Quantum suicide and immortality
The Wiki article Quantum suicide and immortality (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality) states: Also, the philosopher David Lewis, in How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat?, remarked that in the vast majority of the worlds in which an immortal observer might find himself (i.e. the subset of quantum-possible worlds in which the observer does not die), he will survive, but will be terribly maimed. This is because in each of the scenarios typically given in thought experiments (nuclear bombing, Russian roulette, etc.), for every world in which the observer survives unscathed, there are likely to be far more worlds in which the observer survives terribly disfigured, badly disabled, and so on. It is for this reason, Lewis concludes, that we ought to hope that the many-worlds interpretation is false. David Lewis' statement cuts to the core of the nature of consciousness. If each conscious observer on planet Earth (and let's assume the laws of physics don't limit consciousness to humans but includes any sentient animal life form) exists in Many Worlds (see Wiki topic on physicist Hugh Everett III at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett) then Houston, we've got a problem. The human population alone is over 6 billion conscious observers. Each observer can cause branching into an unfathomably huge number of parallel universes (or perhaps an infinite number). Everyone else, in addition to an incomprehensibly large number of people only born in some parallel universes, branches into their own parallel universes, extrapolating logically from the Many Worlds theory. Each one of us is essentially forced to consciously exist in parallel universes that continue coming into existence as the result of the actions of every other conscious observer on this planet. Include conscious non-human observers (animal and who knows what else) and Houston, we've got a really big problem... or is it really a problem? Instead of using this line of thinking to debunk the Many Worlds interpretation, I think this isn't such a big problem as it initially appears. For one thing, consider sleep walking. Sleep walkers can appear conscious, carry on conversations, drive automobiles and operate machinery, essentially do things they can do in the awake state. Only when they're sleep walking, they do not remember those minutes or hours they did all these things. In essence they fast forwarded through those events, even though other observers may have carried on coversations with them, witnessed them driving an automobile or doing other things, all the time thinking these sleepwalkers were wide awake and conscious. Suppose our existences in parallel universes is similar to if we were sleepwalking? Suppose we are not conscious observers in those parallel universes, but other conscious observers believe we are conscious as well? Suppose others in this parallel universe we are in, are similarly sleepwalking in that they are not conscious in this parallel universe (but are conscious in another)? That leads to interesting possibilities and questions. Do we somehow choose the parallel universe where we are consciously present and awake? Do people close to us likely choose to be present and conscious in the same parallel universe we are present and conscious in, so in our relationship with them, we're not talking to someone who is sleepwalking and really not conscious? When we are in a parallel universe where we are not consciously present, does this mean the human brain operates the body like a biological machine, similarly to unconscious human-like androids in the movie I, Robot that one could swear are real sentient people? The questions snowball along this line of thinking, as one wonders if our consciousness moves from one parallel universe to another? If we don't like our lives or the way the world has become, could our consciousness latch on to another more favorable timeline while the sleepwalking unconscious version of ourselves continues in the parallel universe we consciously departed from? What mechanism causes this change? Is it intensely wishing for a different outcome in our lives, or a different world where the recession ended? If each observer on this planet is capable of spawning branching parallel universes, are there unconscious sleepwalking versions of us in an infinite number of timelines? This leads to a very scary question, could our consciousness wake up in some bazaar timeline caused by other conscious observers, a place where we do not want to exist? When we open our eyes in the darkness of our bedrooms, look at the clock radio and breathe a sigh of relief that we were only dreaming, is it possible what we just experienced wasn't a dream but a conscious observance looking at another parallel universe from the perspective of Schrödinger's Cat? --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Everything List
Re: Quantum suicide and immortality
2009/5/10 ZeroSum ing...@usa.net: David Lewis' statement cuts to the core of the nature of consciousness. If each conscious observer on planet Earth (and let's assume the laws of physics don't limit consciousness to humans but includes any sentient animal life form) exists in Many Worlds (see Wiki topic on physicist Hugh Everett III at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Everett) then Houston, we've got a problem. The human population alone is over 6 billion conscious observers. Each observer can cause branching into an unfathomably huge number of parallel universes (or perhaps an infinite number). Everyone else, in addition to an incomprehensibly large number of people only born in some parallel universes, branches into their own parallel universes, extrapolating logically from the Many Worlds theory. Each one of us is essentially forced to consciously exist in parallel universes that continue coming into existence as the result of the actions of every other conscious observer on this planet. Include conscious non-human observers (animal and who knows what else) and Houston, we've got a really big problem... or is it really a problem? Instead of using this line of thinking to debunk the Many Worlds interpretation, I think this isn't such a big problem as it initially appears. For one thing, consider sleep walking. I don't really understand what the problem is. That there are many world in the MWI is already a given. Consciousness and quantum immortality experiments don't create any more worlds than there otherwise would be. In the multiverse as a whole, only a very small number of worlds contain versions of you who survived a direct nuclear blast. In almost all the worlds, you have died. -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Consciousness is information?
Quentin Anciaux skrev: Hi, 2009/5/8 Torgny Tholerus tor...@dsv.su.se: I was an ultrafinitist before, but I have changed my mind. Now I accept that you can say that the natural numbers are unlimited. I only deny actual infinities. The set of all natural numbers are always finite, but you can always increase the set of all natural number by adding more natural numbers to it. Then it's not the set of *all* natural numbers. You do nothing by adding a number... you don't create numbers by writing them down, you don't invent properties about them, it's absurd... especially for a zombie. What do you mean by *all*? How do you define *all*? Can you give a definition that is not a circular definition? -- Torgny --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: 3-PoV from 1 PoV?
On 08 May 2009, at 17:49, Stephen Paul King wrote: I came upon the idea after considering how is it that the notion of an objective reality when we know for a fact that all of our knowledge does not come from any kind of direct contact with an objective reality, at best it is infered. Yes. Even at the deepest level. Science transforms knowledge into belief by making us aware of the hypothetical nature of our mental construction. I would say that science is the condition of genuine faith or bets. Leibniz' Monadology can be considered as a way to think of this idea where each monad represents a 1-PoV. Difficult to make sense. Leibniz is a complex and variable author. I have read the Monadology and consult some expert of Leibniz, but it remains hard to figure out how it works. A synchronization of many such 1PoV, given some simple consistensy requirements, would in the large number limit lead to a notion of a common world of experience. Don't you need some common world of experience to have a notion of synchronization? The 3PoV would follow from a form of inversion or reflection of a 1PoV. For example, we form thoughts of or fellow humans from our own experiences of ourselves. BTW: it seems to me that consciousness, at least, requires some form of dynamic self- modeling process. This implies that there is no such a thing as a static consciousness. I can agree. And you know the way I proceed. I start from elementary arithmetic, the 3-elementary ontology. If only because 99,9% of the humans agree on it, and it is already Turing universal and contains the whole universal deployment. The epistemology is given by adding some induction schema to the machine in there. It is illustrated by the going from Robinson arithmetic to Peano Arithmetic (emulated by Robinson arithmetic). It is enough to generate all finite piece of histories, and we can get the many 1-pov by the Theaetetical variant of the logic of provability/consistency ... So, if you agree that all dynamics are contained in the block- arithmetical truth, consciousness is indeed related to internal information flux, and so we can say there is no static consciousness, in that sense. But here we mix the 3-description with the 1- description, and from this we cannot conclude that we cannot have a conscious experience of static-ity or static-ness. With comp, just because it remains a lot of work, the question of traveling in many different physical directions is just open (obviously). Re the UD Measure problem: The idea i have is that we either have our infinity within each Monad or try to find a way to derive a measure of the infinity without reference to the only source of definiteness that we have available: our conscious experience. If I interpret favorably what you say, this is the passage from UDA to AUDA, where I substitute you working on UDA, by the lobian universal machine working on UDA. I don't insist on this because it can be misunderstood. AUDA looks like an elimination of the need to refer to consciousness, but AUDA without a prior understanding of UDA, would be like a confusion between theology and computer science, comp can only relate them, not identify them it would be an error, explainable in AUDA (!), to confuse them. Only God confuses them; in sense, but a creature which confuses them is either a zombie, or a fake zombie, or a person eliminativist. You can regain consciousness in AUDA, by defining consciousness by the belief (hope, bet, faith) in a reality. But the bet is unconscious itself, and this is partially why we are bounded, at some level, to confuse this very basic belief with a knowledge. Of course it is a knowledge, but only at the G* level, *we* cannot know that, once we bet there is a reality (whatever it is). All this does not mean that you could not try an alternate theory were the 3-pov emerge from the 1-pov, but with comp, the basic ontology is very simple (numbers, addition and multiplication). And then 1-pov, or OMs, appears very sophisticated. They are given intuitively by all possible computations passing to a current state, together with a topology derivable from the self-reference logic (I think you know that). Bruno From: Bruno Marchal To: everything-list@googlegroups.com Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 6:23 PM Subject: Re: Consciousness is information? On 05 May 2009, at 20:13, Stephen Paul King wrote: Hi Bruno and Members, The comment that is made below seems to only involve a single consciousness and an exterior reality. Could we not recover a very similar situation if we consider the 1-PoV and 3-PoV relation to hold to some degree over a multitude of consciouness (plurality). In the plurality case, the objective doubtful but sharable possible reality would be composed of a large intersection of sorts of 3-PoV
Re: Quantum suicide and immortality
ZeroSum wrote: The Wiki article Quantum suicide and immortality (http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide_and_immortality) states: Also, the philosopher David Lewis, in How Many Lives Has Schrödinger's Cat?, remarked that in the vast majority of the worlds in which an immortal observer might find himself (i.e. the subset of quantum-possible worlds in which the observer does not die), he will survive, but will be terribly maimed. This is because in each of the scenarios typically given in thought experiments (nuclear bombing, Russian roulette, etc.), for every world in which the observer survives unscathed, there are likely to be far more worlds in which the observer survives terribly disfigured, badly disabled, and so on. I think this is just a misinterpretation of the physics. All those scenarios and their effects are essentially classical. In Julian Barbour's metaphor they are all strands in the same branch and are classically indistinguishable. Since the brain is a classical information processor, they all correspond to the same conscious stream. Since classically you are either killed or not, or maimed or not, there is are not huge numbers of worlds in which you are maimed to different degrees that are consciously distinct. Brent --~--~-~--~~~---~--~~ 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~--~~~~--~~--~--~---
Re: Consciousness is information?
On 08 May 2009, at 19:15, Torgny Tholerus wrote: Bruno Marchal skrev: On 07 May 2009, at 18:29, Torgny Tholerus wrote: Bruno Marchal skrev: you are human, all right? I look exactly as a human. When you look at me, you will not be able to know if I am a human or a zombie, because I behave exacly like a human. So you believe that human are not zombie, and you agree that you are not human. Where do you come from? Vega? Centaur? I come from Stockholm, Sweden. I was constructed by my parents. In reality I think that all humans are zombies, but because I am a polite person, I do not tell the other zombies that they are zombies. I do not want to hurt the other zombies by telling them the truth. Truth? you mean your theory. As far as I know, you may be a zombie, although I believe that you are conscious and only believe you are a zombie. Or you could suffer from a sort of radical blindsight, making you belief you lack consciousness. You should perhaps consult. And I appreciate very much your attempt to be polite, and your willingness to not hurt other ... zombie. but you should not worry, because if we are zombie, we will only fake being hurt, you know. A french poet said, after he died (!) : friends, pretend only to cry because poet pretends only to dye. (Faites semblant de pleurer mes amis puisque les poêtes font semblant de mourrir). Yes it is right. There is no infinity of natural numbers. But the natural numbers are UNLIMITED, you can construct as many natural numbers as you want. But how many numbers you construct, the number of numbers will always be finite. You can never construct an infinite number of natural numbers. This is no more ultrafinitism. Just the usal finitism or intuitionism. It seems I recall you have had a stronger view on this point. Ontologically I am neutral on this question. With comp I don't need any actual infinity in the third person ontology. Infinities are not avoidable from inside, at least when the inside view begins some self- reflexion studies. I was an ultrafinitist before, but I have changed my mind. Excellent. The ability of changing its mind is a wonderful gift. Now I accept that you can say that the natural numbers are unlimited. I only deny actual infinities. I can deny them ontologically, and with comp, their existence is absolutely undecidable. yet they are also unavoidable on the epistemological planes, once we search truth. The set of all natural numbers are always finite, Of course, but you mean constructed natural number. You stay at the 1-pov. I have no problem for translating. but you can always increase the set of all natural number by adding more natural numbers to it. Life will be harder. An ordinary computer can never be arithmetically unsound. ? (this seems to me plainly false, unless you mean perfect for ordinary. But computers can be as unsound as you and me. There is no vaccine against soundness: all computers can be unsound soo or later. there is no perfect computer. Most gods are no immune, you have to postulate the big unnameable One and be very near to It, to have some guaranty ... if any ... OK, I misunderstood what you meant by unsound, I thougth you meant something like unlogical. But now I see that you mean something like irrational. And I sure am irrational. By unsound I meant that you believe in some false arithmetical proposition. But trivially so, and by using intuitionist arithmetic, and modal logics, you could make your point. I do not want to be tortured, I behave as if I try to avoid that as strongly as I can. Because I behave in this way, I answer no to your question, because that answer will decrease the probability of you torturing me. Do you realize that to defend your point you are always in the obligation, when talking about any first person notion, like consciousness, fear, desire, to add I behave like . But if you can do that successfully you will make me doubt that you are a zombie. Or ... do you think a zombie could eventually find a correct theory of consciousness, so that he can correctly fake consciousness, and delude the humans? An intelligent zombie can correctly fake consciousness, and I am an intelligent zombie. How could a zombie know that he correctly fake consciousness? 3) Do you have any sort-of feeling, insight, dreams, impression, sensations, subjective or mental life, ... ? I behave as if I have sort-of feelings, I behave as if I have insights, I behave as if I have dreams, I behave as if I have impressions, I behave as if I have sensations, I behave as if I have a subjective or mental life, ... As I said. But if you know that, I mean if you can behave like if you were knowing that, it would mean that such words do have some meaning for you. How can you know that you are not conscious? Why do you behave like
