so I've been looking at Netflix and put on that movie The Discovery, and the conceit is that some scientist discovered that there is an afterlife, and so it becomes this world-famous discovery, and suicides go way up
sounds like a fine plot, right?
I posit you a similar plot: scientists make an even more unfathomable discovery. Not something small like one afterlife of totally uncertain character. No, they discover...
.... that there are INFINITELY MANY WORDS EXISTING IN PARALLEL
AND MORE! NEW WORLDS ARE CREATED EVER NANOSECOND!
and people
freak out like crazy. It becomes the only thing anyone talks about. They make the day of the discovery an international holiday. Suicides go way up becomes people know they have other lives that may be happier. They become more risk taking. They stop being afraid of death. Some who think their life is bad start panicking.
People would walk into the movie theater and watch this, and nod along, and I bet "people are overreacting" would not make the top 5 on the list of complaints. Dispute this; I dare you.
Of course, the real world is much less exciting because rather than being a hypothetical crazy discovery it's just -- yawn -- real science -- yawn. real science is boring. correspondingly, people don't care. they really truly do not care. the degree to which people don't care about many worlds ridicules any description. I once mentioned it to my grandfather when he was still alive, maybe 2 years ago, and he made one comment about something related to god it reminded him of, and that was it. It was imminently clear that it did not rise in importance above the level of any random thought experiment or odd philosophical curiosity.
maybe that's because the debate about Copenhagen isn't over yet, but that just feels implausible at this point. If people give zero fucks about something being believed by half the scientists, would that 0 really go to 100 if it was believed by 90% instead?
It seems much more plausible that most people are just grotesquely wrong about what most people who actually live in the real social world actually care about. When Eliezer Yudkowsky says things like, 'people are more afraid of being looked at weird than dying', this sounds so much like an exaggeration, but it seems like it's just straight-forwardly true. you don't
think it's true because, well, we wouldn't play Russian roulette, but that's because the roulette is scary; we don't go cliff diving because that is scary. But when the thing itself is not scary like not putting on a seat belt or smoking or speeding on the highway... society had to push and push and push to get people not to do t he ridiculous life-threatening thing there.
And I actually remember when I was quite small and on a trip with my class, and we were doing something super dangerous where we could fall to death, except of course we had strict safety setups so that, if we fall, nothing happens. Then I noticed (I don't know if it actually happened, but I believed that it happened) that the safety wasn't there for me, and I was like really scared of, you guessed it, the embarrassment of someone noticing, but then I realized that I could just finish the task without the safety there, and I did and it was fine. Not scary.
To additionally nail down this effect because plausibly two different mechanisms have to apply to explain the degree to which people don't care about many worlds, I think most people just have a world model where 'philosophical thoughts' are this special category that is not allowed to affect them. A bit like conspiracy theories.
There's this other Netflix movie Horse Girl about this woman who believes in a bunch of crazy things and eventually just gets a severe psychological disease and starts hallucinating, and the central message seems to be something like "if someone hallucinates something, that something is real to them". But the most memorable scene to me was when she met this guy at a party, and they're into each other, then they go eating, and she talks about how she was at a doctor who made fun of her for bringing up paranormal stuff, and he says how he believes aliens helps build the pyramids, and then she goes further but he's really into it, and then afterward they start kissing and it's lovely-
-and she says she thinks she's a clone of her grandmother, and that some guy is another clone whom she saw in her dreams, which is actually when she woke up during the alien abductions, and there is that moment when he realizes that this person really believes what she's saying-
-and then, and this is the scene that stuck in memory, she drags him to the cemetery where she wants to dig out her grandmother's grave to take her DNA to prove it, and he of course is freaking out and wants none of it, and she quite reasonably reminds him of their previous discussion and
And then, "I thought we were just talking about conspiracy theories"
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Topic: The Necro Wars (Read 356025 times)