On 02 Oct 2015, at 06:45, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On 2/10/2015 2:22 pm, Jason Resch wrote:
On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 2:28 AM, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au
> wrote:
I understand what you mean by "psychological continuity". I simply
maintain that such a concept makes no sense between conscious
beings outside each others light cones.
1. Do you think you could in theory be taken apart atom by atom,
and put back together to "survive" this ordeal?
2. Do you think it is important that all atoms be put back into
their exact places, or could two hydrogen atoms, from different
parts of your body and brain be swapped without making a difference?
3. Do you think you could be reconstituted after being taken apart
atom by atom, using mostly new atoms?
4. Do you think you could be reconstituted after being taken apart
atom by atom, using an entirely new set of atoms?
5. Do you think the distance between your deconstruction and
reconstruction is of any relevance to whether or not you survive?
6. Do you think time between your deconstruction and reconstruction
is of any relevance to whether or not you survive?
7. Do you think there is some non physical element of you, beyond
your organization of atoms, which must travel to (and be limited by
the speed of light) the location of your reconstruction in order
for you to survive the reconstruction?
If you answer yes to questions 1-4, and no to questions 5-7, then
bringing up light cones is irrelevent. The existence of identical
instances of you 10^10^28 meters away enable the survival of your
consciousness.
"Your" consciousness? Your series of questions above all involve a
physical transfer of information, in which case light cones are
relevant, because there can be no physical transfer of information
from you now to a point outside your future light cone. If there is
a purported copy of you outside your past and future light cones,
then there is no way that it can be verified that it is actually a
copy. So the question is purely hypothetical, without operational
content.
The point is that the copy might see the difference, like observing
the start from a different view points allowing the conclusion that it
has been copied outside its light cone.
If you answered yes to question 7, in what sense is the
reconstituted, atom-for-atom identical version of you not alive, or
not you, whereas one created by beaming a signal to guide the
arrangement of the atoms in a certain way from the location of your
destruction, is you or does result in you?
If there can be no physical interaction, then there is no
continuity, psychological or otherwise.
In the computationalist doctrine, you are your patterns and
information. If those patterns and information continue and survive
elsewhere, you survive. The history of how the atoms got to be in
the pattern of information they are now in is of no relevance to
how the atoms behave and interact.
So much the worse for the computationalist doctrine! It becomes a
matter of unverifiable faith,
I think that it is important in our context that the belief in any
reality (different from my consciousness here-and-now) requires
unverifiable faith.
Then computationalism eventually require no more faith than the belief
in the laws of addition, multiplication, and computationalism (at the
metalevel).
You have faith in a substantial actually infinite physical universe.
I prefer to be agnostic on this, especially when working on the mind-
body question.
The main reason for that prudence is that if we assume
computationalism, there are many promising evidence that the universal
machines distributed in the arithmetical reality cannot avoid the
inference of a substancial actually infinite physical universe.
Arithmetic explains why universal Turing machine have a "correct
faith" in a physical reality, without having to assume that this
physical reality is logically prior to such belief.
so of no relevance to any serious scientist. What is even worse, if
"The history of how the atoms got to be in the pattern of
information they are now in is of no relevance to how the atoms
behave and interact", then you have abandoned any possibility of
connecting your theory with the physics of the observed universe.
Actually this conclusion is correct, if by "observed universe" you
mean the Aristotelian substantial and logically prior physical
universe speculated behind the first person apprehension of the
observable.
That is why it is far simpler to not believe in, (or scientifically
said: to not assume), such an Aristotelian universe.
You might need to study a bit of computer science and mathematical
logic, and philosophy of mind/cognitive science, to understand the
arithmetical evidences that the universal turing machines develop the
belief in a physical universe, and indeed in a special logic of what
is observable. As an an empiricist, I only suggest to compare the
physics (that logics) of the (classical, platonist) universal Turing
machine with the physics based on the observation. Up to now in
matches on the non trivial propositional relations between the
measurable numbers (quantum logic).
And if the machine's physics is more and more confirmed, the theology
of the universal Turing machine is/will be indirectly more and more
confirmed too, yet it explains why we can't avoid to doubt it, and
have to use our balls or faith to say yes to a digital surgeon, or say
"No" (and the right to say "no" is mandatory for reason of consistency).
The machine theology is a pure mathematical theory. The devil is
played by the set of false arithmetical sentences, and God is played
by the set of the true arithmetical sentences. Keep in mind that since
Gödel we know that such set escape the computable in the extreme. (and
the Noùs is yet even much bigger). Yet we can defined them by the
usual second order logic induction, that is the usual math of the
mathematicians and physicists. It is the common practice in
theoretical computer science, and logic.
The conclusion remains valid for machine when doing such second order
induction, as they need from making sense of their first person points
of view.
In machine's theology, the "sin" does not come from the ignorance, but
it comes from the ignorance of the ignorance, which can lead to public
certainty, which is close to madness.
Bruno
Bruce
Duplication of a person, even an entirely emulated AI, requires a
physical transfer of information. Information is physical, and its
transfer is subject to physical laws. You can't circumvent this by
inventing some magical concept of "psychological continuity".
Bruce
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