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4 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 4:21 PM

I believe that we probably have infinite lives. And I’m not talking about religion here. Think about the life you have now. It happened once, the fact that you are alive as an intelligent being and aware of it. If it happened one time, it can happen a second, and a third, right? Even if it takes an infinite amount of years to happen again, even if you have to wait for infinite universes until it happens. The good thing is that if you are dead, infinite is a blink of an eye. Probably you won’t be the ‘you’ as you recognize yourself today, probably not even human, could be a different planet in a different universe, but still an intelligent and self aware being. And in this sense I believe we probably have infinite lives.

Be careful with handwavey arguments that include infinities. It's not clear that the universe is infinite - it seems likely to be very (VERY) large but finite. So there _IS_ a maximum number of remaining lives. The questions, for your thesis to be meaningful, is how many, and what percentage of lives are "you"?

Those questions will lead to interesting explorations of whether your next door neighbor is you, in some sense, and whether the person who made decisions for "your" body last week is you. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on those things.

[-]lc4y10

What does it mean to "wait" for infinite universes? Do you think the universe big bounces over and over again? Are you using "infinity" as a shorthand for "really long time"? Won't the heat death of the universe happen before atoms somewhere spontaneously rearrange themselves into a structure like my brain?

Yeah, not "wait", because there will be no 'you' watching. I guess that's the same way I think about the universe. If it came into being once, probably it will happen again when it 'dies'. And the word probably here can be read in a mathematical way. Because if an event has a chance of happening even if very tiny, given an infinite amount of time it will happen. We could be a very smart insect that has a lifespan of a single day, wondering if the sun will ever rise again.