Posthuman Blues

Rudy Rucker muses on the existential implications of quantum mechanics:

My sense is that if time really branches, then you wholeheartedly go into each branch; you're conscious in each of them, and there's no single "lit-up by the searchlight of the mind" that zigzags up through the time-tree to limn the path that you "really" take. The whole tree is lit. You really and truly think you're in each branch that something like you is in.

Restating my logical feeling in terms of the more static Hilbert space view, I'm saying that a version of my mind should be psychologically present in each of the possible worlds that contains a copy of someone like me—and that there should not be any single narrative thread of bright points marking the privileged sequence of possible worlds which I "really and truly" inhabit.