Re: death
R. Miller writes: (snip) The above mechanism would still work even if, as in my thought experiment, there were 10^100 exact copies running in lockstep and all but one died. Each one of the 10^100-1 copies would experience continuity of consciousness through the remaining copy, so none would really die. RM: None would really die only if the behavioral configurations were uniform and equal (thus equivalent) *and* only if their environment was in an equivalent state. However, that is not the case here. The environment and behavioral configurations of those who died are not commensurate with the one who lived. No equivalence means differing results---and differing paths. Let's look at it this way: take two boxes, perfectly equivalent in every way and place inside each two similar marbles. Assume that both systems are equivalent configurations and are, in effect, copies of one another. When you remove one marble from its box, the other marble doesn't follow suit---it stays put. Of course, the mental state and environment of the copies that die are different from the one who continues to live. What is needed for continuity of consciousness is that the mental state at the moment of death be duplicated somewhere. This is what is supposed to happen with teleportation: the subject is destructively analysed, killing him in the process, then the information sent to a receiving station where an exact (or close enough) copy of the subject is constructed from local raw materials. The result is that the subject suddenly finds himself at his destination, a discontinuity not present in my thought experiment since the environment is copied along with the subject. Do you believe teleportation would be a form of transportation or a form of execution? --Stathis Papaioannou _ Low rate ANZ MasterCard. Apply now! http://clk.atdmt.com/MAU/go/msnnkanz003006mau/direct/01/ Must be over 18 years.
Re: copy method important?
On Sat, Jun 18, 2005 at 02:02:01PM -0700, Hal Finney wrote: In practice most people believe that consciousness does not depend critically on quantum states, so making a copy of a person's mind would not be affected by these considerations. It is interesting that there is still no publicly avialable FAQ on the nature of identity, given how often exactly the same issues come up, over the years. -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Re: copy method important?
In the thought experiments I have recently proposed, I should have specified *functionally* exact copies. Millions of neurons die in a normal adult brain every day, and generally this loss isn't even noticed, so the sort of detail which would make the uncertainty principle a significant consideration would be *way* below the acceptable noise level. However, as Brent Meeker recently pointed out, even disregarding quantum effects, classical chaos would cause two initially identical brains to diverge greatly within a very short time period. It therefore looks like the only practical way to have two or more minds running perfectly synchronised with each other would be to run them in parallel as AI's in a virtual environment. Although setting out to make a perfect copy of a human brain may prove impossible, RM's post raises the interesting question of whether it could just happen naturally. Many years ago, before I had heard of the Everett MWI, it occurred to me that if time and/or space were infinite and non-repeating, then it was certain that somewhere in the universe there would arise a copy or analogue of my brain at the moment of my earthly demise (that is, a successor observer moment), thus ensuring that my consciousness would continue. It might take zillions of years, but when you're dead you can afford to wait. The existence of a multiverse (or larger mathematical structures which contain it) can only add weight to this idea, although it might be subject to the same criticisms attracted by the QTI. Scouring the universe to find an exact copy of RM's favourite marble may seem a very inefficient method of duplication, but when it comes to conscious observers in search of a successor OM, the obvious but nonetheless amazing fact is that nobody needs to search or somehow bring the the observer and the OM together: if the successor OM exists anywhere in the plenitude, then the mere fact of its existence means that the observer's consciousness will continue. --Stathis Papaioannou Norman Samish writes: I'm no physicist, but doesn't Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle forbid making exact quantum-level measurements, hence exact copies? If so, then all this talk of making exact copies is fantasy. Norman Samish ~ - Original Message - From: rmiller [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 10:05 AM Subject: copy method important? All, Though we're not discussing entanglement per se, some of these examples surely meet the criteria. So, my thought question for the day: is the method of copying important? Example #1: we start with a single marble, A. Then, we magically create a copy, marble B--perfectly like marble B in every way. . .that is, the atoms are configured similarly, the interaction environment is the same--and they are indistinguishable from one another. Example #2: we start with a single marble A. Then, instead of magically creating a copy, we search the universe, Tegmarkian-style, and locate a second marble, B that is perfectly equivalent to our original marble A. All tests both magically avoid QM decoherence problems and show that our newfound marble is, in fact, indistinguishable in every way from our original. Here's the question: Are the properties of the *relationship* between Marbles A and B in Example #1 perfectly equivalent to those in Example #2? If the criteria involves simply analysis of configurations at a precise point in time, it would seem the answer must be yes. On the other hand, if the method by which the marbles were created is crucial to the present configuration, then the answer would be no. R. Miller -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.7.8/22 - Release Date: 6/17/2005 _ Single? Start dating at Lavalife. Try our 7 day FREE trial! http://lavalife9.ninemsn.com.au/clickthru/clickthru.act?context=an99locale=en_AUa=19179
Re: death
Hal Finney writes: God creates someone with memories of a past life, lets him live for a day, then instantly and painlessly kills him. What would you say that he experiences? Would he notice his birth and death? I would generally apply the same answers to the 10^100 people who undergo your thought experiment. Keep in mind that I was just trying to answer your question very directly and literally, about the person would experience in your thought experiment. I wasn't trying to get all moralistic about it. Maybe he minds about being killed, maybe he doesn't. I think most people would mind, in which case I think God is being pretty cruel. But all that morality is pretty much irrelevant to the simple question of what he would experience. I have tried to answer that as straightforwardly as I can, above. Before continuing, it is worth looking at the definition of death. The standard medical definition will not do for our purposes, because it doesn't allow for future developments such as reviving the cryogenically preserved, mind uploads, teleportation etc. A simple, general purpose definition which has been proposed before on this list is that a person can be said to die at a particular moment when there is no chance that he will experience a next moment, however that experience might come about. Equivalently, death occurs when there is no successor observer moment, anywhere or ever. That definition doesn't make any sense in the context of everything exists, because by definition every possible observer moment exists. Yes; hence, everyone is immortal. But leaving that much-debated issue aside for now, I'm not sure that I understand what, if anything, you would accept as a method of surviving the death of your physical body. Would you consider that scanning your brain at the moment of death and uploading your mind to a computer constitutes survival? What about the Star Trek teleporter: is that a method of transportation or of execution? If you can accept the possibility that you can survive the death of your physical body at all, then I think you have to accept that the people in my thought experiment are *not* killed, despite the death of their physical bodies, just as in the case of mind uploading or teleportation. --Stathis Papaioannou _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Re: death
Stathis Papaioannou writes: Yes; hence, everyone is immortal. But leaving that much-debated issue aside for now, I'm not sure that I understand what, if anything, you would accept as a method of surviving the death of your physical body. Would you consider that scanning your brain at the moment of death and uploading your mind to a computer constitutes survival? What about the Star Trek teleporter: is that a method of transportation or of execution? If you can accept the possibility that you can survive the death of your physical body at all, then I think you have to accept that the people in my thought experiment are *not* killed, despite the death of their physical bodies, just as in the case of mind uploading or teleportation. I guess I would say, I would survive death via anything that does not reduce my measure. If I am stopped here, I should be started over there, or back then, or when such-and-such happens. If my measure is conserved then I can be happy. If it can be increased, I will be that much happier. Both uploading and transporting conserve measure, so they are not death. Being killed and having only one in 10^100 of me continue does reduce my measure, so that is death, death on a scale that has never been seen before in the universe. (Compensated by birth on a scale that has never been seen before... So morally maybe it's not that bad. Still it's jerking people around to an amazing degree.) Hal Finney
Time travel in multiple universes
Hi, I recently wrote a blog entry on time travel http://www.goertzel.org/blog/blog.htm and Tom Buckner followed up with an interesting comment on the potential for time travel in Tegmarkian multiple universes. (You can see it by going to the bottom of the page and clicking where it says "1 Comments.") I am curious for any reactions to Buckner's comment by you multiple-universe experts ;-) thanks Ben Goertzel
Re: death
Hal Finney writes: I guess I would say, I would survive death via anything that does not reduce my measure. If I am stopped here, I should be started over there, or back then, or when such-and-such happens. If my measure is conserved then I can be happy. If it can be increased, I will be that much happier. Both uploading and transporting conserve measure, so they are not death. Being killed and having only one in 10^100 of me continue does reduce my measure, so that is death... What about the situation I described before: quote-- Returning to your example, if God creates a person, call him A, and a day later kills him, A will be really dead (as opposed to provisionally dead) if there will never be any successor OM's to his last conscious moment. Now, suppose God kills A and then creates an exact copy of A along with his environment, call him B, on the other side of the planet. B has all of A's memories up to the moment before he was killed. This destruction/creation procedure is, except for the duplication of the environment, exactly how teleportation is supposed to work. I think most people on this list would agree that teleportation (if it could be made to work, which not everyone does agree is possible) would be a method of transportation, not execution: even though the original dies, the copy has all his memories and provides the requisite successor OM in exactly the same way as would have happened if the original had continued living. So in the example above, if B is an exact copy of A in an exact copy of A's environment, A would become B and not even notice that there had been any change. Now, consider the same situation with one difference. Instead of creating B at the instant he kills A, God creates A and B at the same time, on opposite sides of the planet but in exactly the same environment which will provide each of them with exactly the same inputs, and their minds at all time remain perfectly synchronised. God allows his two creatures to live for a day, and then instantly and painlessly kills A. In the previous example, we agreed that the creation of B means that A doesn't really die. Now, we have *exactly* the same situation when A is killed: B is there to provide the successor OM, and A need not even know that anything unusual had happened. How could the fact that B was present a day, a minute or a microsecond before A's death make any difference to A? All that matters is that B is in the correct state to provide continuity of consciousness when A is killed. Conversely, A and A's death cannot possibly have any direct effect on B. It is not as if A's soul flies around the world and takes over B; rather, it just so happens (because of how A and B were created) that B's mental states coincide with A's, or with what A's would have been if he hadn't died. --endquote Who's measure is decreased here, A's or B's? How would any of them know their measure had been decreased? It seems to me that neither A nor B could *possibly* be aware that anything had happened at all. The only benefit of having multiple exact copies of yourself around would seem to be as backup if one is destroyed. If your measure were surreptitiously increased or decreased, what symptoms would you expect to experience? What about if you were a piece of sentient software: surely having multiple instantiations of the ones and zeroes could not make any difference; if it did, wouldn't that be a bit like expecting that your money would have greater purchasing power if your bank backed up their data multiple times? Or like saying that 2+2=4 would be more vividly true (or whatever it is that increasing measure causes to happen) if lots and lots of people held hands and did the calculation simultaneously? I can't be completely sure that increasing your measure would have no effect. Maybe there would be some sort of telepathic communication between the various copies, such as is said to occur between identical twins, or some as yet undiscovered physical phenomenon. However, there is absolutely no evidence at present for such a thing, and I think that until such evidence is found, we should only go on what we know to be true and what can logically be deduced from it. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Single? Start dating at Lavalife. Try our 7 day FREE trial! http://lavalife9.ninemsn.com.au/clickthru/clickthru.act?context=an99locale=en_AUa=19179
Re: Time travel in multiple universes
Ben Goertzel writes: I recently wrote a blog entry on time travel http://www.goertzel.org/blog/blog.htm and Tom Buckner followed up with an interesting comment on the potential for time travel in Tegmarkian multiple universes. Those are interesting speculations, but I don't think it really makes sense to imagine travelling between the worlds of the Tegmark multiverse. There are no causal connections between them of the type that would be necessary for an information packet to travel in the way we normally think of it happening. I think David Deutsch had some ideas about time travel in the MWI going between parallel worlds, but again I didn't think that could work, physically. Once worlds have decohered, there are no physical mechanisms for them to interact to any measurable degree. However I do think there are connections between time travel and the MWI, different from Deutsch's rather simplistic picture of travel to parallel worlds. The big problem with time travel is not so much the kill-your-father paradox, because as Ben writes this can be easily dealt with by postulating that only consistent time travel works. The bigger puzzle then is the apparent necessity of the universe to be intelligent, for the natural laws to engage in strategic reasoning at least as advanced and sophisticated as the intelligent beings whose free will it is thwarting. When a time traveller tries to do something, there has to be the potential for a sort of back-reaction from the universe which can interfere with his actions if they would lead to a paradox. Let's suppose he goes to do something, make a change in the past which it turns out will be inconsistent with his memories in the future. Something's going to stop him. But how does the universe know that this has to be stopped? It seems that there has to be at least a potential or virtual universe created in which his actions play out, their consequences extend through time into the future where the time traveller departed from, and the inconsistency with his mental state is detected. This can be represented as a quantum wave function which is travelling around a causal loop, such that only consistent conditions can exist. But for this to work I think we have to imagine universes existing where the other things happen, the ones which will get cancelled out in the end. This is not unlike a commonplace phenomenon in QM, where the classical- physics paths of particles arise from what is actually a much more muddled condition at the quantum level. The seemingly straight path of a beam of light is actually the result of constructive interference much like what we are postulating to prevent time paradoxes. Light actually takes every possible path from A to B. Most of them cancel out, and only the paths that are straight interfere constructively rather than destructively. The thing is, though, that the other paths do exist and are represented in the wave function. They are not usually considered, even by believers in the MWI, to represent worlds. This is because they do not decohere and so do not acquire independent existence. They all get folded back together much like the two paths through a double-slit experiment. We can imagine a model of the MWI which does treat the two paths through a double slit experiment as separate worlds, which then recombine. I think this is actually the perspective that Deutsch prefers. In that view, we could say that the crooked light beams also exist in worlds of their own, which recombine and cancel each other out. In the case of time travel, if we apply the same concepts, then the decohered-out worlds would also be said to have existence in the MWI. They don't have lasting existence or effects, but they exist in some sense for some period of time. It is in these shadow worlds that the apparent intelligence of nature arises in the case of time travel. Any action that would produce a paradox, no matter how complex the effect or how long the chain of causation that it requires, gets simulated and all its effects get determined in shadow universes. Real people live there whose lives are affected by the changes in history, and whose actions may play a part in making the paradox arise. It's almost like a super-powerful quantum computer running to check everything the time traveller does for consistency. In the movie Back to the Future, Marty travels back to the past and meets his mother when she is a teenager. She falls in love with him instead of his father, so Marty won't be born. This is a paradox which nature would prevent in a real situation. Nature might stop Marty from meeting his mother, so things will still go as they were supposed to. But how does nature know that he shouldn't be allowed to meet her? It seems that there must exist a shadow world where they do meet, where she falls in love, and all the consequences play out. Yet that world ends up having no real existence. It gets cancelled out just like
Re: Dualism and the DA
I have just waved my magic wand, and lo! Jonathan Colvin has been changed body and mind into Russell Standish and placed in Sydney, while Russell Standish has been changed into Jonathan Colvin and placed somewhere on the coastal US. If anyone else covets a particular person's wealth or position, please email me privately, and for a very reasonable fee I can arrange a similar swap! --Stathis Papaioannou Le Jeudi 16 Juin 2005 10:02, Jonathan Colvin a crit: Switch the question. Why aren't you me (Jonathan Colvin)? I'm conscious (feels like I am, anyway). Hi Jonathan, I think you do not see the real question, which can be formulated (using your analogy) by : Why (me as) Russell Standish is Russell Standish rather Jonathan Colvin ? I (as RS) could have been you (JC)... but it's a fact that I'm not, but the question is why I'm not, why am I me rather than you ? What force decide for me to be me ? :) Quentin _ Low rate ANZ MasterCard. Apply now! http://clk.atdmt.com/MAU/go/msnnkanz003006mau/direct/01/ Must be over 18 years.
RE: Copies Count
Hal Finney writes: Consider an experiment where we are simulating someone and can give them either a good or bad experience. These are not replays, they are new experiences which we can accurately anticipate will be pleasant or unpleasant. Suppose we are going to flip a biased quantum coin, one which has a 90% chance of coming up heads. We will generate the good or bad experience depending on the outcome of the coin flip. I claim that it is obvious that it is better to give the good experience when we get the 90% outcome and the bad experience when we get the 10% outcome. That's the assumption I will start with. Now consider Tegmark's level 1 of parallelism, the fact that in a sufficiently large volume of space I can find a large number of copies of me, in fact copies of the entire earth and our entire visible universe (the Hubble bubble?). When I do my quantum coin flip, 90% of the copies will see it come up heads and cause the good experience for the subject, and 10% will see tails and cause the bad experience. I will also assume that my knowledge of this fact about the physical universe will not change my mind about the ethical value of my decision to give the good experience for the 90% outcome. Now the problem is this. There are really only two different programs being run for our experimental subject, the guy in the simulation. One is a good experience and one is bad. All my decision does is to change how many copies of each of these two programs are run. In making my decision about which experiences to assign to the two coin flip outcomes, I have chosen that the copies of the good experience will outnumber copies of the bad experience by 9 to 1. But if I don't believe that the number of copies being run makes a difference, then I haven't accomplished what I desired. The fact that I am running more copies of the good program than the bad wouldn't make any difference. Therefore there is no actual ethical value in what I have done, I might have just as validly reversed the outcome of my coin flips and it wouldn't have made any difference. Here is another way of explaining this situation. When there are multiple parallel copies of you, you have no way of knowing which copy you are, although you definitely are one of the copies during any given moment, with no telepathic links with the others or anything like that. If a proportion of the copies are painlessly killed, you notice nothing, because your successor OM will be provided by one of the copies still going (after all, this is what happens in the case of teleportation). Similarly, if the number of copies increases, you notice nothing, because during any given moment you are definitely only one of the copies, even if you don't know which one. However, if your quantum coin flip causes 90% of the copies to have bad experiences, you *will* notice something: given that it is impossible to know which particular copy you are at any moment, or which you will be the next moment, then there is a 90% chance that you will be one of those who has the bad experience. Similarly, if you multiply the number of copies tenfold, and give all the new copies bad experiences, then even though the old copies are left alone, you will still have a 90% chance of a bad experience, because it is impossible to know which copy will provide your next OM. So, perhaps counterintuitively, you and all your copies are better off if all but one is painlessly killed than if the total number is increased and a proportion of the new copies given a bad experience. This is what I was trying to show in my post another puzzle. I think this way of looking at it is simple, consistent, does not require any new physical laws, and provides a reason to do good things rather than bad things in the multiverse, as long as you don't make the terrible mistake of assuming that the absolute measure of copies with good experiences is more important than the relative measure. _ Sell your car for $9 on carpoint.com.au http://www.carpoint.com.au/sellyourcar
RE: Time travel in multiple universes
Hal wrote: Those are interesting speculations, but I don't think it really makes sense to imagine travelling between the worlds of the Tegmark multiverse. There are no causal connections between them of the type that would be necessary for an information packet to travel in the way we normally think of it happening. I think David Deutsch had some ideas about time travel in the MWI going between parallel worlds, but again I didn't think that could work, physically. Once worlds have decohered, there are no physical mechanisms for them to interact to any measurable degree. However I do think there are connections between time travel and the MWI, different from Deutsch's rather simplistic picture of travel to parallel worlds. The big problem with time travel is not so much the kill-your-father paradox, because as Ben writes this can be easily dealt with by postulating that only consistent time travel works. The bigger puzzle then is the apparent necessity of the universe to be intelligent, for the natural laws to engage in strategic reasoning at least as advanced and sophisticated as the intelligent beings whose free will it is thwarting. When a time traveller tries to do something, there has to be the potential for a sort of back-reaction from the universe which can interfere with his actions if they would lead to a paradox. Let's suppose he goes to do something, make a change in the past which it turns out will be inconsistent with his memories in the future. Something's going to stop him. But how does the universe know that this has to be stopped? It seems that there has to be at least a potential or virtual universe created in which his actions play out, their consequences extend through time into the future where the time traveller departed from, and the inconsistency with his mental state is detected. Nature abhors a paradox. The principle of least (or minimal) action appears to prevent inconsistencies; at least according to Novikov et al. http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/gr-qc/9607063 It's fine for billiard balls going through wormholes, but gets (philosophically at least, if not physically) problematic when applied to objects which like to think they have free will, such as me killing my grandfather. I hate to think that my decisions are reductively determinined by the principle of minimal action (much though my wife might agree). Jonathan Colvin
