Hi Jason (again)
in your response to Brent:
>>Personally I believe no theory that aims to attach persons to one
>>psychological or physiological continuity can be successful.
ok, but in Bruno's step 3 it is taken as axiomatic that you survive in both
branches because there is a continuity of psychological phenomena like memory.
this is the 'yes doctor' axiom. Being an axiom Bruno doesn't need to defend it.
We are obliged to assume it.
That said, taking issue with it is tantamount to admitting that we do not
survive the teleportation, in which case the probability of me seeing Moscow or
Washington is 0.
There is a concept of the observer moment. A discrete snippet of experience and
the UD is churning these out willy nilly in a digital form. Or maybe they're
all just there in an infinite plenitude of blah. Now the observer moments can
be in any old order. A moment from tomorrow can be churned out before a moment
from yesterday. Identity emerges as a trace of coherent memory. There is no
need for an inherent order between the elements so long as there is some means
of coherently connecting the observer moments. In this scheme the order is
implicit in the notion of coherent memory.To use an analogy from IT , I suspect
its the difference between sorting an array of shuffled digital cards or just
keeping track of pointers to cards in an array when shuffling. Like wise
physics emerges in this coherent trace. For example, in one observer moment a
pen is dropped. Whats next? An observer moment where the pen goes down? One
where it goes up? One where it goes right or left? All these moments are
catered for in the infinite plenitude. So physics, here the law of gravity,
becomes an investigation into a psychologically consistent trace of pen
moments. All those where the pen keeps going down in my trace. Its going to be
tricky to keep track of traces because they criss-cross. That is, all moments
in some sense are coherent with one another. The pen down one vertical voxel is
a consistent with moments where the pen is at any of the voxel neighbors, up
down, left right, back forward. Taking different velocities into account it
doesn't even have to be a neighboring voxel. Where is velocity anyway? Is it
between the moments? Within the moments. A problem here I think.
Anyway, the point is that continuity between moments seems to me to be a big,
big deal in this scenario. So, if you are of the view that continuity isn't
even sufficient to maintain identity then I wonder to what degree you really
are on the same page as Bruno.
best regards.
From: chris_peck...@hotmail.com
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: Step 3
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 02:18:43 +0000
Hi Jason
You're presenting the exact same situation in a different context in the hope
that it will clarify the issues for me, I suppose. My response is exactly the
same for your new version as it is for the original. The same as it is for
Bruno's example in which the duplications involved explode to cover every
possible permutation of pixel combinations that could occur over a 90 minute
period on a telly.
Perhaps a better tack might be to accept that I understand the issues under
debate, and address the arguments that I offer directly rather than claim
'misunderstanding' etc.
How can uncertainty arise in a subject who believes he knows all the relevent
facts?
How does a prediction of 50/50 not contravene the axiom that I survive
anihilation and duplication into two (any number of) branches?
regards.
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 10:12:55 +1300
Subject: Re: Step 3
From: lizj...@gmail.com
To: everything-list@googlegroups.com
I suggested doing this on FOAR (I used HAL from 2001). It simply makes it
easier to visualise if you forget about biological creatures. Assuming comp, an
AI is exactly equivalent to a human person, so anything you can do to an AI
could be done (in theory) to a human by a teleporter, or to a human by MWI
style splitting.
What should the AI expect to see? It should expect to see the ball turn red and
remain red. There are copies of it which see the ball go blue at various
points...
However this answer doesn't assume comp. According to comp it doesn't know what
"it" will see, or to be more exact it knows that "it" will see all
combinations, but by that time it will no longer be an "it" but a "them".
Technically - in this case - we know which ones are the copies and which ones
aren't - however comp says that the AI will experience becoming many AIs, with
varied experiences.
In any case, although one copy is the original, that doesn't really help,
because an AI, by its nature, is probably being constantly swapped into
different parts of computer memory (or stored on disc), parts of it are being
copied, other parts erased, and so on. Comp says none of this matters - that
its experiences are at a fundamental level exactly like ours.
So. What's wrong with this picture, if anything?
On 30 October 2013 09:41, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 2:06 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 10/29/2013 8:19 AM, Jason Resch
wrote:
Chris,
Perhaps it is simpler to think about first person
indeterminacy like this (it requires some familiaraity with
programming, but I will try to elaborate those details):
Imagine there is a conscious AI inside a virtual
environment (an open field)
Inside that virtual environment is a ball, which the AI is
looking at and next to the ball is a note which reads:
"At noon (when the virtual sun is directly overhead) the
protocol will begin. In the protocol, the process
containing this simulation will fork (split in two), after
the fork, the color of the ball will change to red for the
parent process and it will change to blue in the child
process (forking duplicates a process into two identical
copies, with one called the parent and the other the child).
A second after the color of the ball is set, another fork
will happen. This will happen 8 times leading to 256
processes, after which the simulation will end."
It is 11:59 in the simulation, what can the AI expect to
see during the next 1 minute and 8 seconds?
I don't see that as any different.
It is similar, but it never hurts to look at the same problem from different
angles. What is a little more evident in this case is that of the 256 possible
memories of the AI about to meet its doom, none contain the memory of seeing
all 256 possibilities, an in fact, the majority of them see the ball change
color back and forth at random. Only 2 see it stay all red or all blue for the
last 8 seconds. None of them can predict from the view inside the simulation,
whether the ball will stay the same color or change after the next fork occurs.
The problem is still what is the
referent of "the AI". As John Clark points out "the AI" is
ambiguous when there are duplicates.
Personal identity is less of an issue in this case, because it concerns the AI
or anything/anyone else inside the simulation who might also be viewing the
ball. In this way, it is slightly more analogous to MWI since it is the
environment which is duplicated, not just the person, and so the apparent
random changing of the ball color is also something that can be agreed upon by
the group of observers within the simulation.
Sometimes Bruno talks about
"the universal person" who is merely embodied as particular
persons. So on that view it would be right to say *the* universal
person sees Washington and Moscom.
But not "at the same time" or as "an integrated experience", so the appearance
of randomness still arises from the first person perspective(s).
But then that's contrary to
identifying a person by their memories. My view is that "a person"
is just a useful model, when there is no duplication - and that's
true whether the duplication is via Everett or Bruno's teleporter.
What model should be used in a world with duplication, fission machines, mind
uploading, split brains, biological clones, amnesia, etc.? Or does personhood
no longer make sense at all in the face of such situations?
Personally I believe no theory that aims to attach persons to one psychological
or physiological continuity can be successful. Jason
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