carado.moe

tammy's blog about
AI alignment, utopia, anthropics, and more;

also on twitter, lesswrong, rss, and at

what happens when you die?

contrary to popular (secular) belief, i don't believe nothing happens.

considering that you are your information system and nothing else, any future occurence of your information system is you. so, the meaning of the question "what happens when you die?" is really "what are some next things your information system will percieve after facing what should be fatal events in its original body?"

this is very likely not nothing. somewhere, in some timeline, your information system is probably being redundanced.

first, your body can miraculously avoid death. this would be a weird kind of immortality, where there is almost always a timeline where you somehow avoid death. it is, however, pretty unlikely to persist.

second, your mind could arise somewhere by accident. this could be as simple as random fluctuations in space producing something that runs your mind's information system by pure chance. this is extremely unlikely.

in fact, the most likely scenario is that someone in the far future reproduces your mind on purpose. for example, this could be a society in a u-line being able to, and deciding, to run an accurate enough simulation of the entire earth up to some point, and downloading people from this simulation into their world, to allow them to avoid death. as it'd probly take a bunch of effort, and sounds like a pretty nice thing to do, i expect that to happen mostly in u-lines; however, there could be some s-lines where this happens too. and while getting resurrected seems more likely in u-lines than s-lines, s-lines seem more likely than u-lines, and i don't know if the probabilities cancel out.

so, what happens when you die? you wake up either in heaven or hell, depending not on your personal actions in particular but in how likely it is we figure out AI alignment (a probability which you do have, if small, an impact on).