Your life is not insignificant. It seems to be an indispensable part of the grand scheme of things
"At any given time, most of the universes computed so far that contain yourself will be due to one of the shortest and fastest programs computing you. This insight allows for making non-trivial predictions about the future. [...]
There are many possible futures of your past so far. Which one is going to happen? Answer: given the probability distribution induced by the optimal method, most likely one of the few regular, non-random futures with a fast and short program. Because the weird futures where suddenly the rules change and everything dissolves into randomness are fundamentally harder to compute, even by the optimal method. Random stuff by definition does not have a short program. [...]
You may think that your life is insignificant, because you are so small, and the universe is so big. But given the Great Programmer’s optimal way of computing all universes, it is probably very hard to edit your life (or mine) out of our particular universe: Any program that produces a universe like ours, but without you, is probably much longer and slower (and thus less likely) than the original program that includes you.
So with high probability, your life essentially has to be this way, with all of its ups and downs. Your life is not insignificant. It seems to be an indispensable part of the grand scheme of things."
Excerpts from transcript of Jürgen Schmidhuber’s TEDx talk
2013-03-15
