7 ms·

If the universe you live in is getting increasingly surreal, be concerned. Universes where you survive a maximal time are likely to be wierd and not fun for you

If the universe you live in is getting increasingly surreal, be concerned. Universes where you survive a maximal time are likely to be wierd and not fun for you.

layer8 4y ago
No, that’s not how it works. At every moment, the likelihood of future moments to be normal is overwhelming (even if you’re already 200 years old). But among all physically possible futures, there’s presumably always at least one where you continue living. And that future may be otherwise perfectly normal and non-weird except for the fact that you’re still living. Of course, there’s also always weird futures besides the non-weird ones. But there is no special correlation between overall-weird futures and futures where you continue living. As an analogy, when you throw a coin repeatedly, there will be a world where you get tails a million times in a row. That doesn’t mean that there will be anything else weird in that world.
- roywiggins 4y ago
  I guess it depends. Maybe there are worlds where, if you flipped wrong, humanity all dies horribly. People alive in those worlds are much more likely to see runs of millions of flips than people alive in worlds where that's not true. If you see a million heads, you might start to worry that you're in one of those very strange worlds (where your survival depends upon those flips). Maybe there are exponentially more worlds where humanity's survival depends on flipping heads then there are worlds where you just randomly got a million heads. The other way things might get weird is if you have a run of, say, extremely near misses towards nuclear apocalypse. The more near misses, the more history has to appear to contort to avoid an apocalypse. If you have a bunch of those in your history, it's a bad sign- it means that your future is likely to involve either 1) an apocalypse or 2) an extremely weird avoidance of one, that is basically totally unpredictable. Maybe next time a cosmic ray will zap the guy giving the launch order. That is, if you find yourself in universe with a weird history that's getting weirder, you might have reason to believe that that weirdness is actually less weird than nonexistence and things will keep getting weirder.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    >> If you see a million heads, you might start to worry that you're in one of those very strange worlds (where your survival depends upon those flips) I'm already in a world where even a slight wobble in my planet's orbit, or any asteroid changing course by a few inches per hour over the past million years, would have prevented my existence. Then in the last 100 years we've been to the brink of nuclear annihilation at least three times... and shouldn't have survived. And it's still getting weirder. My fear once I realized this about 20 years ago was that I'd end up alone as the last living being on earth. And no matter how many cigarettes I smoke, it seems everyone else dies around me...
- blamestross 4y ago
  It isn't about probability at all. You live in the universe where you will survive maximally. That is fundimentally an unlikely state. You might have started in a "normalish" mainline universe, but you can't stay there and live "forever" too. You don't get to start your quantum imortality path today, you were born on it the moment you first observed, and you are doomed to exist for the entire length of whatever the maximal path is. Quantum imortality is existential horror fodder.
  - blamestross 4y ago
    And if you can make consistent enough deathtraps you can perform any computation in it's validation time.
  - noduerme 4y ago
    one sign for me that this may be true is that I invented the concept on my own decades ago and have watched it take over the public consciousness. I might just be living with other survivors who are also starting to catch on. On the other hand it's about as solipsistic as you can get...
    - layer8 4y ago
      The idea is obvious enough that a lot of people are coming up with it on their own once they learn about Many-Worlds.
      - blamestross 4y ago
        It's also fundimentally untestible. Makes for a wonderful psudoreligon.

If the universe you live in is getting increasingly surreal, be concerned. Universes where you survive a maximal time are likely to be wierd and not fun for you.

layer8 4y ago

No, that’s not how it works. At every moment, the likelihood of future moments to be normal is overwhelming (even if you’re already 200 years old). But among all physically possible futures, there’s presumably always at least one where you continue living. And that future may be otherwise perfectly normal and non-weird except for the fact that you’re still living. Of course, there’s also always weird futures besides the non-weird ones. But there is no special correlation between overall-weird futures and futures where you continue living. As an analogy, when you throw a coin repeatedly, there will be a world where you get tails a million times in a row. That doesn’t mean that there will be anything else weird in that world.

roywiggins 4y ago
I guess it depends. Maybe there are worlds where, if you flipped wrong, humanity all dies horribly. People alive in those worlds are much more likely to see runs of millions of flips than people alive in worlds where that's not true. If you see a million heads, you might start to worry that you're in one of those very strange worlds (where your survival depends upon those flips). Maybe there are exponentially more worlds where humanity's survival depends on flipping heads then there are worlds where you just randomly got a million heads. The other way things might get weird is if you have a run of, say, extremely near misses towards nuclear apocalypse. The more near misses, the more history has to appear to contort to avoid an apocalypse. If you have a bunch of those in your history, it's a bad sign- it means that your future is likely to involve either 1) an apocalypse or 2) an extremely weird avoidance of one, that is basically totally unpredictable. Maybe next time a cosmic ray will zap the guy giving the launch order. That is, if you find yourself in universe with a weird history that's getting weirder, you might have reason to believe that that weirdness is actually less weird than nonexistence and things will keep getting weirder.
- noduerme 4y ago
  >> If you see a million heads, you might start to worry that you're in one of those very strange worlds (where your survival depends upon those flips) I'm already in a world where even a slight wobble in my planet's orbit, or any asteroid changing course by a few inches per hour over the past million years, would have prevented my existence. Then in the last 100 years we've been to the brink of nuclear annihilation at least three times... and shouldn't have survived. And it's still getting weirder. My fear once I realized this about 20 years ago was that I'd end up alone as the last living being on earth. And no matter how many cigarettes I smoke, it seems everyone else dies around me...
blamestross 4y ago
It isn't about probability at all. You live in the universe where you will survive maximally. That is fundimentally an unlikely state. You might have started in a "normalish" mainline universe, but you can't stay there and live "forever" too. You don't get to start your quantum imortality path today, you were born on it the moment you first observed, and you are doomed to exist for the entire length of whatever the maximal path is. Quantum imortality is existential horror fodder.
- blamestross 4y ago
  And if you can make consistent enough deathtraps you can perform any computation in it's validation time.
- noduerme 4y ago
  one sign for me that this may be true is that I invented the concept on my own decades ago and have watched it take over the public consciousness. I might just be living with other survivors who are also starting to catch on. On the other hand it's about as solipsistic as you can get...
  - layer8 4y ago
    The idea is obvious enough that a lot of people are coming up with it on their own once they learn about Many-Worlds.
    - blamestross 4y ago
      It's also fundimentally untestible. Makes for a wonderful psudoreligon.