Stathis also wrote in the same email, Sent: Friday, June 30, 2006 12:24 AM To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: A calculus of personal identity
> Brent wrote > > That's why I suggest that OMs are not an adequate ontological basis for a > > world model. On the other > > hand, if we include brain processes, or more abstractly, subconscious > > thoughts, then we would have > > enough information to string them together. > > I know some people on this list have attempted world-building > with OMs, but my starting point is the less ambitious idea that > consciousness can in principle extend across time and space > without being specially linked. If a person's stream of consciousness > were chopped up into seconds, minutes, days or whatever, using > whatever vehicle it takes to run a human mind, and these moments > of consciousness randomly dispersed throughout the multiverse, > they would all connect up by virtue of their information content. > Do you disagree that it would in principle be possible? So if I understand you right, this is where the difference between a book and a person arises. When a book's letters are scattered over the cosmos, the information is lost, but when the observer moments are so scattered, the subjective experience still remains. Now we suppose from quantum mechanics that the Bekenstein bound on the number of states a human can be in is less than 10^10^45. (Tipler, 1993, "The Physics of Immortality".) So each state of your life is a very special small subset of all those states. Let's do something special with just *one* life that you've led (will lead) in the universe, one life, that is, in a particular spacetime. I propose to take something quite a bit like observer-moments and ask some questions about it. Suppose that an exact frozen replica of your brain is made corresponding to each 10^-42 seconds of your life. This gives us about 10^42 * 10^7 * 70years, or about 10^50 states (a far cry from all those possible for humans, 10^10^45). We place those 10^50 states in a long row, and then, for an audience, we round up all the billions of observers in the visible universe to watch the show. First the spotlight is on your brain the second after you were born. Then one 10^-42 seconds later the spotlight moves to the next frozen brain, and so forth. The audience is placed in the same frame of reference as the moving light, and so they see an apparently continuous evolution of your brain. How is this any different from what happened to you actually? From an external scientific point of view, it seems remarkably identical. (I am ultimately to claim that something essential---but not "consciousness" or anything like that is missing, but rather *causality* is missing.) I suppose that you would assert that a first person experience was attached to this performance, a performance moving against a background of stars as the stage. Is that correct? Next we begin a process of deconstruction. First, on one century's performance, there is trouble with the spotlight, and it's very dim although the audience can still see the show. But a few performances (centuries) later, the spotlight goes out altogether. Still, the audience knows from the notes passed out exactly what is happening. On another night, the audience fails to show up. Do these things really affect whether or not a first person experience attends the brain? In other performances, the spotlight dances all around, from a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a hundred trillionth of a second (about 10^-50 seconds) from your brain in midlife to your brain as an adolescent, then to your brain as a young adult, then to the geezer Stathis brain, and so on, completely wrecking the order. Now from what you wrote above about > it takes to run a human mind, and these moments > of consciousness randomly dispersed throughout the multiverse, > they would all connect up by virtue of their information content. one might surmise that you believe that the order that these frozen brains appear is irrelevant. (I happen to agree---my own view is that as soon as there was no longer causality connecting each frozen brain with another brain---that is, that no real computation was taking place---the first person experience no longer occurred.) But if I have surmised correctly, then you wouldn't care that the frozen brains were not only shown sometimes out of sequence, but that there did not have to be an audience, nor was the spatial relative locations of the brains relevant. They could be jumbled all over the cosmos. But next, what about the neurons making up the brains? What would be lost if they too were dispersed through time and space? Finally, just when, if any time, would anything be lost: what if the neurons are themselves separated into atoms and dispersed? Well, to me this is the ultimate reductio, because it means that among the dust in the vast, vast, vast volumes of the cosmos, each of your brain states already exists. (To me this is as absurd as some of Hilary Putnam's claims, or Greg Egan's in Permutation City. (For the record, Greg Egan made it clear in an interview that he does *not* necessarily believe in the notions presented in all his books.)) The only place in all this chain of reasoning where it seems that first person experience could be lost is when one state no longer followed *causally* from a preceding state, or, in other words (in my opinion) when a true computation involving information flow no longer occurred. Your thoughts? Lee --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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