Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife?

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Philosophy Now
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Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife?

Post by Philosophy Now »

Rui Vieira says yes it can, of sorts.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/119/Ca ... _Afterlife
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Hobbes' Choice
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Re: Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife?

Post by Hobbes' Choice »

No. Mathematical devices for which no actual evidence exists IN REALITY, are no more capable of giving you anything, than any other fantasy world.
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A_Seagull
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Re: Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife?

Post by A_Seagull »

Philosophy Now wrote:Rui Vieira says yes it can, of sorts.

https://philosophynow.org/issues/119/Ca ... _Afterlife
Speculative fantasy and nonsense.
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Greta
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Re: Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife?

Post by Greta »

While a theoretical infinite reality can theoretically produce infinite things, that means there's an infinite number of possibilities that have not yet occurred.

It is fair to say that, if there are enough iterations, then the probability is that someone very much like you in numerous ways will emerge. In fact, statistically there should be a tiny number of people who are extraordinarily similar to you, then there'd be more who are not quite so much like you, more again who are even less like you, and so forth.

That would seem less like an afterlife than a reminder that we are perhaps not quite as unique as we imagine. In a complex enough human classification system, would each person would represent a "type".
DisagreeableMe
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Re: Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife?

Post by DisagreeableMe »

I'd like to hear the argument against this view, rather than dismissals of it as fantasy and nonsense. It really isn't. There's a compelling case for it being true, given a couple of relatively reasonable assumptions.

But first you need to understand it.

It depends on two key ideas.

The first idea is that existence is not finite. We don't need to appeal to a quantum multiverse or any of the more exotic parallel universes. All we need is for space to go one forever -- for there to be no border to space, and for space not to repeat itself periodically or to wrap around as does the surface of a sphere.

As far as we can measure, the curvature of spacetime is flat. If it is precisely flat, then it would seem this assumption is true. Whether or not it is actually true is debatable, but the idea is neither fantasy nor nonsense. However if it is true, then there are certainly an infinite number of people indistinguishable from you to be found if you just travel far enough. They live on a planet just like ours, and have had the same life experiences and recorded the same memories.

Greta has offered some more detailed thoughts than "fantasy and nonsense", thankfully.
While a theoretical infinite reality can theoretically produce infinite things, that means there's an infinite number of possibilities that have not yet occurred.
I don't think that follows. A finite reality would mean that there are an infinite number of possibilities that have not yet occurred. It's harder to see this with an infinite reality. If space is infinite, then anything that can have occurred since the Big Ban will have occurred somewhere. However, there are an infinite number of things which cannot yet have occurred, I guess, simply because there hasn't been time yet. Although this kind of assumes that there is such a thing as a global universal time across all of space, the idea that it makes sense to talk of what's happening right now on the other side of the observable universe, and in general relativity that would appear not to be the case (though there are physicists such as Lee Smolin who would beg to differ).
In fact, statistically there should be a tiny number of people who are extraordinarily similar to you, then there'd be more who are not quite so much like you, more again who are even less like you, and so forth.
Not quite. If space is infinite in extent, then the cardinality of all such classes of people should be infinite. Infinite people extraordinarily similar, infinite people who are not quite so much like you, infinite people who are even less like you and so forth. Instead of the numbers of such people increasing as you relax the similarity criteria, you should speak of the density of distribution of such people increasing. If you relax it enough, you are likely to find someone sufficiently like you even on the same planet. Relax it further, you may find many such people living in your town or city. But if you keep it very strict, you can expect to have to travel for many billions upon billions of light years (actually I suspect that's rather underselling the distances involved) to meet your nearest doppelganger.
That would seem less like an afterlife than a reminder that we are perhaps not quite as unique as we imagine.
It isn't really an afterlife in any sense, in that the idea of an afterlife is that you go somewhere else (very different, usually) when you die. So I don't agree with that description of the idea (not your fault, but the article's). The idea is instead that we are all immortal, that we can never die. We don't go anywhere when we die, we just keep on living, at least from our own subjective point of view. We still see those around us dying. This makes the idea rather less comforting than actual afterlife beliefs. Indeed, it is chilling.

But to explain this, you need to understand the second big idea, which is a certain account of personal identity. I'm not going to try to defend this view too much, just describe it.

The idea here is that we ought to think of personal identity as attaching to a mind, i.e. a particular life story, personality, set of memories, etc, and not to a physical object (the body). So, if I lose an arm, and get a prosthetic arm to replace it, I'm still me. All the atoms in my body are replaced with other at regular intervals, but I'm still me. If my brain were to be transplanted into an entirely new body, I would think of my personal identity as going along with it. And if parts of my brain were replaced with electronic prostheses that performed exactly the same functions, I think I would still be me -- even if the whole brain were replaced.

Or think of the Kirk transporter problem. The transporter effectively destroys the original body and builds a replica at a remote location. On traditional notions of identity, the original Kirk dies and a new Kirk, an impostor, is born, and so we should not use the transporter if we don't want to die. But on the mind theory of personal identity, Kirk simply moves to a new location. This is because the mind of the teleported Kirk is identical with the mind of the original Kirk. The same life story, personality, set of memories etc continues to exist, but now it is in a new location.

The problem with this way of understanding it is when we are invited to consider what happens when the transporter fails to destroy the original Kirk. Both Kirks can't be Kirk, right? Well, I say they can. Think of a pair of identical twins. Which one of these twins is the original zygote and which is the clone? That question is nonsense. Both are equally descended from the original zygote. Neither is any more an original or a clone than the other. The identity of the original zygote has simply split. These new individuals are not identical to each other, but they are each the inheritors of the identity of the original zygote. The same is true of Kirk, in my view. Each Kirk has equal claim to Kirk's identity, while they are from this point on distinct people.

It's not unlike encountering a fork in a river. Each fork is still the river, but each fork has its own identity from that point on.

From the point of view of the pre-teleportation Kirk, he has two futures, and should one of those futures terminate prematurely (as in when the teleporter functions correctly), he will still be alive in the other future and so he should not be too concerned (unless one of those deaths is preceded by suffering of some kind, including fear and anticipation of death).

Anyway, from this point of view, you are just the pattern that your mind makes, and you exist wherever that pattern is instantiated. If there are infinite copies of this pattern scattered throughout existence, then you are not any particular one of them. You are all of them equally. You perhaps perceive yourself to be sitting at a desk, reading this post, with light coming in from a window. It feels like this experience places you at a very specific time and location, but if this precise experience is not unique it really doesn't. You could be in any one of an infinite number of similar places and times throughout the universe. So I say you are not in any specific place. You are in all of the places (and at all of the times) that conform precisely to your experience. Should any one of the physical instances of you die, then you continue to exist in all of the others.

Due to the anthropic principle, you will of course always find yourself living on a planet where you have not died yet. You can never witness yourself dying after all. So you will appear to yourself to be immortal. Your family and friends will eventually see you die on 99.9999999999...% of planets on which you are instantiated, but there will always be a diminishing fraction (though still infinite number) where your death has not happened yet for whatever reason. As long as it is at all physically possible for you to be alive, then you will be alive somwhere, making you effectively immortal.
Kinloch101
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Re: Can The Multiverse Give You An Afterlife?

Post by Kinloch101 »

I have thought about this myself, and the article expresses many of my own reflections. It combines a materialist understanding of self with the idea of the infinite Cosmos. In religious terms, we often speak of people leaving God and returning to God. Of these existing eternally within the Mind of God all the while. If we leave aside the supernatural order - the idea of a metaphysical "beyond" - perhaps the most natural step is to consider the fundamental soup from which the Multiverse arises as that same God. This could be just that "fuzziness" found at the Big Bang, when concepts like space and time have no meaning whatsoever. Yet it is from that "fuzziness" all reality seems to arise, ourselves included. In this timeless soup of raw potential, it is difficult to see how the same entities would fail to arise once again from its bounty, given its probable infinite scope. We may so approach Pantheism, or at least Panentheism, with these thoughts.

Is there any conscious experience localised in this entity of infinite potential? I don't think we even can begin to adjudicate. Sir. Roger Penrose suggests a quantum mechanical basis for consciousness, and the stuff from which the Multiverse may arise follows laws even stranger than those of Quantum Mechanics. Many materialists may well cry foul here, but my only point is that I don't think we can be sure of anything at such a mysterious level. It is possible that God is a conscious entity at some level, within the Natural order, as this kind of creative potential giving rise to infinite universes. I tend to think that regardless of what we say here, God can be considered "Person" as God is to us Phenomenologically. Ontologically, God can be considered in contrast as "Prime Mover", and the "Personhood" question is left open. Maybe some kind of "Meta-Personhood" or maybe none at all?

The Holographic Principle may also be worth mentioning here, in that while the aforementioned "Mind of God" might not itself be defined, the Universe seems capable of recording itself. This touches on the controversy around the Information Paradox, surrounding Black Holes. Does the structure of reality encode all that occurs in history? The Holographic Principle seems to answer in the affirmative, at least for as long as the Universe lives. So that while your conscious experience does not exist outside your time frame, you do in some sense own the time you have been given. Those 90 years of life remain your own for as long as the data remains recorded. Should time travel into the past become possible somehow, this would affect your timeline and create itself one version of the parallel Universes - so that there can be more than one history.

However, perhaps there is less strangeness than we think, and perhaps the Multiverse is a pipe dream. Perhaps the Universe doesn't preserve information. Perhaps those 90 years you owned are lost in "fuzziness" billions of years from now, with not a single trace of that history having existed. No possible way to turn the clock back. Yet, even in these cases we still have a Universe, and we might imagine endless iterations prior to and after its existance. The infinity here ultimately still allows the very same existance for new iterations of "You" in all your different possible modes. How can it be otherwise? Indeed, we come here to Something vis à vis Nothing. In truth, Nothing simply cannot exist. For to have Nothing, you must have Something. Namely, to define Zero you need an "Empty Set" in which to hold it. Pure Mathematics gives us such conclusions. This all means finally that there is simply an Eternal and Infinite Something, utterly mysterious and utterly endless in scope. This is incontestable, whether we have a Multiverse or Universe.

My main question now is whether the Cosmos is evolving, or whether it remains static to some extent? In religious or mystical terms, we might phrase that question as whether the Cosmos follows a Will to improvement or not. Teilhard de Chardin S.J. certainly liked to think so, and regarded the end as an Omega Point. For him the Universe was absolutely evolving into perfection, even if it had to die first maybe. Yet, would such thinking apply to the Multiverse? This seems an open question. If God is immutable, as per tradition, then it seems the answer may be negative. God in this view would create infinitely new Cosmos forever. Each evolving to God's pleasure, and coming to its own Omega Point. Which means suffering is always going to be a part of my various "Afterlives". So too is it always part of God's own self, in this view, as Paul Fiddes argues. However, let's comes back to the idea that my own self in this Universe is called to the "Mind of God" after death. While I have infinite iterations of myself extending into the past and future, in entering the "Mind of God", I also might find the core idea - the kernel - of my own being. As before, I have to emphasise that we are not certain such a "Mind" exists in the personal sense, so we can't be certain we'd have personal experience within it either. However, in any case, maybe our own afterlife experience within this Mind is all these infinite iterations of ourselves summed over one another?* If so, I become part of God, and each version of me scattered across Reality is God in the world. I become greater than what I was before. Again, here we come to traditional ideas - Humanity in God and God in Humanity. On the other hand, perhaps there is no individual kernel and each iteration thereby has its own end-point within the Divine Mind. If this be so, then we'd have the very odd possibility of meeting various mirrors of ourselves, other versions of us.

*Here I only consider those versions that achieved what might be traditionally termed "Salvation". We might imagine all the failed versions of ourselves to disappear, and the summation or union only to apply to those that succeeded in their worlds.
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