"Robert Charles Wilson - Divided by Infinity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

тАЬYouтАЩve read it?тАЭ
тАЬIтАЩm a sucker for that kind of thing, if you want the truth.тАЭ
тАЬDonтАЩt tell me. It changed your life.тАЭ I was smiling.
She smiled back. тАЬIt didnтАЩt even change my mind.тАЭ
But there was an odd note of worry in her voice.


Of course I read it.
Deirdre was right about You Will Never Die. It had been
published by some private or vanity press, but the writing wasnтАЩt
crude. It was slick, even witty in places.
And the argument was seductive. Shorn of the babble about
Planck radii and Prigogine complexity and the Dancing Wu-Li
Masters, it came down to this:
Consciousness, like matter, like energy, is preserved.
You are born, not an individual, but an infinity of individuals,
in an infinity of identical worlds. тАЬConsciousness,тАЭ your individual
awareness, is shared by this infinity of beings.
At birth (or at conception; Soziere wasnтАЩt explicit), this span
of selves begins to divide, as alternate possibilities are indulged or
rejected. The infant turns his head not to the left or to the right, but
both. One infinity of worlds becomes two; then four; then eight,
and so on, exponentially.
 But the underlying essence of consciousness continues to
connect all these disparate possibilities.
The upshot? Soziere says it all in his title.
You cannot die.
Consider. Suppose, tomorrow afternoon, you walk in front of
a speeding eighteen-wheeler. The grillwork snaps your neck and
what remains of you is sausaged under the chassis. Do you die?
Well, yes; an infinity of you does die; but infinity is divisible by
itself. Another infinity of you steps out of the path of the truck, or
didnтАЩt leave the house that day, or recovers in hospital. The
you-ness of you doesnтАЩt die; it simply continues to reside in those
remnant selves.
An infinite set has been subtracted from infinity; but what
remains, remains infinite.
The subjective experience is that the accident simply doesnтАЩt
happen.
Consider that bottle of clonazepam I keep beside the bed. Six
times I reached for it, meaning to kill myself. Six times stopped
myself.
In the great wilderness of worlds, I must have succeeded
more often than I failed. My cold and vomit-stained corpse was
carted off to whatever grave or urn awaits it, and a few
acquaintances briefly mourned.
But thatтАЩs not me. By definition, you canтАЩt experience your
own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness
persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.
I am the one who wakes up in the morning.