X-Message-Number: 5927 Date: Wed, 13 Mar 96 14:44:53 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Immortality Thomas Donaldson, #5923, writes: > >This is a sad point for Mike Perry: > >I like the probabilistic argument for the possibility of immortality too. >However we should not forget the other side of that argument. I may have a >98% probability of living forever, but take 1 million people and 2% of >them (20,000 people, not a small number) will run into the other side >and never reach that immortality. Our finitude remains. It is only myths >that "live forever", and gods are myths. > This is a good issue to raise, and one I have spent some time thinking about. I think there is a satisfactory answer, one based on science not superstition, though it goes beyond the scope of such things as cryonics. It depends on the idea that "you" survive in your "continuers"--however and wherever they may be formed. If you were killed and your remains destroyed, and then by some random event a copy of you were made, that copy would qualify as a resurrection. Considering the universe at large, then, there are many chances for copies of deceased individuals to be made, though for just the right things to be put in place again may be very unlikely, in any specific case. But, in view of many-worlds (and even without many-worlds, according to some scenarios), I think it inescapable that copies of everyone, correct in the minutest details, must come into existence somewhere, and even infinitely often. Those who die without preservation, then, do have a shot at some sort of afterlife--though under what circumstances it is hard to say. I still think it's a good thing to try to survive in a more straightforward sense. (One of the reasons is just the "unknown circumstances" of any possible revival after disintegration, and there are others.) This means *staying* in the world given you're here--i.e. not dying if possible, or having yourself well- preserved after clinical death. There's where the nonzero probability of infinite survival is important to me. I would like to survive infinitely long if possible, and similarly I would like others to survive.. If the probability is 98% (or some amount <1, as it must be), yes it does mean many out of a large population won't make it. Even for them it's not the absolute end however. I would go so far as to say that in the long run, it will matter less and less whether, at some (relatively increasingly early) point in your life, you survived some catastrophe or had to be reassembled later. But shorter-term it matters more. So you can both justify cryonics and the position that, in the long run, right will prevail for all. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5927