simulation”, I believe Dumbass means the “reality simulation” hypothesis Nick Bostrom famously argued for in his 2004 paper “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?”. This argument is closely tied to the parts of Omega Point theory where practically unlimited computing resources are available, allowing a practically infinite number of arbitrarily detailed simulations of reality to be run. Bostrom then makes a simple appeal to probability by noting that, as there is only one “bottom level”, “really real”, or “actual reality” reality, and a very large number of “virtual reality” simulations indistinguishable from “actual reality” to the virtual people in them, the probability that we are living in a simulated, rather than actual, reality, is very high.

 

I love this argument, but the key problem I have with it is that it supposes that practically unlimited computing resources will be available sometime, and that there are no insurmountable difficulties with simulating reality in a way indistinguishable from the reality we now measure given such resources. I know of no rigorous proof that this is so, and intuitively suspect there may be such obstacles, because very detailed simulations have proven difficult. It’s easy, given the unlimited computing cycles and memory, to write a program to brute-force write every possible Turing-complete program - just take any Universal Turing Machine, and have it run every possible tape, which can be generated simply incrementing an integer starting with 0. However, the observable (interact-able) universe is finite, so “practically unlimited” doesn’t mean “infinite”, and I know of no proof that a indistinguishable-from-the-reality-we-now-measure simulation is possible within the actual limitations of the this finite universe.

 

The concept of eternal recurrence appears, assuming some not-too-uncomfortable consequences of physics, physically true, but offers no innate guarantee of any traits of the universe other than those we currently observe, which do not include people who never die, or, like Bob, continue to prove their identity after their death

 

That being said, I am very sad, very much so, for I am realizing that death is truly the only comfort we will ever have, except we wont, becouse we are immortal, we will live with our misery and pain for ever, even suicide wont end it, we are, in the words of Schopenhauer, a pendulum oscillating between pain and bordem. We are scared of death but the alternative is horrifying. Whats even more terrifying is the lack of any options, it is something you have to accept, this time, there is not way out.

I really wish am wrong, and the end is the end.

This sounds to me like fear that we are living in reality of which Sartre’s No Exit is an accurate metaphor.

 

This doesn’t appear to be true to me. Many people have died, and there appear to be no people with credible memories of having lived longer than their apparent age.

 

The great sadness I feel is that it appears to me that Ray Kurtzweil’s delightful optimism, and that of other transhumanist (which I consider myself) about the possibility of death becoming elective is premature, and perhaps will be until everyone is dead.

 

The old song lyric appears to have been, and may always be, true: Life’s a long song / But the tune end too soon for us all. (listen)

[Dumbass]

Craig, I define immortality from the mind point of view rather then a heart beat or even brain death. I think we could both agree that the mind arises from the brain. Which is nothing but a collection of atoms moving in a mysterious way but nonetheless merely a collection of atoms. So being alive = special movement of atoms.

 

Now just like the number pie contains every novel, the universe with sufficient time will recreate every possible state of any possible mind. Thus where you died eventually you will continue on, maybe as a computer simulation or maybe as another identical brain billions of years later or maybe as a physical simulation of the brain coused by water droplets dripping on a leave rather than electrons going through gates. Point is, with enough time, the world will keep us alive, I think that's just a logical and direct implication of our current understanding of the world.

 

Now the leap of faith comes in accepting that there will always be something outthere, in other words, the world can not disappear, my homosepian brain just can not fathom a world without a world.

 

With that leap of faith, which I think is logical, or atleast reasonable, the rest follows.

[ErlyRisa]

Craig, I define immortality from the mind point of view rather then a heart beat or even brain death. I think we could both agree that the mind arises from the brain. Which is nothing but a collection of atoms moving in a mysterious way but nonetheless merely a collection of atoms. So being alive = special movement of atoms.

 

Now just like the number pie contains every novel, the universe with sufficient time will recreate every possible state of any possible mind. Thus where you died eventually you will continue on, maybe as a computer simulation or maybe as another identical brain billions of years later or maybe as a physical simulation of the brain coused by water droplets dripping on a leave rather than electrons going through gates. Point is, with enough time, the world will keep us alive, I think that's just a logical and direct implication of our current understanding of the world.

 

Now the leap of faith comes in accepting that there will always be something outthere, in other words, the world can not disappear, my homosepian brain just can not fathom a world without a world.

 

With that leap of faith, which I think is logical, or atleast reasonable, the rest follows.

Your a smart person, but scary.

Problem with faith/religion - it creates nut cases, doesn't matter what the faith is.

Beauty of your religion(to me an almost basal undeniable fact - making it math in the end) is that it accounts for ANYTHING, much like string theory. The ugliness of spreading such thoughts though is an instigation of chaos in what has been a good 6000+ yrs of pretty linear stable growth for humanity: Rocking the boat should be left to the Scientologists, the Uni-Bomber and the poor souls of the Wacko disaster.

 

"A World without a world", hmmm many people have often pondered what our computers are, it doesn't take much to give them external "sensors" which would make them at one with the same world we live in...but the point is mute because they can recreate worlds that we cannot even fathom. Soooo What is a WORLD?...

 

Playing Games like Echoes or Pac Man is fun, the info that makes up the world and the system that it is enacted on are in effect an entity too us: the external beings. Does Pac Man live through us? Is Pac Man an immortal? Or is he mortal in the sence of being marketable enough to be played with? Which then begs the question... WtF is the point to existence, are we supposed to show off to GOD? What does (s)he/it want from us? Entertainment? - if that is the answer that makes GOD a *ank*r.

[Shea]

Funny thing...only the dead really know about what's after death death. We have seen dying, we have seen the moment of death, but what comes after we have yet to discover. Psychologically, this tends to create a fear of death because afterward is so unknown; one might argue this is a motivator for religions with quite a few explanations of what comes after death-heaven/hell, the Dao, various afterlifes, etc.