[ExI] a doubt concerning the h+ future

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 02/06/07, neville late <neville_06 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Having signed up to be cryonically suspended i wonder if future beings
> will reanimate humans to torture them in perpetua. The likelihood of such
> might be small, but just say there's a .001 risk of eating a certain food
> and going into convulsions lasting years-- would i eat that food? No.
>  I signed up to be suspended anyway yet always wonder about the direst of
> reanimation possibilities seeing as how we live in a multiverse not a
> universe, and all possibilities are conceivable. Though the risk is very
> small if one loses the odds and is tortured forever, death would seem like a
> wonderful priceless gift.
>

The multiverse idea on its own would seem to imply the possibility of
eternal torture, because it isn't possible to die. If you are involved in an
accident, for example, in some universes you will die, in some universes you
will escape unhurt, and in some universes you will live but be seriously and
permanently injured. Let's say there is a 1/3 probability of each of these
things happening: that means that subjectively, you have a 1/2 chance of
finding yourself seriously injured, because you don't experience those
universes in which you die. As you go through life, you come to multiple
such branching points where there is a 1/2 subjective chance that you will
survive but be seriously injured. Eventually, the probability that you will
be seriously injured approaches 1, since the probability that you will
survive n accidents unharmed is 1/2^n and approaches zero as n approaches
infinity. There is no way you can escape this terrible fate, since even
trying to kill yourself will at best have no subjective effect, at worst
contribute to your misery when you find yourself alive but in pain after a
botched suicide attempt.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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