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55 points arielzj | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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polishdude20 ◴[] No.46198703[source]
I thought about death the other day and how maybe it's akin to the feeling of going under before a surgery.

When you go under and then wake up some hours later, often you feel like no time has passed at all.

What if death is just that same feeling or lack thereof for Millenia, an infinite amount of time, but at some point from your perspective, you wake up instantly far in the future.

Like a photon travelling for millions of years, you don't perceive time passing at all.

Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact.

To you, it feels like you woke up in an instant. To the universe, it took an infinite amount of time to wake up you again.

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benlivengood ◴[] No.46198828[source]
If the universe is infinite that should happen sometime (not really important) around 10^10^29 meters away. Of course, you don't actually have to die for that copy to exist either, and a copy of the local galaxy etc. is not too much further away (10^10^92 m), so waking up indistinguishably somewhere else after a good night's sleep would happen occasionally too.
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Retric ◴[] No.46199044[source]
Infinite does not mean everything happens.

Waking up up the equivalent memories requires a body with that arrangement of neurons that isn’t in ill health. That could easily be looking for a 3 on an infinite sequence of odd numbers.

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benlivengood ◴[] No.46199432[source]
Yes, at some point Boltzmann brains become higher likelihood but don't forget that interventions are not limited to prior history, e.g. someone builds a machine that performs whole-body surgery based on the timing of radioactive decay. Still more likely to end up with a functioning body than a Boltzmann brain. Most likely to end up with a weirder but more likely intervention (low expectation of it actually working, but not infinitesimal) (and from anthropic perspective)
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1. Retric ◴[] No.46201674[source]
The issue I was pointing to was a society with a higher technical standard isn’t going to naturally create a brain that remembers a vastly less technologically advanced civilization. It’s possible they would create such structures artificially, but now your dependent upon a civilization with the capacity that also happens to create this specific arrangement.