Immortality through technology? [closed]

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I speak with a lot of quite terrified post humanists at the moment: terrified that they will miss the technological singularity and immortal life.

But I can't help but think that they immortality is impossible:

1. the multiverse is finite... then no matter or physical being will eventually collapse and take with it any life forms.

2. the multiverse is infinite... then eventually everything will happen, including freak deaths. All the posthumans are going to die through some unlikely chain of events, the futurist version of some unlucky accident, or suicide or something.

The only hope of infinite life if resurrection, and I've never believed that you can wake up from death, that life is tied to ones immediate physical makeup.

manpreet 2 years ago

I would not rule out 'waking up from death', in two senses.

First -- once there are few enough quasi-immortal beings, they would likely duplicate themselves. So, even though many copies might die, one continuous memory going back arbitrarily far may be available as far as one wishes into the future.

Second -- I think bidirectional time (a la the Feynman universe where every current proton is the same one at a different age...) is a more likely quantum-mechanical model than Copenhagen or Many-Worlds. In such a model, it would be possible to preserve information by 'threading' causality through a unique event which forces certain initial conditions on an earlier period. If there is still matter in motion and the only way for time to continue were for certain particles to have been in a certain configuration at some point far earlier, then that will have to have happened.

The last few intelligent beings in existence might consider continued experience more valuable than continued existence, and would be willing to take that risk. So it would, with immense effort, be possible for copies of that memory to be instantiated much earlier in the universe's history and imparted to multiple bodies as soon as that is possible. This would allow streams of consciousness to exist in an infinite loop, continually recopying the wisdom of the version near the end of time to an earlier body.

These people would then be subjectively immortal.