On 3/11/2012 21:44, R AM wrote:
This discussion has been long and sometimes I am confused about the whole
point of the exercise.
I think the idea is that if comp is true, then the future content of
subjective experience is indeterminated? Although comp might seem to entail
100% determinacy, just the contrary is the case. Is that correct?
3p indeterminacy in the form of the UD*, 1p determinacy from the
perspective of those minds relative to bodies in the UD*.
However, I think that if comp is true, future experience is not only
indeterminate, but also arbitrary: our future experience could be anything
at all. But given that this is not the case, shouldn't we conclude that
comp is false?
You're basically presenting the "White Rabbit" problem here. I used to
wonder if that is indeed the case, but after considering it further, it
doesn't seem to be: your 1p is identified with some particular abstract
machine - that part is mostly determinate and deterministic (or
quasi-deterministic if you allow some leeway as to what constitutes
persona identity) in its behavior, but below that substitution level,
anything can change, as long as that machine is implemented
correctly/consistently. If the level is low enough and most of the
machines implementing the lower layers that eventually implement our
mind correspond to one world (such as ours), that would imply reasonably
stable experience and some MWI-like laws of physics - not white noise
experiences. That is to say that if we don't experience white noise,
statistically our experiences will be stable - this does not mean that
we won't have really unusual "jumps" or changes in laws-of-physics or
experience when our measure is greatly reduced (such as the current
statistically winning machines no longer being able to implement your
mind - 3p death from the point of view of others).
Also, one possible way of showing COMP false is to show that such stable
implementations are impossible, however this seems not obvious to me. A
more practical concern would be to consider the case of what would
happen if the substitution level is chosen slightly wrong or too high -
would it lead to too unstable 1p or merely just allow the SIM(Substrate
Independent Mind) to more easily pick which lower-level machines
implement it (there's another thought experiment which shows how this
could be done, if a machine can find one of its own Godel-number).
Ricardo.
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