X-Message-Number: 11264
From: Thomas Donaldson <>
Subject: Is it really digitality, or do multiplicities suffice?
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 23:28:30 +1100 (EST)

Hi again!

For Mike Perry, I will point out that the major factor in his ideas seems
to be not the digital nature of human beings but instead the possibility
of multiple universes. Even if we are NOT digital that does not mean that
with multiple universes we might not be repeated: the number of universes
itself need not be limited to countable. With an uncountable set of other
universes (uncountable in the math sense, just as the real numbers are
uncountable) then there is no difficulty with repetition of someone who
can only be described using real numbers rather than (ultimately)
integers (as a digital person would be). If I understand the original
ideas behind the notion of multiple universes, there is nothing in quantum
theory preventing them from being uncountable (again, in the mathematical
sense).  

Moreover, even the presence of multiple universes does not imply anything
about whether or not those universes may be characterized by rational
numbers --- as the notion of characterizing them DIGITALLY seems to imply.
So far as I can see, the two ideas bear no relationship to one another.

For that matter, it is an assumption (perhaps or perhaps not well founded
from what we now know) that these multiple universes will produce copies
of us. Yes, if every quantum event produced another universe, then we'd
expect copies of ourselves in every one. But then we can have multiple
universes produced only by an infinite subset of possible quantum events,
none of which are involved in our lives (I am exploring the basic ideas
here, not the original explanation of quantum theory).

As for myself, I have sometimes looked back at various points in my life
in which, with hindsight, I could see that I had survived some fatal
event. Becoming a cryonicist may turn out to be one of those points. Is
it that my awareness, terminated in all those universes in which I did
NOT escape that fatal event, continuing in universes in which I do? I 
presently see no way at all to establish such an idea experimentally.
Even the multiple universes constantly hiving off to explain quantum
phenomena have one difficult feature: no way exists to move from one
to the other. If there were, quantum theory itself would suffer some
major changes. For now there simply seems no way we might pass between
or even contact these other universes; in essence, then, they do not
exist. 

That is why I do not feel personally interested in unreachable versions of
myself which may survive when I do not. 

			Best and long long life to all,

				Thomas Donaldson

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