One way to make sense of this is to think about humanity as a region in mind space, with yourself and your listener as points in that region. The atheist who hasn’t heard about Bostrom/Tegmark yet is sitting between you and your listener, and you’re just using atheism as a convenient landmark while trying to point your listener in your general direction.
The listener in this case being a theist you’re trying to explain your epistemic position to, I assume. (It took me a moment to figure out the context.)
I don’t think anyone has gone mad or otherwise suffered really bad consequences from thinking about Bostrom/Tegmark-like ideas..
My gut feeling is the causal flow goes “manic depression → suicide, alternate universes” rather than “alternate universes → manic depression → suicide”.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be that sure. On this very site I’ve seen people say their reason for signing up for cryonics was their belief in MWI.
It would not surprise me if “suicide → hell” decreases the overall number of suicides and “suicide → anthropic principle leaves you in other universes” increases the overall number of suicides.
Cryonics is reasonable—Due to reading and understanding the quantum physics sequence, I ended up contacting Rudi Hoffman for a life insurance quote to fund cryonics. It’s only a few hundred dollars a year for me. It’s well within my budget for caring about myself and others… such as my future selves in forward branching multi-verses.
My comments on the subject (having cut out the tree debating MWI) can be found here.
The listener in this case being a theist you’re trying to explain your epistemic position to, I assume. (It took me a moment to figure out the context.)
Possibly related: “(Hugh) Everett’s daughter, Elizabeth, suffered from manic depression and committed suicide in 1996 (saying in her suicide note that she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father” (via rwallace).
My gut feeling is the causal flow goes “manic depression → suicide, alternate universes” rather than “alternate universes → manic depression → suicide”.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be that sure. On this very site I’ve seen people say their reason for signing up for cryonics was their belief in MWI.
It would not surprise me if “suicide → hell” decreases the overall number of suicides and “suicide → anthropic principle leaves you in other universes” increases the overall number of suicides.
Really? What’s the reasoning there (if you remember)?
The post is here. The reasoning as written is:
My comments on the subject (having cut out the tree debating MWI) can be found here.