On 8/6/2016 10:12 AM, smitra wrote:
On 05-08-2016 01:08, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
2016-08-04 19:20 GMT+02:00 smitra <smi...@zonnet.nl>:
On 04-08-2016 03:05, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 8/3/2016 4:30 PM, smitra wrote:
On 04-08-2016 01:16, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 8/3/2016 4:09 PM, smitra wrote:
On 04-08-2016 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
Only if you wake up and find out winning the lottery was a
mistake,
which seems less likely than waking up a winner. Waking up as one
of
the many copies who didn't win is not one of the options - those
copies are not continuations of the you who won the lottery.
I'm imagining waking up after a night of heavy drinking with
memories gradually returning. Now, you can, of course, condition
everything on the person who will find that he won the lottery. But
making that a hard part of my identity doesn't make sense to me,
otherwise you could not be the same person and forget about it, or
consider being the same person who participated in the lottery who
then went on to win it.
Now,while this boils down to an arbitrary definition of personal
identity, we should be consistent about this; you can be the same
person as the won who had not yet won it, and you could imagine
being a person who did not win it, then you'll likely end up waking
up as a copy in another branch who did not win it.
That seems to invoke a dualism, such that there's only one real
"you"
who may be in different branches at different times. I'd say that if
"you" wake up as a copy in another branch where "you" didn't win,
it's
because "you" didn't win. It's the same as saying the man who sees
Moscow didn't "wake up" as the man who sees Washington.
Brent
We can turn this into a reverse Bruno-like problem. If your memory is
temporarily cleared then copies of different branches merge.
You mean there are branches of the world in which your memory of
yesterday, when the lottery was drawn, is erased (and we're supposing
there is no physics, so there is no physical evidence of yesterday?).
Then the threads of consciousness constituting Saibal before
yesterday
AND suffering amnesia about yesterday will merge with each other, but
NOT with the threads of Saibal that do remember yesterday.
The branches will of course be different, but you without a memory
of having won in the branch where you did win is the same you as the
you in another branch were you did not win where you also have
forgotten about not winning.
The question is then if it is advisable to go through this
procedure if you have won.
You're supposing there's a "procedure" for erasing memory of
yesterday? How could there be, there's no physics? So there are
some
Saibals that forgot yesterday, and whether or not "they" won, but the
forgetting wasn't a "procedure" because that would imply a physical
world context in which whether on not Saibal won would be evident in
the physical world and beyond mere "forgetting". The forgetting
would
just have to be a result of the computation.
I've written in the past about an elaborate procedure involving an AI
that resets its memory, but I now think that this is not necessary.
It seems to me that every moment we experience is a new measurement of
our state that is equivalent to forgetting everything and then just
reloading all the information. Predictions of outcomes of experiments
should not depend on making this assumption. Put differently, at any
one time you could imagine yourself as being sampled randomly from the
set of all observer moments.
This is basically ASSA... and it has all the problems ASSA has....
I think in the old debate about RSSA/ASSA things were oversimplified.
The main thing that was overlooked was that an observer moment (OM)
cannot be specified as a classical state, because an algorithm needs
to be specified requiring counterfactual inputs and outputs to be
specified. So OMs should be identified with operators specifying the
time evolution over one computational step.
?? An algorithm doesn't have have any input or output. The algorithms
executed by the UD don't have either.
Now, if we jump ahead to QM, then it should be clear that you should
end up with a complete set of commuting observables not for some
system in the lab, but for whatever the observer is aware of, which is
in principle also a quantum mechanical measurement.
A quantum measurement implicitly assumes decoherence into classical
results. It's not all clear to me what process is "ending up" there?
So, specifying an OM involves a lot more than was assumed, you can
build an entire universe around it. This should be possible because
that's what we do in physics all the time. All we know at any given
moment is never more than information contained in a single OM, but
that doesn't stop us from knowing a lot about the universe, the laws
of physics etc. etc.
What does it mean to know something at a given moment? Does it mean to
have an affirmative thought about a proposition expressing a fact? How
extensive can this thought be? I know I can't think of the Standard
Model Lagrangian of QFT all at once. So when and how do we "know a lot
about the universe"? Is it written in books? Is it in memory? But
where is memory if not in classical physics?
Brent
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