2010/1/20 Nick Prince <m...@dtech.fsnet.co.uk>: >> If the no clone theorem were a problem then you could not survive more >> than a moment, since your brain is constantly undergoing classical >> level changes. >> > How interesting!! I had forgotten that most people believe that > consciousness is a classical rather than quantum process (Penrose > excepted). Thank you for bringing this to my attention. So the no > clone theorem should not pose a problem for copy builders after all.
Even if perfection to the quantum level is needed for a copy (it can't be, since our brains do change over time, whether quantum level events are important or not) the no clone theorem says that it is not possible to make a perfect clone at will. It is still possible to make a perfect clone by preparing multiple variations of a copy. >> What do you think could happen if there were 100 copies of you running >> in parallel and 90 were terminated? If you think you would definitely >> continue living as one of the 10 remaining copies then to be >> consistent you have to accept QTI. If you think there is a chance that >> you might die I find it difficult to understand how this could be >> reconciled with any consistent theory of personal identity. >> > I know. To be consistent with my other assumptions I would have to > believe in QTI but it is just so difficult to swallow. I think the > hardest bit comes when we think of what we would experience. Suppose > I lived in 200BC or before. It's hard to think of ways you could keep > on surviving apart from alien visitations with copying machines etc. > This is one reason I have looked in some detail into Tiplers omega > point theory. I don't think this should be written off as being too > whacky just because others have got onto the Tipler bashing > bandwagon. It has not been refuted yet in terms of the accelerated > expansion of the universe or for other reasons which I can eloborate > on - but that is besides the point. If Tiplers final simulation is a > Universal Dovetailer then anyone who has ever lived in the past could > in principle find themselves as a consistent extension in that > simulation. This is one explanation how people could avoid ending up > in a cul de sac branch. Well, it is possible that the MWI is false. And as I understand it the MWI does not actually say that anything that can happen, will happen, although it is often assumed that it does; so it may be that sometimes probabilities go down to zero, which would make the QTI false. >> According to RSSA and the RSSA your absolute measure in the multiverse >> decreases with each branching as versions of you die. According to the >> RSSA this doesn't matter as at least one of you is left standing; >> according to the ASSA, this does matter and you eventually die. The >> only way I can make sense of the latter is if you have an essentialist >> view of personal identity. Under this view if a copy is made of you >> and the original dies, you die. Under what Parfit calls the >> reductionist view of personal identity, you live. > > Hmm.. I think that what I am calling absolute measure you think of as > relative measure or something like it. I thought absolute measure was > the total measure of my existence across the whole multiverse. If I > cannot die then RSSA implies this would be conserved. As you traverse > down a particular branch though, your measure would indeed decrease > for both RSSA and ASSA but it would eventually decrease to zero for > ASSA when you died! With RSSA it could only decrease asymptotically > to zero, but never completly disappear. There is the absolute measure of a particular OM, and there is the absolute measure of all the OM's associated with a particular person, and both of these are fixed. As you age, the absolute measure of the OM you are experincing decreases because versions of you die. I think everyone agrees with this. Relative measure concerns the ratio of the measure of one OM to that of another OM or set of OM's. The ASSA/RSSA distinction came up in relation to QS/QTI, which concerns the probability of your next moment of experience. The RSSA says you should consider only the OM's which are candidates for your next moment and assume that your next moment is sampled randomly from these. In this case, their absolute measure is irrelevant, and only their measure relative to each other is important. The ASSA assumes that the sampling should be over all your OM's, so if the absolute measure of your all potential next moments is greatly decreased because the guillotine blade is falling and is 1mm from your neck, then your probability of surviving to the next moment is very low. This is a corollary of the claim that you are more likely to find yourself in a high measure OM than a low measure OM. Hopefully someone can comment if I have misrepresented the ASSA view, because I just don't see how it could make sense. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
