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Could death be solved?
What would it even mean to solve death? Would that
mean that nobody else dies from here on out? Would that mean
that anybody who did die could be brought back? Could it mean
that everybody who has ever lived can be brought back?1
Some transhumanist thinkers, notably Frank Tipler,
author of The Physics of Immortality, believe that
the answer to all three of those questions is a
resounding yes. This belief--that every person, no matter
when they lived or where they lived, can be brought back
to life--is called universal immortalism.
The argument underlying the notion is that our descendents
will possess sufficient computational resources to be able
to run high-resolution simulations of past conditions in our
universe. In this case, high-resolution means simulating the
entire system at the sub-atomic level, getting planets, stars,
galaxies, and, eventually, humans to fall out of it. Tipler
argues that if our descendents possess enough computational
power to do this, then they will inevitably do so.
Not only once, either, but a potentially infinite
number of times. In the process, they will re-create every
human being who has ever lived.
This strikes me as ludicrous on several levels, even after
granting that persons instantiated in a sufficiently detailed
simulation are actual persons. First, the idea of simulating
the entire universe on a piece of hardware that exists within
the universe has such major flaws that it barely qualifies as
coherent. Doing so an infinite number of times only makes it
worse.
But let's grant the technical points, and consider
a hypothetical world where some descendent of humanity runs
an infinite number of simulations of an infinite number
of universes. Clearly, with this many simulations being run,
every distinct human being that has ever existed would occur in
at least one of those simulations.
But that's not all that would
exist in those simulations. Every human who ever could
have existed would be in there. Every human who
differs from a real person only in what time they woke up on
the morning of April 6, 1993. Every alternate history where the
only substantial difference is whether you ate your salad before
your roll or after at the restaurant last Tuesday. Even if we
grant that this vast assemblage represents some sort of solution
to the problem of death, it doesn't seem a very useful solution
that leaves you with so many search results that you can never find
your true love anyway.
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