Immortality for Atheists (and everyone else)

[The Laughing Man]

so you are saying our current ignorance of the universe (= our potential) is required to support our current vision of it (= our incapability to understand it)?

[Avatar]

Sure. And by the time we figure it out, it'll be different.

--A

[The Laughing Man]

soooo...that means we can never observe enough of the universe fast enough to accurately/completely understand all of it? What about ourselves? Can potential be finite?

[Avatar]

Hahaha, please bear in mind that I'm still talking largely tongue in cheek.

Potential isn't finite per se, only its realisation is. As for observing enough of the universe fast enough, I think it seems clear that we can't because our perception is certainly finite.

--A

[The Laughing Man]

yea, I'm with ya bro....


what it boils down to is that we can never completely understand the universe because we cannot account for that which we cannot see. Until we can prove that we are aware of all of it, we can never claim to accurately describe it or understand it, or even ourselves.

[Avatar]

...people in general don't understand how weird the world really is.

--A

[I'm Murrin]

Murrin, an observer is certainly different from "any other interaction." For instance, electrons and protons are interacting all the time. Atoms wouldn't exist without this interaction. Yet, this doesn't change the fact that electrons exist around the nucleus in an "electron cloud," as you may have heard in school. They don't call it that because it's made of water vapor. The electron's position and momentum is "spread out" around the atom in such a way that it is meaningless to talk about it actually being in a specific spot with a specific momentum at any given time. It has a certain probability of being in a specific spot. It is only when we do a measurement that it actually has a specific location. Yet, even when we have this much information, its "conjugate attribute"--the momentum--is less certain the more precisely we know its position (Heisenberg's U.P.). Clearly, an electron isn't a particle like we usually think of tiny bits of solid matter. And this is true for all particles, except the smaller they are the more they exhibit these qualities. Even you and I would exhibit these properties if we had instruments precise enough to measure them. And maybe that's the "solution." Maybe we're talking about effects that are simply too small to notice on a day-to-day basis. But Schroedenger's cat shows that it's not that simple. Quantum effects could, in principle, make themselves known on macro scales.

Yes, yes, I know all that. I even understand it. I didn't entirely waste the last three years of uni.
My problem is with this bit:

It is only when we do a measurement that it actually has a specific location.

Which is true, but... When we make a measurement to determine the position of the electron (and strictly speaking what we're actually doing is measuring one attribute of the state of the wavefunction at the time of measurement) the interaction used for the measurement is what causes the 'collapse' of the waveform into a particular state. If it happened that the exact same interaction that the electron experiences under experiment were to by chance occur in a different situation, then an 'observer' of that interaction--meaning any system that receives information from it, meaning in this case the next system the interacting photon interacts with--would perceive the waveform as being collapsed, just as we would in the situation. The observer would just be other particles, and unable to actually know that it is perceiving it that way, but it would. Observation does not--strike that, should not--necessitate thought.

[Prebe]

Tanks Murrin. That's a bit less religious. I have no idea if it's right though

[emotional leper]

I am a Zen Buddhist and DO NOT believe in Reincarnation. This leads to many interesting discussions with my mother, who is a Tibetan Buddhist and DOES believe in Reincarnation.

[Hyperception]

[warning: in response to all three pages of posts, so long post ahead]

The most interesting possibilities for an afterlife proposed in recent years are based on hard science with a dash of speculation. In his 1994 book, “The Physics of Immortality,” Frank J. Tipler, a specialist in relativity theory at Tulane University, showed how future beings might, in their drive for total knowledge, “resurrect” us in the form of computer simulations. (If this seems implausible to you, think how close we are right now to “resurrecting” extinct species through knowledge of their genomes.)

Tipler is not the first to suggest the possibility of resurrection through simulation; Asimov thought of it many years before.

Ray Kurzweil is known for his outlandish statements, absurd hyperbole, and self serving speechifying. What he fails to account for is the law of diminished returns, which destroys any possibility of unlimited linear progression. Although he is correct to claim that humans always transcend limits, we must note his failure to address competing exponential processes, such as population growth, economic inequity, and resource depletion that threaten to overwhelm any strictly technical or material progress. What he proposes is likely to lead to a society of vampires where smaller and smaller numbers of richer and richer people consume greater and greater shares of the output of more and more oppressed people. Nor does he address issues of the quality of life, the desirability of its extension, or the selection of its membership for such a club of immortals.

but I really, really like not being able to be killed by an EMP.

I haven’t seen any research that indicates that any humans are completely immune to electromagnetic pulses. You would certainly have a hard time if you were surrounded by Blue Tooth devices, or even a wristwatch, and you may have some difficulty with the Faraday effect on your fillings and glasses. Also most survivors of lightening strikes report extreme pain of a chronic basis, along with soft tissue and nervous damage that would lead me to believe that an EMP originating from sufficiently close at hand would be quite unpleasant, if not fatal. All this, of course, is irrelevant, if you are within the blast radius.

Regarding quantum immortality, I’m pretty sure that something like this is the case, because when I was in a severe car accident all I remember of the moment of impact was a very bright light and a loud crushing sound, after which I found myself outside of the vehicle and traveling in the exact opposite direction minus my shirt and glasses, without any other visible injuries. I was not unconscious as far as I can tell, and retained the presence of mind to scramble out of the road and wait for medical attention. The car was reduced to a third of its former size, and all of its contents disappeared. When I went to reclaim it from the towing company, they refused to give it to me on the grounds that I was listed as a fatality. Subsequently all reference to the incident disappeared from police records. Since I am personally convinced in my own immortality on other grounds, I choose to believe that an infinitely large subset of my infinitely infinitely large worldlines collapsed at that moment. It felt bad.

I promise, if I get a whole new universe to play with, I'll renounce my atheism very quickly.

Call subroutine “circumlocution”: the Scholastics were fond of such questions, their favorite being “can God make a stone so heavy that He can not lift it?” This variant may actually be relevant to certain creation myths. For the one thing that God can not do, being the pinnacle of existence and essence and power, is to cease being God. Therefore, should a supreme being fail to concede its own existence, something much like the world of today, ruled by chance and ignorance, striving for spiritual reintegration, may result.

Wait, so Hyperception's and my way of life of "shifting realities" when something isn't the way we know it was the day before is unusual? We've lived together with this as a fundamental belief of our day to day mundane world that I can't imagine seeing things as static and unchangeing...

Do you mean you have days where you wake up and the South won the Civil War, or Gore is President, or Gore is President and the South won the Civil War, or the 13 Colonies were colonised by the Dutch, not the English?

Although I’m a bit late to this tea party, I will lay down a few rules of thumb.

First, the many worlds quantum hypothesis refers to single events on the order of nanoseconds and atomic radii or less. This means that the statistical likelihood of many such events concatenating to affect the world in a way noticeable to an untrained observer without instruments is practically nil over the lifetime of the universe.

Second, because any particular observer is in communication with a number of other minds, there is an historical narrative inertia to that world which manifests itself as collective memory. Accordingly, any large scale change to the shared consensus requires multiple observations of a single event from multiple perspectives followed by negotiation over an interpretation of what “really happened.” This means that it is even more difficult to make large scale changes of an arbitrary nature to the collective experience.

Third, the number of shared linkages with other minds increases with the significance of the event and the number of retellings or negotiations. This means that historical events of great significance, affecting many people, are nearly irrefragable.

In regard to the theory of chaotic substance that underlines the universe: consider a sea of infinite potential without rules. There is a finite possibility of the actual spontaneously emerging as an island of pattern or order. Only within its shores would notions of time, comma, space, rules, or information have any value. Unfortunately, there is no way for this island to be observed by the sea. Nonetheless, within the island no necessary inconsistency would obtain.

Nah, if it was conscious, we'd all be walking through walls and on water. The universe relies on us not being conscious for it all to work.

Referring to the rules of thumb above, it is possible to say that a conscious universe consciously resists conscious attempts at manipulation of consciousness. In short, the world is a sticky place, and it’s really, really hard to get things done by will alone!!

what it boils down to is that we can never completely understand the universe because we cannot account for that which we cannot see. Until we can prove that we are aware of all of it, we can never claim to accurately describe it or understand it, or even ourselves.

In some respects it’s even worse than that. Gödel’s theorem proves that we can never simultaneously describe the universe fully and accurately with any logical system. In the same way as the famous statement that we can not solve our problems using the same type of thought that created them, we can never create a one to one map of the universe. In some ways all we ever know is our models, which become more precise only to the degree that they are less comprehensive.

In reply to Bhuddism: the chicken and egg problem of reality requiring an observer’s consciousness reminds me of the Bhuddist doctrine of interdependent arising.

[Avatar]

See? He agrees with me.

--A