This really started to scare me a bit last night, but today I thought it through.
The argument depends on two things being true. 1) The parallel-universe-at-every-moment-of-randomness conceptualization (which also gets used to explain causality violation, etc.) 2) Our consciousness is nothing more than something like a chain of causality. Ie, there is nothing deeper or more solid to it, and no reason that you would ‘die’ if all your atoms were vaporized but the information in them transformed into something else. (And the best argument for this being true is that your subatomic particles do, in fact, get destroyed and recreated constantly. Even on a higher level, you eat food, regrow all your cells, recreate all your molecules, etc, and yet you stay you.)
I won’t argue that either of those hypotheses are false. Instead, I’d examine the consciousness-as-chain-of-causality further. What’s stopping this chain of causality from morphing into something else, something that is perhaps less coherent than a thinking brain? Instead of dying, you may say you simply get transformed into a rock. You live, but without any of your usual faculties.
In the framework of philosopher Donald Davidson, this would amount to pondering the effect of brain damage. I assume that if by some chance you receive brain damage, then it doesn’t count as ‘death’, and that you can still continue living with this condition. What happens if you get brain damage again, and again? Eventually you lose your ability to see, hear, to feel pain, and finally to think. Without any of those, living for eternity doesn’t seem so scary anymore, does it?
In effect Donald Davidson is 100% right. We stay alive forever. It’s just what ‘being alive’ means that needs adjustment.
That’s actually in their conjecture. From the article:
That’s right, the Higgs Boson got Congress to cancel funding. Not that the right energy state didn’t get created in the experiment, or the particles didn’t hit right. No, they came back and got the funding canceled. Preposterous. Luny fringe. Apparently these physicists have spent too much time inside their particle accelerators. matt_mcl said:
Did you read the same article as the rest of us? They claim that creating the Higgs boson is so unlikely that the possibility that the SSC would have created it made any line of future occurring where the SSC was completed impossible, so the only lines of possible future were for SSC to not be created. That’s not the particle preventing it’s own creation by interference (like wave interference), that’s making the CERN magnet explode (one of their other examples). Hyperelastic said:
Failing to find Higgs bosons from the collisions is one thing. Having the funding canceled so the facility can’t be built is something quite different. They have explicitly cited the later.
Stranger On A Train said:
As long as you’re around to make the observation, you are in the timeline where you somehow lived to make the observation. But that ignores the timelines where you ceased being able to make observations. The Tao’s Revenge said:
The downside, of course, is you can’t control whether you are one of the few yous in the timelines that win and not one of the many yous in the timelines that don’t win.
The idea is that you are all of them. Each one has only its own memories, but all those memories are memories of being you. So while most will die, you will experience survival. This is because the ones that die won’t be experiencing anything at all. The only ones who experience anything are the ones that survive. So as far as you will be concerned, you will have survived–because if you didn’t survive, you couldn’t be concerned at all.
The real downside is that there are countless ways to survive a gunshot wound to the head rather grotesquely and unfortunately. So you’re not guaranteeing that you’ll win the lottery. Just as likely is that you’ll shoot yourself–and survive in permanent pain.
This is getting into philosophy and unanswered questions about how perception works with these divergences.
Think of it like a tree. I am going along the trunk. The trunk splits into two. I[sup]1[/sup] take the left trunk, I[sup]2[/sup] takes the right. Which I is the current me? I’m well aware that both I’s share the exact common past right up to the split, but which is the consciousness that I currently am? I[sup]1[/sup] or I[sup]2[/sup]?
Yes, both will think he is me. Both have been me. But only one is the seat of my current consciousness rather than the seat of consciousness for the alternate me.
Fiction has tried to explore this. I need look no further than Star Trek, and the Next Gen episode where Wil Riker gets in a transporter accident that leaves a copy of him on a planet trapped for a while, and recreates a copy on Enterprise. Then they eventually rescue Wil2. They are no longer the same Wil Riker, because after the split they went different directions.
A more interesting example is a story I only heard described. Transport technology exists where you step in a booth, and zip, you are mapped and your info is sent to the new destination and recreated, and you continue on your merry way. Until one day a guy goes through his usual routine, and discovers he is the body left behind. Turns out the moral ramifications were too spotty for disintigration of the “original”, so he actually steps through a door in the back of the booth and finds a room full of identical hims, from many of his previous transports. He’s the him that didn’t get created that time. All the previous transports, he was the one who went to the new destination. Until he wasn’t.
Both will say “I am the seat of my current consciousness,” and, from their respective points of view, each is correct. So it depends on which one you ask.
I would say this is more a consequence of the point of view that the story chose to follow. It could have – just as legitimately – broken off to follow the point of view of the previous “left-behind” copy, or the one before that, or the one before that, and so on, all the way down to the original who was left behind on the very first transporter trip.
Alternatively, it could have gone on following the “lucky” clone – the one who gets to his destination and remains ignorant of what’s going on behind the curtain – indefinitely. All the copies (and the original) are just different individuals with different histories. There is no “privileged” or “correct” point of view among them, unless you want to attach subjective qualities to one in particular. For example, maybe you believe that the “original” somehow has primacy. This would seem distressing, however, since from the way you’ve described it, the original is the very first person to be shoved in the indefinite storage closet!
I went to a lecture by one of those physicist (Holger Bech Nielsen) about 6 months ago where he talked about this. He was quite clear that the theory was more of an interesting logic puzzle to him than a serious theory.
Not the point. Yes, each will be the current seat of his consciousness, but the consciousness split, so each is an independent leg of the original consciousness. How do you know which leg you will end up being after the split - the one that survives or the one that terminates.
Yes, you will survive, for some definitions of “you”.
Yes, there are different points of view to be followed. Which point of view will you end up being?
Okay, this is where the confusion exists, because we’re in undefined territory. Assuming there is no privileged or correct point of view, that still leaves the fact that at least one of me is dying. Or in the case of the story, one of me is going into the box to never emerge. Why is that me less significant than the me that survives or goes on clueless?
I think “you” is no longer a coherent concept after the split. What does it mean?
In terms of continuity, you might say that the one that was just assembled is the “new” one, and “you” continue being the original. For example, suppose the process was carried out while you were conscious: you would never cease having a sense of self throughout the entire time your clone was being constructed. Of course, the other guy is just like you, only without as much continuity: to him it seems like he’s just blacked out for a moment and reappeared somewhere else.
So, how important is that continuity? If you take away the continuity by making the original unconscious during the procedure, does that change anything?
I never said that any of them could be judged more or less significant. In fact, my whole point is that you can’t do it except fairly arbitrarily, by deciding for yourself which factors you want to consider as leading to significance.
So, if it is the case that Higgs Boson creations uncreates the Universe throughout time, then the universe we live in is not one of those in which such an event ever takes place. This universe can have multiple attempts by many different intelligent actors to create such a particle, but since we do exist, they must always fail. The details of failure are irrelevant, engineering and politics are equally effective in stopping such an event.
The squelch that occurred may simply be a matter of programmed caution preventing necessary operations near the safety limits. But no one is going to program risky enough operating limits to succeed, because the professional cost of such a failure (and the consequent financial disaster it would initiate). The required machine can only be built by a huge bureaucracy, and no such bureaucracy can take the risks necessary to produce the particle. It is simply the case that it won’t work. Not that it can’t, it just will come to pass that it doesn’t work.
I don’t find this at all mystical. Nor is it provable.
