Ask A Genius 608: Ineradicable Substrate
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2021/07/11
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Rick Rosner: So I’ve been collecting on behalf of my wife and, a little bit on behalf of myself, like stuff from the past two hundred years; I bought my kid a sampler from 1812. A girl named Philadelphia Henderson, I believe—South Eastern England, which came with a genealogy. So we know her mom, and we know her family up to the present day. It even came with a picture of Philadelphia as an old lady. And I’ll go into thrift stores, vintage stores, and I’ll buy old images because we have a bunch of frames. So, I’ll buy old photos to fit the old structures. And it’s clear that it should be clear anyhow. But it’s evident through these pictures how fast we’re swept away. I have a picture. I bought an image for a buck of Betty and George standing at their cash register in March 1955.
They’re almost certainly dead or soon to be dead. Well, let’s see what fricking they look. They were – I don’t know – thirty. So they were born in 1925, so they’re roughly 96 if they’re still around. And if I got their ages right, they probably smoked. Um, anyway, they’re probably gone. But they were here just a few decades ago, standing at the cash register. And we, too, are soon to be swept away, and we can distract ourselves from that for most waking moments and, indeed, most sleeping moments. We have very few thoughts that we remember from when we’re asleep. And we’re swept away. Our pets are swept away, and the universe has few provisions for caring about or stopping that.
We’re on the verge of having the technology to drastically extend the time we have before we die to the point where people are alive one hundred years from now. We’ll be able to live indefinitely and have consciousness continue indefinitely in some form. Though, the very nature, at the deepest levels of the rules of the principles of existence. You don’t get to live forever because it is likely impossible. You’d have to live for infinite years, years without end. Years that end. It needs to be clarified that anything, let alone an individual consciousness, can keep going for endless time. And you also have to examine what the point of living for infinite time would be, and you have to take that. It would help if you took it down to what we want as humans and what we’ve evolved to do. And we’ve grown to want to live and to want to keep living and not to be afraid of ever stopping living.
And you put those things together, and you get the desire to live forever. So you ask most people, and they’ll say they don’t want to live forever. Mainly because we come from a cultural history of living forever being unattainable. More people will change their tune as the technology becomes more accurate, and we can live indefinitely. But as far as what provisions the universe itself and, the principles of existence that lie behind or work in tandem with these, there are some provisions, but they’re pretty sucky. We’ve talked about the set of all possible universes, which could be broken down into the setting of all possible moments that can be contained. It’s the set of all possible moments, and possible moments generally are moments in a string of moments in a possible universe.
And it’s not unreasonable to propose that the elements in the set of all… we don’t know if this set exists in any reasonable form, but the features of this set are unique in that they possibly live; they can live. And because they can live, they probably do exist because they can’t not exist. And do our moments of consciousness have some relationship to this set of possible moments? That by virtue of being possible, live; and this existence, while the moments exist along timelines; if the setting of all moment possible moments exists, then that set is beyond time. Itself doesn’t exist in time, or it’s not time-dependent, though each group element exists within a timeline.
So you can propose in the math that any analysis on this possible set is way beyond anybody, anything anybody’s worked on. So you can’t talk reasonably about it. However, you can make wild guesses that the moments of existence, including personal fact, have this quasi-existence as members of this set that is possibly ineradicable because it is so deeply rooted in the principles of reality that as long as a moment isn’t self-contradictory; it can exist, and thus does exist in a way that exists outside a time, beyond time and ineradicable. All those are wild guesses and should be of little comfort. I don’t know. I mean, it doesn’t help us live, beyond the constraints of our bodies that’ll take technology, and the technology will be shitty until it’s less shitty.
And even as it becomes better and better, there will still be forces that will act to shut us down before we get to live forever and living forever seems impossible. They’re not necessarily. Because if things of arbitrary bigness can exist, universes of arbitrary largeness all the way up to, but not including, infinity. If they can live because you can’t ever reach infinity, you could have entities that could keep going indefinitely, which just never stopped going and keep counting forever. Well, I don’t know. I wonder if this statement is true. I’ll have to look at the set theory or whatever theory it is. Whatever approaches infinities, you can keep counting finite numbers and never stop. You can keep going forever, which is the same. I’m confusing myself, but it makes sense that you could keep existing eternally. You could keep living, never stopping existing, which seems like immortality; but it doesn’t have an infinite lifespan because you can never reach infinity.
So I don’t know; I’ve confused myself. I’ve revealed my ignorance. Also, I don’t know if there’s a difference between existing forever or existing indefinitely and if there’s a difference between existing indefinitely and an infinite lifespan. If that difference between an endless lifespan and keep going without stopping. If there’s a difference between those two things, does that difference mean anything about what we want and will want when we become the following things? The end.
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