RE: A calculus of personal identity
I have before stated my long-held opinions on this, namely that it's best to regard one's duplicates as self. As a corollary, the you that ends up in one place is 100% you and so is the other. Consider this alternative experiment: we reveal to you that every minute of the last two years you have had one thousand duplicates created in fake rooms, streets, passage ways, or in bed, wherever you happen to be. At random, 999 are chosen to be immediately destroyed, with only the 1 at the end of each minute carrying on. Oh, yes, you might be very philosophically upset. But it would end up making no real difference to you. You would find that you, as always, have more important things to worry about, and life would go on normally. No important difference exists between one person to whom this is happening, and his neighbor to whom it is not. They both feel similarly, and by hypothesis lead very similar lives. For this reason, our concepts and language must adapt to reality, not try to make reality adapt to them. Lee Corbin --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Teleportation thought experiment and UD+ASSA
I'll offer my thoughts on first-person indeterminacy. This is based on Wei Dai's framework which I have called UD+ASSA. I am working on some web pages to summarize the various conclusions I have drawn from this framework. (Actually, here I am going to in effect use the SSA rather than the ASSA, i.e. I will work not with observer-moments but with entire observer lifetimes. But the same principles apply.) Let us consider Bruno's example where you are annihilated in Brussels and then copies of your final state are materialized in Washington and Moscow, and allowed to continue to run. What can we say about your subjective first-person expectations in this experiment? Here is how I would approach the problem. It is a very straightforward computational procedure (in principle). Consider any hypothetical subjective, first person stream of consciousness. This would basically be a record of the thoughts and experiences of a hypothetical observer. Let us assume that this can be written and recorded in some form. Perhaps it is a record of neural firing patterns over the course of the observer's lifetime, or perhaps a more compressed description based on such information. The question I would aim to answer is this: for any proposed, hypothetical first-person lifetime stream of consciousness, how much measure does this hypothetical subjective lifetime acquire from the third-person events in the universe? The answer is very simple: it is the conditional Kolmogorov measure of the subjective lifetime record, given the universe as input. In other words, consider the shortest program which, given the universe as input, produces that precise subjective lifetime record as output; if the length of that program is L, then this universe contributes 1/2^L to the measure of that subjective lifetime. Note that I am not trying to start from the universe and decide what the first-person stream of consciousness is; rather, I compute the numerical degree to which the universe instantiates any first-person stream of consciousness. However, this does in effect answer the first question, since we can consider all possible streams of consciousness, and determine which one(s) the universe mostly adds measure to. These would be the ones that we would informally say that the universe instantiates. Now, let me illustrate how this would be applied to the situation in question, and some other thought experiments. Specifically, let us imagine three hypothetical streams of consciousness: B goes through life until the moment the subject is annihilated in Brussels, then stops. W goes through life as does B but continues with the life experiences from Washington. And M is like W, going through life until the event in Brussels but then continuing with the events in Moscow. Normally we only consider first-person experiences like M and W when we discuss this experiment, where the consciousness jumps to Moscow or Washington respectively, but it is also useful to consider B, which corresponds to dying in Brussels. Let me first deal with a trivial case to illustrate one of the issues that arise when we compare first-person experiences that stop at different times. Imagine a conventional lifetime where a person lives to a ripe old age of 90. Now imagine the truncated version of that which we cut off arbitrarily at age 50. Obviously the universe will contribute significant measure to both of these first-person experience streams. Which one will get more? I would suggest that it is actually the 90 year old lifespan which will have more measure. The reason is because any program to turn the third-person record of all events into a meaningful, compact record of the lifetime experience is going to have to deal with the enormous gap between the fundamental events of physics, which happen at the Planck scale, and the fundamental events of consciousness, which although small to us are at an enormously larger scale compared to physics. This means that the program to do this conversion is going to have to be intensively data driven; it will have to identify tenuous and rather amorphous patterns of physical events, in order to translate them into the neurophysiological events that we would want to record. Given this structure, the (approximate) moment of physical death will be easily recognized, as it is that moment when the structure which the program has been built to track disappears. The simplest program is going to be one that has its own built-in, implicit stopping rule. In contrast, a program which stops at some arbitrary time, like age 50, is goint to have to be larger, because we are going to have to build in the stopping rule. And given that the average human lifetime is enormous when expressed in the most natural physical units, the Planck time, it means that expressing the time to stop is going to take substantial program space. The conclusion is that, for a conventional life experience, the largest measure is contributed
Re: A calculus of personal identity (was:*THE* PUZZLE)
Tom Caylor writes: Withoutreallygettingintoyourthoughtexperiment,Iwanttoaska question.Whatdoesitmeanto"experienceaminuteofcontinuous consciousness"?OK,wehaveabiologicalclockthatgivesusarough senseofrelativepassingoftime.ButIdon'tthinkyoumaintainthat ourpersonalidentityistiedtothat,doyou?Inordertoreallybe surewearegoingthroughtime,Ithinkwehavetogetdiscreteinput fromtheexternalworldeveryonceinawhiletoseehowmuchtime (roughly)haspassed.Ifweareannihilatedandduplicatedwitha delay,Ithinkwewouldbeinterestedinhowmuchtimeactually*did* pass,inordertocontinuetoliveourlife(identity)inthemost effectiveway. This is already the case in everyday life. We have alarm clocks to tell us how much time has passed in the "real" world because our subjective sense of time is distorted when we are asleep. However, our sense of personal identity is necessarily subjective, tied to events in the real world only insofar as these events influence our subjective experience. Stathis PapaioannouExpress yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! MSN Messenger --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: *THE* PUZZLE (was: ascension, Smullyan, ...)
Le 19-juin-06, à 15:31, Russell Standish a écrit : I'm not so sure. At heart, I suspect he is a computationalist, however what he assumes in his papers is that the universe (that we see) is a single specific computation selected from the dovetailer algorithm. With COMP (and with functionalism too) we assume that consciousness supervenes on all consistent computations, which leads to your famous first person indeterminism result. Schmidhuber's assumption directly implies determinism (we are living inside one particular computation only). I do not see Schmidhuber's argument as inconsistent, but it does seem to contradict COMP, so Schmidhuber may have inconsistent faiths if he insists both on this argument and COMP. I agree here. I still don't understand why you call description what is really just a real number (or a real number from the unit interval). I will try to read my Levin Solomonov literature, if only to see if we are just quibbling on terminology or on something more fundamental. To see program as prefix of infinite string is interesting if you are interested in Kolmogorov-Chaitin-Solovay-Martin-Löf sort of (quasi absolute) probability measure, like in the search of a Bayesian sort of ASSA Udist (which, I have often argue miss the relative self-sampling assumption forced by the 1-3 distinction). I disagree (but this I already told you) with your mention of universal dovetailing in Schmidhuber, given that if you select a specific computation there is no more need to dovetail. This is, at the least, pedagogically confusing. Sure, Church Thesis and Universal Machine should play an important role in Schmidhuber, but there is no reason to dovetail universally. This appears when you realize comp makes it impossible to attach consciousness to any specific computation (material or not) that is when you get the comp first person indeterminacy. A last note: speed prior, like in Schmidhuber second paper, seems to contradict the basic idea of its first paper. With notion of prior we can just go back to (theoretical) physics. QM is easily derivable from few assumptions on probability and symmetry and math, but this I take as cheating when asking fundamental questions. More technically the speed prior seems to be in contradiction with the fact that universal machine can be sped up infinitely (Blum speed up theorem). Speed prior would favorize *big* programs. We can come back later on this more technical issue. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: *THE* PUZZLE (was: ascension, Smullyan, ...)
Le 20-juin-06, à 04:04, Norman Samish a écrit : I've endured this thread long enough! Let's get back to something I can understand! Why? you'll ask. I'll reply, Because your audience is shrinking! I've plotted the Audience vs. Topic, and find that, in 12.63 months, there is a 91% probability that, if the topic doesn't become understandable to one with an IQ of 120, your audience will be zero, and the only expositor will be Bruno. I thought only politicians were interested in audience (during electoral period!). Not that there's anything wrong with that, but we must acknowledge that Bruno speaks a language that very few of us can understand. Please ask when you don't understand, unless you are not interested. I insist enough that there is no stupid questions. Perhaps, like so many (especially in france and Belgium) you get some traumatic experience with math and you did persuade yourself you cannot understand math. My experience is that people who believes they does not understand math, well in 99,% are just imagining difficulties which does not exist at all. They are too much clever! Like henry Poincare I believe mathematics is the easiest of all the fields. Human psychology is the most complex one. Bruno, and probably Russell and a few others, are clearly Homo Superior, while the rest of us are mere Homo Sapiens. I am talking to the the Machina Universalis. Todays, with the exception of those who got a highly injured brain, current universal machines are still *very* far from being as clever as the stupidest human. I bet you have just miss some definition, in which case it is all normal you miss the track. You will then say, Our discourse is meant for Homo Superior. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. I am addressing the most inferior of all the creatures, the simple mind common to all of us (but yes sometimes traumatized by teaching driven by pure competition or moral sadism. Note that, I have nothing against competition *per se*, but everything against competition for competition and form of social elitism based on it, which has lead us to some form of in-numeracy. I'll reply, Damn! I was hoping to learn something! Just tell us what you don't understand. Do you grasp the notion of function from N to N? Do you know what N refers to? Just ask. You have the opportunity of being in front of a math teacher who is willing to explain you the basic starting from zero. Not just because I would be so compassionned, but because later it will be capital to understand that what I say can be understandable, in some sense, by very simple machine. What are your relation with computers? Theoretical computer science is a field which you can get startling results quickly when starting from zero. This is rather uncommon. Also, we are discussing since years. It is all normal that we arrive at delicate points needing to be more specific, especially in counterintuitive-land. Come back in the kitchen Norman. You can understand the thread, and if you ask all the needed question, perhaps the audience will grow up again! Because then many other will benefit from your questions. I don't believe in non-mathematicans! Those who say I have never understand math are just either snobbish, or have been mentally destroyed by some mad teacher (frequent in some country). Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Teleportation thought experiment and UD+ASSA
Bruno writes: Hal, It seems to me that you are introducing a notion of physical universe,=20 and then use it to reintroduce a notion of first person death, so that=20 you can bet you will be the one annihilated in Brussels. I should first mention that I did not anticipate the conclusion that I reached when I did that analysis. I did not expect to conclude that teleportation like this would probably not work (speaking figurately). This was not the starting point of the analysis, but the conclusion. The starting point was the framework I have described previously, which can be stated very simply as that the measure of an information pattern comes from the universal distribution of Kolmogorov. I then applied this analysis to specific information patterns which represent subjective, first person lifetime experiences. I concluded that the truncated version which ends when the teleportation occurs would probably have higher measure than the ones which proceed through and beyond the teleportation. Although I worked in terms of a specific physical universe, that is a short-cut for simplicity of exposition. The general case is to simply ask for the K measure of each possible first-person subjective life experience - what is the shortest program that produces each one. I assume that the shortest program will in fact have two parts, one which creates a universe and the second which takes that universe as input and produces the first-person experience record as output. This leads to a Schmidhuber-like ensemble where we would consider all possible universes and estimate the contribution of each one to the measure of a particular first-person experience. It is important though to keep in mind that in practice the only universe which adds non-negligible measure would be the one we are discussing. In other words, consider the first person experience of being born, living your life, travelling to Brussels and stepping into a teleportation machine. A random, chaotic universe would add negligibly to the measure of this first-person life experience. Likewise for a universe which only evolves six-legged aliens on some other planet. So in practice it makes sense to restrict our attention to the (approximately) one universe which has third-person objective events that do add significant measure to the instantiation of these abstract first-person experiences. You agree that this is just equivalent of negating the comp hypothesis.=20 You would not use (classical) teleportation, nor accept a digital=20 artificial brain, all right? Do I miss something? It is perhaps best to say that I would not do these things *axiomatically*. Whether a particular teleportation technology would be acceptable would depend on considerations such as I described in my previous message. It's possible that the theoretical loss of measure for some teleportation technology would be small enough that I would do it. As far as using an artificial brain, again I would look to this kind of analysis. I have argued previously that a brain which is much smaller or faster than the biological one should have much smaller measure, so that would not be an appealing transformation. OTOH an artificial brain could be designed to have larger measure, such as by being physically larger or perhaps by having more accurate and complete memory storage. Then that would be appealing. I think that one of the fundamental principles of your COMP hypothesis is the functionalist notion, that it does not matter what kind of system instantiates a computation. However I think this founders on the familiar paradoxes over what counts as an instantiation. In principle we can come up with a continuous range of devices which span the alternatives from non-instantiation to full instantiation of a given computation. Without some way to distinguish these, there is no meaning to the question of when a computation is instantiated; hence functionalism fails. My approach (not original to me) is to recognize that there is a degree of instantiation, as I have described via the conditional Kolmogorov measure (i.e. given a physical system, how much does it help a minimal computation to produce the desired output). This then leads very naturally to the analysis I provided in my previous message, which attempted to estimate the conditional K measure for the hypothetical first-person computations that were being potentially instantiated by the given third-party physical situation. Hal Finney --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Teleportation thought experiment and UD+ASSA
On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 09:35:12AM -0700, Hal Finney wrote: The starting point was the framework I have described previously, which can be stated very simply as that the measure of an information pattern comes from the universal distribution of Kolmogorov. I then applied this analysis to specific information patterns which represent subjective, first person lifetime experiences. I concluded that the truncated version which ends when the teleportation occurs would probably have higher measure than the ones which proceed through and beyond the teleportation. Comment to Bruno - Hal starts with the ASSA. I'm pretty sure this negates functionalism and hence COMP. I just checked my book - I noted Hal as a staunch member of the ASSA camp :). This leads to a Schmidhuber-like ensemble where we would consider all possible universes and estimate the contribution of each one to the measure of a particular first-person experience. It is important Echoes of my previous correspondence to Bruno - it would seem Schmidhuber is an ASSA supporter too... I think that one of the fundamental principles of your COMP hypothesis is the functionalist notion, that it does not matter what kind of system instantiates a computation. However I think this founders on the familiar paradoxes over what counts as an instantiation. In principle we can come up with a continuous range of devices which span the alternatives from non-instantiation to full instantiation of a given computation. Without some way to distinguish these, there is no meaning to the question of when a computation is instantiated; hence functionalism fails. I don't follow your argument here, but it sounds interesting. Could you expand on this more fully? My guess is that ultimately it will depend on an assumption like the ASSA. -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type application/pgp-signature. Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Teleportation thought experiment and UD+ASSA
I don't understand why you consider the measures of the programs that do the simulations. The ''real'' measure should be derived from the algorithmic complexity of the laws of physics that describe how the computers/brains work. If you know for certain that a computation will be performed in this universe, then it doesn't matter how it is performed. The algorithmic complexity of the program needed to simulate a brain refers to a ''personal universe''. You can think of the brain as a machine that is simulating a virtual world in which the qualia we experience exist. That world also exists independent of our brain in a universe of its own. This world has a very small measure defined by the very large algorithmic complexity of the program needed to specify the brain. Saibal From: Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 06:35 PM Subject: Re: Teleportation thought experiment and UD+ASSA Bruno writes: Hal, It seems to me that you are introducing a notion of physical universe,=20 and then use it to reintroduce a notion of first person death, so that=20 you can bet you will be the one annihilated in Brussels. I should first mention that I did not anticipate the conclusion that I reached when I did that analysis. I did not expect to conclude that teleportation like this would probably not work (speaking figurately). This was not the starting point of the analysis, but the conclusion. The starting point was the framework I have described previously, which can be stated very simply as that the measure of an information pattern comes from the universal distribution of Kolmogorov. I then applied this analysis to specific information patterns which represent subjective, first person lifetime experiences. I concluded that the truncated version which ends when the teleportation occurs would probably have higher measure than the ones which proceed through and beyond the teleportation. Although I worked in terms of a specific physical universe, that is a short-cut for simplicity of exposition. The general case is to simply ask for the K measure of each possible first-person subjective life experience - what is the shortest program that produces each one. I assume that the shortest program will in fact have two parts, one which creates a universe and the second which takes that universe as input and produces the first-person experience record as output. This leads to a Schmidhuber-like ensemble where we would consider all possible universes and estimate the contribution of each one to the measure of a particular first-person experience. It is important though to keep in mind that in practice the only universe which adds non-negligible measure would be the one we are discussing. In other words, consider the first person experience of being born, living your life, travelling to Brussels and stepping into a teleportation machine. A random, chaotic universe would add negligibly to the measure of this first-person life experience. Likewise for a universe which only evolves six-legged aliens on some other planet. So in practice it makes sense to restrict our attention to the (approximately) one universe which has third-person objective events that do add significant measure to the instantiation of these abstract first-person experiences. You agree that this is just equivalent of negating the comp hypothesis.=20 You would not use (classical) teleportation, nor accept a digital=20 artificial brain, all right? Do I miss something? It is perhaps best to say that I would not do these things *axiomatically*. Whether a particular teleportation technology would be acceptable would depend on considerations such as I described in my previous message. It's possible that the theoretical loss of measure for some teleportation technology would be small enough that I would do it. As far as using an artificial brain, again I would look to this kind of analysis. I have argued previously that a brain which is much smaller or faster than the biological one should have much smaller measure, so that would not be an appealing transformation. OTOH an artificial brain could be designed to have larger measure, such as by being physically larger or perhaps by having more accurate and complete memory storage. Then that would be appealing. I think that one of the fundamental principles of your COMP hypothesis is the functionalist notion, that it does not matter what kind of system instantiates a computation. However I think this founders on the familiar paradoxes over what counts as an instantiation. In principle we can come up with a continuous range of devices which span the alternatives from non-instantiation to full instantiation of a given computation. Without some way to distinguish these, there is no meaning to the question of when a computation is instantiated; hence functionalism fails. My
Re: A calculus of personal identity (was:*THE* PUZZLE)
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: Tom Caylor writes: Without really getting into your thought experiment, I want to ask a question. What does it mean to experience a minute of continuous consciousness? OK, we have a biological clock that gives us a rough sense of relative passing of time. But I don't think you maintain that our personal identity is tied to that, do you? In order to really be sure we are going through time, I think we have to get discrete input from the external world every once in a while to see how much time (roughly) has passed. If we are annihilated and duplicated with a delay, I think we would be interested in how much time actually *did* pass, in order to continue to live our life (identity) in the most effective way. This is already the case in everyday life. We have alarm clocks to tell us how much time has passed in the real world because our subjective sense of time is distorted when we are asleep. However, our sense of personal identity is necessarily subjective, tied to events in the real world only insofar as these events influence our subjective experience. Stathis Papaioannou I wonder if our sense of identiy is more dependent on the world than we suppose. I recall reading somewhere, in the 1960's when sensory deprivation experiments were the new thing, that people who stayed in the sensory deprivation tanks more than an hour or so found that their thoughts sort of went into an endless loop and they then lost all sense of time and self. Brent Meeker --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
