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by shadowprofile77 2353 days ago
First, obligatory short story (free open access on the site below) for this entire concept. It takes things to their extreme conclusion and I liked it very much with the way it experiments with QI: https://www.tor.com/2010/08/05/divided-by-infinity/

This brings me to my second point: in relation to the death of a close family member a couple years ago from cancer. The end lasted a month and largely consisted in its last days of a slow withering of conscious reasoning and awareness. How exactly would something like that square with the notion of consciousness suddenly jumping to the QI state in which it simply "persists"? An argument around this was already made by Max Tegmark, who suggested that the flaw in that reasoning is that dying is not a binary event. Instead it is very often a progressive degeneration, with a continuum of states of steadily decreasing consciousness. In other words, in most real causes of death (and this squares with my experience), one experiences such a gradual loss of self-awareness that an observer defies all odds only within the confines of a very abstract scenario.

Furthermore, the obvious: QI does not at all save us from the loss of loved ones who do die in our quantum branch. Even if it were true, and each individual continues to perceive consciousness in a sort of immortal state of constantly branching awareness, we objectively know that we see these people die forever in our perception, with no allowance that I know of for a reunion in the future. Thus, its ultimate outcome if you follow this logic is deeply tragic: We keep living, seeing those we love die to our perception, while these same loved ones go through the same process, even if in some other branch other versions of both get to see said loved ones continue to live for a certain time longer.

2 comments

I agree. Under QI it's possible we end up as some disembodied conscious matter in a state of eternal agony; QI only says consciousness will persist, it says nothing about quality of life.
When we die, our consciousness just gets transferred over to the atoms that make us up. Since there is no longer a self-contained "vessel" for it, specifically a hippocampus, we don't have any short-term or long-term memory anymore, but are still experiencing. That's why we can't remember time before we were born.
This is one of my favorite stories ever.