On last week’s World Transformed, we talked about parallel universes in their various theoretical permutations. (This piece on Better All the Time walks through the various levels that we discussed on the show.) The discussion followed the news that evidence for universes outside our own may have been found.
Thinking over the discussion, a question occurred to me for my friends who describe themselves as “patternists” — those who uphold the idea their identity is nothing more or less than a replicable pattern of information. In principle, I agree with that proposition, although it leads to some sticky implications. For example, a pure patternist is okay with stepping into the transporter from Star Trek even if it works by destroying your body on one side and creating a perfect copy on the other. Likewise, a patternist will tell you that all that is need to survive death is a copy of the information in your brain. Freeze your brain at the moment of death; later they will figure out how to extract the information from it. If the pattern survives, the individual survives.
So my question is — if parallel universes were to be conclusively proved to exist, would you even need to make a copy? Max Tegmark, quoted extensively in the BATT piece linked above, offer estimates as to how many light years we are from our nearest perfect duplicate. If the multiverse is overflowing with perfect copies of us, and one copy is as good as another — why make any more copies?