FW: FIN too
-Original Message- From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] The problem is that the probability isn't 0% that you'd find yourself at your current age (according to the QTI - assume I put that after every sentence!). Because you HAVE to pass through your current age to reach QTI-type ages, the probability of finding yourself at your current age at some point is 100%. At some point, yes. At a typical point? 0%. My (ahem) point is, though, that none of us ARE at a typical point (again, assuming QTI). In fact we're in a very atypical point, just as the era of stars might be a very atypical point in the history of the universe - but it's a point we (or the universe) HAVE TO PASS THROUGH to reach more typical points (e.g. very old, no stars left...). Hence it's consistent with QTI that we find ourselves passing through this point... I'm not arguing for QTI here, but I do think that you can't argue from finding yourself at a particular point on your world-line to that world-line having finite length, because you are guaranteed to find yourself at that particular point at some (ah) point. So I'm rejecting, not Bayesian logic per se, but the application of it to what (according to QTI) would be a very special (but still allowable) case. The basic problem is that we experience observer moments as a sequence. Hence we *must* experience the earlier moments before the later ones, and if we happen to come across QTI before we reach QTI-like observer moments then we might reject it for lack of (subjective) evidence. But that doesn't contradict QTI, which predicts that we have to pass through these earlier moments, and that we will observe everyone else doing so as well. I wish I could put that more clearly, or think of a decent analogy, but do you see what I mean? Our observations aren't actually *incompatible* with QTI, even if they do only cover an infinitsimal chunk of our total observer moments. Charles
FW: FIN insanity
-Original Message- From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] 2) You would also be the same person if the surgeon made a new brain identically to yours. I'm not sure what you mean here. The new brain would be the same as the old you, the old one would remain the same, the old one was destroyed, or what? As far as I understand quantum physics, this is only true if the new brain is in the same quantum state as the old one - like atoms in a bose-einstein condensate, they would then be literally, physically indistinguishable. However (also as far as I understand quantum physics) it's actually impossible to create two macroscopic objects in the same quantum state, at least, it's impossible to measure the state of one object accurately enough to create one which is idnetical in this sense (which is the only sense the universe recognises). This does not, however, prevent the universe itself from creating two objects in the same quantum state, if it's allowed to generate every conceivable arrangement of mass-energy - as may be the case in a single, infinite universe, and is definitely the case according to the MWI. Charles
FW: FIN Again (was: Re: James Higgo)
-Original Message- From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] I've explained that in other posts, but as you see, the idea is indeed mathematically incoherent - unless you just mean the conditional effective probability which a measure distribution defines by definition. And _that_ one, of course, leads to a finite expectation value for ones's observed age (that is, no immortality). Although I have other objections to the quantum theory of immortality, I still don't see how the sampling argument refutes it. Because (as I've said elsewhere) you don't know what a typical observer is. If the QTI is correct then a typical observer moment may *well* be someone who is 10^32 years old wondering why all the other protons have decayed except the ones in his body. But you have no way to find that out *except* by reaching that age yourself, because it's very very very very (keep typing very for another couple of weeks) unlikely that you will meet up with a typical observer who isn't yourself. Charles
RE: FIN Again (was: Re: James Higgo)
-Original Message- From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] I've explained that in other posts, but as you see, the idea is indeed mathematically incoherent - unless you just mean the conditional effective probability which a measure distribution defines by definition. And _that_ one, of course, leads to a finite expectation value for ones's observed age (that is, no immortality). I've just realised that according to the Bayesian argument, the chances of someone with an infinite world-line being ANY specific age are infinitesimal. (It also makes the chances of me being the age I am pretty infinitesimal too, come to think of it). That would seem to indicate that the Bayesian argument *assumes* that infinite world-lines (and possibly infinite anythings) are impossible. Sorry I took so long to spot that objection to the SSA argument, which I will call (4). Charles
RE: fin insanity
-Original Message- From: Saibal Mitra [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] So, I would say that you will always find yourself alive somewhere. But it is interesting to consider only our universe and ignore quantum effects. Even then you will always find yourself alive somewhere, but you won't find yourself becoming infinitely old (see above). Because this is a classical continuation of you, it is much more likely than any quantum continuation that allows you to survive an atomic bomb exploding above your head. QTI can give you some idea of the size of the multiverse if you consider that there are branches in which every organism that has ever existed (including bacteria, viruses etc) are immortal - as well as every non-living configuration of matter (e.g. snowflakes, rocks, grains of sand...) - on every planet (and star, and empty space) in the universe ... According to QTI *no* observer moments ever lead to death. Every observer moment of every organism that has ever lived has timelike-infinite continuity. This leads to very very very big numbers, even if we allowed the output from the SWE to be quantised - which it isn't. Charles
Re: FIN too
Convince me of this fact, and I would readily reject QTI. What you say would be disproof of the cul-de-sac assumption, which sadly I suspect to be true except in rather extreme circumstances like black holes. Nevertheless, if you can construct a situation using forbidden states where conscious continuation of provably impossible, I'd be most interested to hear about it. Cheers Fred Chen wrote: Hal, Charles, I think this is an unavoidable part of the QTI or FIN debate. It seems that with QTI, you could only be entering white rabbit (magical-type) universes, not continue in probable ones. But in general I have a more fundamental objection (to quantum immortality). In QM, not all quantum states are possible for a given situation. For example, an electron orbiting a proton can only occupy certain energy states, not arbitrary ones. The energy states in between are forbidden; an electron cannot be measured and found to be in one of these forbidden states. So I do not see why immortality is allowed by QM from our universe if physical mechanisms generally ban it. Survival seems to me (and I guess most people) a forbidden state in the situations where death is certain. Fred Dr. Russell Standish Director High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967, 8308 3119 (mobile) UNSW SYDNEY 2052 Fax 9385 6965, 0425 253119 () Australia[EMAIL PROTECTED] Room 2075, Red Centrehttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02
Re: fin insanity
Charles Goodwin wrote: -Original Message- From: Saibal Mitra [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] As I have written before, a person is just a computation being implemented somewhere. Suppose that the person has discovered that he suffers from a terminal ilness and he dies (the computation ends). Now in principle the person in question could have lived on if he wasn't diagnosed with this terminal ilness. Somewhere in the multiverse this person exists. Some time ago I wrote (I think on the FoR list) that the transformation from the old dying person to the new person is a continuous one. The process of death must involve the destruction of the brain. At some time the information that the person is dying will be lost to the person. The person might even think he is 20 years old while in reality he is 92. Anyway, the point is that his brain had stored so much information that adding new information would lead to an inconsistency. By dumping some of the information, the information left will be identical to the information in a similar brain somewhere else of a younger person, free from disease. Hmm.and this is a simpler theory, with more explanatory power, than that people are just material objects which eventually wear out? People are material objects, but the materials out of which people are made don't matter. If your neurons were replaced by artifiicial ones that would function in the same way, would you not be the same person? You would answer any question in the same way as the original version of you would. I conclude that it is the computation that is performed by your brain that generates you. The materials don't matter. I could just as well generate you by a primitive analog computer. What matters is the computer program that is running on the machine, not the machine itself. If you believe that all possible universes exist (universes that can be generated by a computer program), then you ``always´´ exist in some universe, because, by definition, you are a computer program. So, I would say that you will always find yourself alive somewhere. But it is interesting to consider only our universe and ignore quantum effects. Even then you will always find yourself alive somewhere, but you won't find yourself becoming infinitely old (see above). Because this is a classical continuation of you, it is much more likely than any quantum continuation that allows you to survive an atomic bomb exploding above your head. Saibal
Re: FIN too
Fred Chen wrote: Hal, Charles, I think this is an unavoidable part of the QTI or FIN debate. It seems that with QTI, you could only be entering white rabbit (magical-type) universes, not continue in probable ones. But in general I have a more fundamental objection (to quantum immortality). In QM, not all quantum states are possible for a given situation. For example, an electron orbiting a proton can only occupy certain energy states, not arbitrary ones. The energy states in between are forbidden; an electron cannot be measured and found to be in one of these forbidden states. So I do not see why immortality is allowed by QM from our universe if physical mechanisms generally ban it. Survival seems to me (and I guess most people) a forbidden state in the situations where death is certain. But all the QTI problem (or the COMP I problem) is there. QM shows that even by taking account the forbidden states, from the point of view of the observer there are enough histories making hard to define a situation where death is certain. It is plausible that comp immortality makes that death entails a deviation from normality, but you always find yourself in the most near possible world such that you survive. Not really a happy thought *a priori*, but how to escape it? Now comp is rich enough for allowing the consistency of jump between type of normal world, amnesia bactracking, etc. The mortality question is harder with comp than with QM, and with QM the solution would be provided the SE applied to the agonising: just intractable. All the problem comes from the fact that although it is easy to imagine situation where 3-death is very probable, it is not easy at all to define a situation where 1-death is certain. Comp entails big ignorance here. Bruno
Re: FIN insanity
Good grief - Jacques said it often enough (F)allacious (I)nsane (N)onsense! Charles Goodwin wrote: Thank you for the explanation. I think FIN stands for something derogatory - possibly invented by Jaques Mallah (in much the way that Fred Hoyle coined the term 'Big Bang' to make his opponents' views sound ridiculous, or art critics coined 'Cubism' for similar reasons, only to see the derisively-termed ideas go on to achieve fame while the original reason for the name was forgotten). The IN part of FIN is (I think) Immortality Nonsense - the F I'm not sure about although some ideas come to mind . . . so anyway, it *is* another name for QTI. I think the idea of continuity of consciousness between duplicates, no matter how widely separated in space, time or the multiverse, assumes that they are (at least momentarily) in the same quantum state. According to quantum theory this means that they are literally identical, as atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate are identical - there is no test, even in theory, that will distinguish them. The MWI postulates that the initial state of some system evolves through the schrodinger wave eqn to a continuum of derived states, and hence that a person (for example) is continuously becoming an (uncountably infinite) number of copies, all of which have continuity of consciousness with the original. Of these outcomes, we typically experience the most likely, which is to say that our experiences are normally of the laws of physics holding, including probablistic 'laws' like thermodynamics. There are SOME copies of me who are experiencing their PCs turning into a bowl of petunias, or all the air molecules rushing out of the room, but the chances that you will be getting an email from one of them rather than one in which things go on as normal is very unlikely - thermodynamically unlikely. As I understand the QTI (from your post and others) it goes on to postulate that in the event of imminent death (including the infamous quantum suicide experiment) we would start to experience *unlikely* outcomes, because in all the likely ones we'd die (which we wouldn't experience for the reasons you mention below). So if in a fit of depression I try to shoot myself, the QTI suggests that I would experience the most likely outcome that provides continuity of consciousness. (This reminds me of a Larry Niven story in which a race of aliens discovered the meaning of life (I forget how they managed this) and promptly committed suicide en masse.) Of course the most likely outcome that provides continuity of consciousness is unlikely to be pleasant: if I shot myself, I'd probably experience acquiring very bad injuries (and doctors exclaiming in delight over the opportunity to work out how someone can survive with half his head missing). The QTI assumes that the possibility of identical quantum states arising for any arbitrary collection of matter is 100% - which is true in the MWI (or any infinite collection of space-time slices which have the same laws of physics). So it actually seems at least a possible theory, given certain assumptions - but not easily testable in the sense that most theories try to be (i.e. third person testable, so to speak). Charles -Original Message- From: Jesse Mazer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, 7 September 2001 7:21 a.m. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: FIN insanity From: Charles Goodwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: FIN insanity Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 12:26:24 +1200 On the other hand I can't see how FIN is supposed to work, either. I *think* the argument runs something like this... Even if you have just had, say, an atom bomb dropped on you, there's still SOME outcomes of the schrodinger wave equation which just happen to lead to you suriviving the explosion. Although these are VERY unlikely - less likely than, say, my computer turning into a bowl of petunias - they do exist, and (given the MWI) they occur somewhere in the multiverse. For some reason I can't work out, all the copies who are killed by the bomb don't count. Only the very very very (etc) small proportion who miraculously survive do, and these are the only ones you personally experience. Is that a reasonable description of FIN? Ignoring statistical arguments, what is wrong with it? Charles What does FIN stand for, anyway? Is it just another version of the quantum theory of immortality? Anyway, the idea behind the QTI is not just that we arbitrarily decide copies who die don't count, rather it has to do with some supplemental assumptions about the laws governing first-person experience, namely: 1. Continuity of consciousness is real (see my recent post on this) 2. Continuity of consciousness does not depend on spatial or temporal continuity, only on some kind of pattern continuity between different
RE: FIN insanity
Thank you for the explanation. I think FIN stands for something derogatory - possibly invented by Jaques Mallah (in much the way that Fred Hoyle coined the term 'Big Bang' to make his opponents' views sound ridiculous, or art critics coined 'Cubism' for similar reasons, only to see the derisively-termed ideas go on to achieve fame while the original reason for the name was forgotten). The IN part of FIN is (I think) Immortality Nonsense - the F I'm not sure about although some ideas come to mind . . . so anyway, it *is* another name for QTI. I think the idea of continuity of consciousness between duplicates, no matter how widely separated in space, time or the multiverse, assumes that they are (at least momentarily) in the same quantum state. According to quantum theory this means that they are literally identical, as atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate are identical - there is no test, even in theory, that will distinguish them. The MWI postulates that the initial state of some system evolves through the schrodinger wave eqn to a continuum of derived states, and hence that a person (for example) is continuously becoming an (uncountably infinite) number of copies, all of which have continuity of consciousness with the original. Of these outcomes, we typically experience the most likely, which is to say that our experiences are normally of the laws of physics holding, including probablistic 'laws' like thermodynamics. There are SOME copies of me who are experiencing their PCs turning into a bowl of petunias, or all the air molecules rushing out of the room, but the chances that you will be getting an email from one of them rather than one in which things go on as normal is very unlikely - thermodynamically unlikely. As I understand the QTI (from your post and others) it goes on to postulate that in the event of imminent death (including the infamous quantum suicide experiment) we would start to experience *unlikely* outcomes, because in all the likely ones we'd die (which we wouldn't experience for the reasons you mention below). So if in a fit of depression I try to shoot myself, the QTI suggests that I would experience the most likely outcome that provides continuity of consciousness. (This reminds me of a Larry Niven story in which a race of aliens discovered the meaning of life (I forget how they managed this) and promptly committed suicide en masse.) Of course the most likely outcome that provides continuity of consciousness is unlikely to be pleasant: if I shot myself, I'd probably experience acquiring very bad injuries (and doctors exclaiming in delight over the opportunity to work out how someone can survive with half his head missing). The QTI assumes that the possibility of identical quantum states arising for any arbitrary collection of matter is 100% - which is true in the MWI (or any infinite collection of space-time slices which have the same laws of physics). So it actually seems at least a possible theory, given certain assumptions - but not easily testable in the sense that most theories try to be (i.e. third person testable, so to speak). Charles -Original Message- From: Jesse Mazer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, 7 September 2001 7:21 a.m. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: FIN insanity From: Charles Goodwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: FIN insanity Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 12:26:24 +1200 On the other hand I can't see how FIN is supposed to work, either. I *think* the argument runs something like this... Even if you have just had, say, an atom bomb dropped on you, there's still SOME outcomes of the schrodinger wave equation which just happen to lead to you suriviving the explosion. Although these are VERY unlikely - less likely than, say, my computer turning into a bowl of petunias - they do exist, and (given the MWI) they occur somewhere in the multiverse. For some reason I can't work out, all the copies who are killed by the bomb don't count. Only the very very very (etc) small proportion who miraculously survive do, and these are the only ones you personally experience. Is that a reasonable description of FIN? Ignoring statistical arguments, what is wrong with it? Charles What does FIN stand for, anyway? Is it just another version of the quantum theory of immortality? Anyway, the idea behind the QTI is not just that we arbitrarily decide copies who die don't count, rather it has to do with some supplemental assumptions about the laws governing first-person experience, namely: 1. Continuity of consciousness is real (see my recent post on this) 2. Continuity of consciousness does not depend on spatial or temporal continuity, only on some kind of pattern continuity between different observer moments. I won't try to explain #1 any more for now, but I'll try explaining #2 (Bruno Marchal is much better at this sort of thing). Basically, you want to imagine
RE: Conditional probability continuity of consciousness (was: Re: FIN Again)
-Original Message- From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] The appeal of that kind of model is based on the illusion that we can remember past experiences. We can't remember past experiences at all, actually. We only experience memory because of the _current_ way our brains are structured. Thank you for that, that's just what I was trying to put across when I was asked how observer moments seem to link up. (Although some semantically pedantic people might argue that We can't remember past experiences at all isn't true, because accessing our current brain state on the assumption that we have an accurate record of past experience *is* what we mean by remembering past experience. But I know what you mean, and I agree!) Charles
RE: FIN insanity
From: Charles Goodwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: FIN insanity Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 12:26:24 +1200 On the other hand I can't see how FIN is supposed to work, either. I *think* the argument runs something like this... Even if you have just had, say, an atom bomb dropped on you, there's still SOME outcomes of the schrodinger wave equation which just happen to lead to you suriviving the explosion. Although these are VERY unlikely - less likely than, say, my computer turning into a bowl of petunias - they do exist, and (given the MWI) they occur somewhere in the multiverse. For some reason I can't work out, all the copies who are killed by the bomb don't count. Only the very very very (etc) small proportion who miraculously survive do, and these are the only ones you personally experience. Is that a reasonable description of FIN? Ignoring statistical arguments, what is wrong with it? Charles What does FIN stand for, anyway? Is it just another version of the quantum theory of immortality? Anyway, the idea behind the QTI is not just that we arbitrarily decide copies who die don't count, rather it has to do with some supplemental assumptions about the laws governing first-person experience, namely: 1. Continuity of consciousness is real (see my recent post on this) 2. Continuity of consciousness does not depend on spatial or temporal continuity, only on some kind of pattern continuity between different observer moments. I won't try to explain #1 any more for now, but I'll try explaining #2 (Bruno Marchal is much better at this sort of thing). Basically, you want to imagine something like a star trek transporter, which disassembles me at one location and reassembles me at another. Will this mean that the original version of me died and that a doppelganger with false memories was created in his place? If computationalism/functionalism is true, it would seem the answer is no--who I am is a function of my pattern, not the particular particles I'm made of, so as long as the pattern is preserved my continuity of consciousness will be too (and after all, the molecules of my body all end up being totally replaced by new ones every few years anyway). But if this is true, the spatial/temporal separation of the two transporter chambers shouldn't matter--the imaging chamber could be on 21st century earth and the replication chamber in the Andromeda Galaxy in the year 5000, and I would still have a continuous experience of stepping into the imaging chamber and instantaneously finding myself in the replication chamber, wherever/whenever that may be. A naturally corrolary of this is that my stream of consciousness can be split--if there are two replication chambers which create copies of me just as I was when I stepped into the imaging chamber, then I before the experiment could experience becoming either of the two copies. All other things being equal, it seems reasonable to assume the chances of experiencing becoming one copy vs. the other are 50/50. But now suppose we do a similar duplication experiment, except we forget to plug in the second replication chamber, so only one copy is created. Should I assume that I have a 50% chance of becoming the real copy and a 50% chance of finding myself in an empty chamber, and thus being dead? That doesn't seem to make sense--after all, a duplication experiment where one chamber fails to create a copy is just like a standard Star-Trek-style transporter, and I assume that in that case I have a 100% chance of finding myself as the single copy. But it's easy to imagine extending this--suppose instead of failing to replicate anything, the second chamber replicates a copy of my body with the brain totally scrambled, so that the body dies pretty rapidly. Do I have a 50% chance of dying in this experiment because I become the copy with the scrambled brain? If only pattern continuity is important, the fact that this copy has a body which resembles mine shouldn't matter, its brain-pattern doesn't resemble mine in any way so there's no reason I should become that copy. It's not too hard to see how all this would be analogous to what would be happening all the time in a MWI-style multiverse. Why should I become those copies of me who experience death in various possible histories? There shouldn't be any more danger of that than there is of me suddenly becoming the dead body of a complete stranger, or of finding myself in a universe where I was never born in the first place and being dead for that reason. So, that's the basic argument for quantum immortality. The catch is in defining exactly what pattern continuity here means--what if a copy is replicated that's basically the same as me but with a few neurons scrambled, for example? Something like that happens every time I have a new experience, so it shouldn't make too much of a difference. But it's possible to imagine a continuum of cases where
Re: Conditional probability continuity of consciousness (was: Re: FIN Again)
, so you end up in neither. By another, you might correspond to a particular implementation of a computation - a mapping from physical to formal states, and in that case you I think you might end up in hell - but that's not random, it all depends on what the mapping is and what the physical situation is. This one is the closest to what you seem to want, but remember: a mapping can easily enter a region in which the formal states no longer apply or are no longer changing, and then you'd be dead. But as for your utility function - it should give the same results *regardless* of what definitions you use. Definitions are just a way of talking, and have nothing to do with whether the real situation that exists is one that you approve of. I talked about this question in an earlier post called 3 possible views of consciousness: 1. Consciousness is not real--our decision to call a system conscious or not is based only on subjective aesthetic criteria, like cuteness (Daniel Dennett's example). The only facts about reality are third-person facts, in this view. 2. Consciousness is real, but the feeling of continuity of consciousness over time (the 'flow of related thoughts in time' above) is not. In this view, only moments of experience exist, but nothing flows between these moments. 3. Consciousness is real, and so is continuity of consciousness over time. Proponents of this view may still believe that identity can split or merge though (think of many-worlds, or replicator experiments). Presumably you'd choose either 1 or 2, although I'm not quite sure which. I'm not sure just how real consciousness is. I'm basically a reductionist - that is, I think that the math contains all the facts about consciousness. I'd like to think that, even if it's really an illusion, then it's at least an interesting or important illusion. So I'm somewhere between #1 and #2. The only facts are those that are objectively true, and that includes some sort of facts about what it's like to be a particular OM. But do you think view #3 is crazy, or is it just quantum immortality specifically that you find crazy? #3 isn't crazy the way the FIN is, but it's wrong and as I said above it's based on the illusion of remembering past experiences. It would be possible to believe in #3 without believing in quantum immortality, of course...I do think that once you accept #3, as well as the splitting and merging of consciousness-streams, then are some thought-experiments which make quantum immortality very plausible. But they're only plausible if you already find view #3 to be plausible in the first place. No, even if you believe #3 there's no way the FIN could be plausible. I've explained that in other posts, but as you see, the idea is indeed mathematically incoherent - unless you just mean the conditional effective probability which a measure distribution defines by definition. And _that_ one, of course, leads to a finite expectation value for ones's observed age (that is, no immortality). The expectation value is a problem, but as I said it's possible to accept #3 without accepting quantum immortality. For example, there could be a null observer-moment (death) which any given observer-moment has a small probability of becoming at any given time, and this probability could become large given enough time. Another interesting possibility is that whatever conditional probability we choose will be nonzero for *any* pair of observer-moments, so that there is some tiny probability that my next observer-moment will be completely unlike my current one--in situations where the probability of my physical death is large (like observing myself falling off a cliff), perhaps the combined conditional probability of my next moment being fairly similar to my current one is smaller than the combined conditional probability of a dissimilar next moment, so that I may suddenly find myself waking up from a dream of falling as a totally different person in a different region of the multiverse. In this way my conscious experience could be infinite even if at any given time I find myself as a finite organism with a finite memory. In this case I can see no point to the whole construct. If you jump randomly to other people and lose all of your old memories - what's the point of being the original person vs. the other person? Finally, if conditional measure and global measure mutually determine each other in some way, there might be a way in which young observer-moments could have greater global measure than old ones. Imagine an experiment where I am duplicated, as in Bruno Marchal's example, once in Moscow and once in Washington. Then a year later, if a democrat wins the U.S. presidency, the Washington twin will be duplicated 1000 times; if a republican wins the presidency, the Moscow twin will be duplicated 1000 times. Even though this subsequent duplication
RE: Conditional probability continuity of consciousness (was: Re: FIN Again)
-Original Message- From: Jesse Mazer [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Well, I hope you'd agree that which observer-moment I am right now is not a matter of definition, but a matter of fact. My opinion is that the global measure on all observer-moments is not telling us something like the number of physical instantiations of each one, but rather the probability of *being* one particular observer-moment vs. some other one. I would be interested to hear what you think the measure means, though, since my version seems to require first-person facts which are separate from third-person facts (i.e., which observer-moment *I* am). I don't see how you can talk about the probability of being a particular observer moment. The probability is 1 at that moment! We don't get dropped into observer moments from some metaphysical realm (like Fred Hoyle's flashlight-and-pigeonholes analogy in October the 1st is too late) - we ARE those observer moments. It's a bit like the probability of me being born as me. The probability was 1, because otherwise I wouldn't be me! Similarly for this particular observer moment. Charles
Conditional probability continuity of consciousness (was: Re: FIN Again)
From: Jacques Mallah [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: FIN Again (was: Re: James Higgo) Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 17:51:46 -0400 From: Jesse Mazer [EMAIL PROTECTED] I don't understand your objection. It seems to me that it is perfectly coherent to imagine a TOE which includes both a universal objective measure on the set of all observer-moments and also a relative conditional probability which tells me what the probability is I'll have experience B in the future if I'm having experience A right now. You is just a matter of definition. As for the conditional effective probability of an observation with characteristics A given that it includes characteristics B, p(A|B), that is automatically defined as p(A|B) = M(A and B) / M(B). There is no room to have a rival relative conditional probability. (E.g. A = I think I'm in the USA at 12:00 today, B=I think I'm Bob.) Well, I hope you'd agree that which observer-moment I am right now is not a matter of definition, but a matter of fact. My opinion is that the global measure on all observer-moments is not telling us something like the number of physical instantiations of each one, but rather the probability of *being* one particular observer-moment vs. some other one. I would be interested to hear what you think the measure means, though, since my version seems to require first-person facts which are separate from third-person facts (i.e., which observer-moment *I* am). In any case, I'm pretty sure there's room in a TOE for a conditional probability which would not be directly deducible from the global probability distribution. Suppose I have a large population of individuals, and I survey them on various personal characteristics, like height, IQ, age, etc. Using the survey results I can create a global probability function which tells me, for example, what the likelihood is that a random individual is more than 5 feet tall. But If I then want to find out the conditional probability that a given individual over 5 feet tall weighs more than 150 pounds, there is no way to deduce this directly given only the global probability distribution. In this example it may be that p(A|B) = M(A and B) / M(B), but the point is that M(A and B) cannot be found simply by knowing M(A) and M(B). And a TOE could conceivably work other ways too. Suppose we have a large number of interconnected bodies of water, each flowing into one another at a constant rate so that the total amoung of water in any part stays constant over time. In that case you could have something like a global measure which would tell you the probability that a randomly selected water molecule will be found in a given body of water at a given time, but also a kind of conditional probability that a water molecule currently in river A will later be found in any one of the various other rivers that river A branches into. This would approximate the idea that my consciousness is in some sense flowing between different experiences, splitting and merging as it goes. Just as the path of a given molecule is determined by the geographical relationships between the various bodies of water, so the path of my conscious experience might be determined by some measure of the continuity between different observer-moments...even though an observer-moment corresponding to my brain 5 seconds from now and another one corresponding to your own brain at this very moment might have equal *global* measure, I would presumably be much more likely to flow into a future observer-moment which is more similar to my current one. Most generally, we can imagine that a TOE defines both a global measure on individual observer-moments, but also a conditional measure on ordered pairs of observer-moments, or perhaps longer ordered chains. There would probably be some kind of mathematical relation between the two types of measure, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be of the form p(A|B) = M(A and B) / M(B) as you said. Do you see anything inherently contradictory about this idea? self-sampling assumption--what does it mean to say that I should reason as if I had an equal probability of being any one of all possible observer-moments? It means - and I admit it does take a little thought here - _I want to follow a guessing procedure that, in general, maximizes the fraction of those people (who use that procedure) who get the right guess_. (Why would I want a more error-prone method?) So I use Bayesian reasoning with the best prior available, the uniform one on observer-moments, which maximizes the fraction of observer-moments who guess right. No soul-hopping in that reasoning, I assure you. I'm not sure it's possible to take a third-person perspective on the self-sampling assumption. For one thing, the reasoning only works if I assume *my* observer-moment is randomly selected--I can't use anyone else's or I may get incorrect results, as if I reasoned from Adam and Eve's
RE: FIN too
I'll have another go at explaining my position (maybe I'll spot a flaw in it if I keep examininig it long enough). Bayesian reasoning assumes (as far as I can see) that I should treat my present observer moment as typical. My objection to doing so is that this assumes the result you want to prove, because if my observer moment is typical and QTI is correct, then the likelihood of me experiencing a moment at which my age is less than infinity is infinitesimal. This either demonstrates that (1) my present observer moment is typical and QTI is wrong or (2) the present observer moment isn't typical and Bayesian reasoning is inappropriate ((2) doesn't imply that QTI is correct, of course, merely that it's compatible with observation). *Assuming* that QTI is correct, then the chances of you and me interacting at a typical observer moment (for either of us) is negligible. QTI guarantees that almost all interactions between observers will occur at highly non-typical observer moments, because (scary thought) for 99.999% of any given person's observer moments, the rest of the human race will be extinct. Hence Bayesian reasoning isn't appropriate because the fact that we're communicating with one another guarantees that at least one of us, and with overwhelming probability both of us, is experiencing highly atypical observer moments. The assumption of typicality can't be made without first checking that you're not dealing with a special case. To take an obvious example, if I was to apply Bayesian reasoning to myself I would be forced to assume that I am almost certainly a peasant of indeterminate sex living in the third world. Or more likely a beetle... Or even more likely a microbe (assuming microbes have observer moments). Which I believe isn't the case! (Even on those rare occassions when I argue with my better half, she very rarely calls me a microbe...) Charles PS - I could be a butterfly dreaming that I'm a man, I suppose... -Original Message- From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, 4 September 2001 2:32 p.m. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: FIN too From: Charles Goodwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Um, OK, I don't want to get into an infinite argument here. I guess we both understand the other's viewpoint. (For the record: I don't see any reason to accept QTI as correct, but think that *if* it is, it would fit in with the available (subjective) observational evidence - that being the point on which we differ. Um, no, I still don't understand your view. I think the point that Bayesian reasoning would work with 100% reliability, even though the FIN is technically compatible with the evidence, is perfectly clear. Any reason for disagreeing, I have no understanding of. It may help you to think of different moments of your life as being different observers (observer-moments). That's really just a matter of definition. - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/ _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
RE: mo' FIN
Jacques Mallah wrote: Actually I am still waiting to see the full UDA argument! I don't think you ever posted more than bits and pieces of it, without the precise definitions that I requested, and you referred people to papers written in French. But I'll check ... The full UDA appears at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m1726.html A better more recent version is in the conversation with Joel Dobrzelewski: see the main links at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m3044.html (note also that some people on the list seems to arrive independently to similar conclusions). (The older version in the list was called P-omega experience. I did explain my view, check the archive. But don't say that I believe in what you call comp. I never claimed to believe it, mainly because I have yet to see a clear definition of it. I believe in computationalism, meaning that computations (effectively) give rise to consciousness. The word survive appears nowhere in any definition of computationalism I might give. You *did* accept my way of presenting comp (saying yes to the brain surgeon proposing an artificial digital brain/body made at *some* level of description). You *do* give some meaning to survive, if only to prove us that comp immortality (QTI) entails that we should find ourself older than the expected age common for our species. More precisely, I don't see any 1st person view, other than as a description of what an observer-moment experiences. That's not too bad, and it is enough for the UDA. (the translation of the UDA in the language of a sound machine need a little more rigorous definition, possible with G and G*, we will probably come to that later). But the set of all such experiences is what the objective (which you might call 3rd person, but I don't) view describes. The objective truth has all the information, which we should guess as best we can. Both the thought experiences and the incompleteness phenomena can be used for explaining why the objective truth cannot have all the information. This is important and can be made completely precise. (something different but related happens in quantum self-reference, cf Albert's work). You say me (and thus, the 1st person concept) can't be defined. Maybe you have some idea of what you mean by it, but if you can't define it, there's no way you could ever convey that information to another person. that case, you might as well stop posting. First babies cannot define milk but can convey information about milk to another person. It is naive to believe we must define all the terms of our talk for using them. Second: me can be *both* interpreted from a 1 and 3 person pov. (pov = point of view). me can be precisely defined from a 3 pov: through a bet on a level of substitution. The fact that me cannot be defined from a first person pov does not entail that me cannot be made mathematically precise in a theory of the 1 person. I agree this is a subtil point (clearly ununderstood by people like Penrose or Lucas). We will see that the logic S4Grz is able to formalise the notion of informal and unformalisable proof!!! The trick is made simple once you realise the gap between truth and provability (captured by the gap between G and G* in the modal setting). My problem: logic is not very well known, but then I explain all details when people asks me so. I have little doubt that you pull some questionable tricks in reaching that conclusion, but here we get into the technical part that you have never fully explained on this list, I believe. Almost fully. The missing part are the non original part of my thesis: mainly Godel, Lob, Solovay theorems. I have begin recently a path toward such an explanation (diagonalisation 1: http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m3079.html). I intend to go slowly but surely ... [...] You have never given a precise definition, but you always have the word survive in there, so maybe when you translate the implications of comp into precise mathematics you in effect are effectively assuming that conclusion from the start. At some time I will explain that indeed there is no possible precise definition of survive. Still the word has a folk meaning precise *enough* to understand that comp entails the reversal psycho/physics. If you don't understand the word survive you should remain silent about any mortality/immortality question. To believe in mortality = to believe there is an experience x such that I don't survive x. To believe in immortality is to believe that for all experience I survive x. If you don't understand the word survive you should be agnostic about FIN (your term). Now I agree with you: it can be argued that the immortality is build in in comp. No problem with that. You should show then comp being false or inconsistent. It's not meant to be comical. Scientists always doubt that they really have the complete right answer, but one the other hand
RE: FIN too
Oh, I forgot my main problem with QTI :-) Basically it's to do with the rate at which decoherence spreads (presumably at the speed of light?) and the finite time it takes someone to die. So if you were shot (say) the QTI would predict that there was some point in the process of your body ceasing to operate at which some unlikely quantum processes separated branches of the multiverse in which you died to ones in which you remained alive (forever, presumably). The problem is working out exactly where that happens (I suspect it gets worse if you include relativistic considerations). Another question is what happens in cases of very violent death, e.g. beheading. After someone's head is cut off, so they say, it remains conscious for a few seconds (I can't see why it wouldn't). According to QTI it experiences being decapitated but then survives indefinitely - somehow . . . well, I'd like to hear what QTI supporters think happens next (from the pov of the victim). Are they magically translated into a non-decapitated version of themselves, and if so, how? Surely it can't be in the same quantum state that they're in? If not, do they experience indefinitely continued survival as a severed head, or . . . what??? Just curious! Charles -Original Message- From: Charles Goodwin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, 4 September 2001 1:42 p.m. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: FIN too Um, OK, I don't want to get into an infinite argument here. I guess we both understand the other's viewpoint. (For the record: I don't see any reason to accept QTI as correct, but think that *if* it is, it would fit in with the available (subjective) observational evidence - that being the point on which we differ. I also think that for QTI to be correct, a number of other things would have to hold - space-time would have to be quantised, objects in the same quantum state would have to be literally identical (no matter where they happened to be in the uni/multiverse) . . . and, either the multiverse has to exist, or our universe has to be infinite . . . and probably a few other points I can't think of right now!) Charles -Original Message- From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, 4 September 2001 1:12 p.m. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: FIN too From: Charles Goodwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Jacques Mallah wrote] But there's one exception: your brain can only hold a limited amount of information. So it's possible to be too old to remember how old you are. *Only if you are that old, do you have a right to not reject FIN on these grounds.* Are you that old? Yeah, that's one of my objections to QTI. Although perhaps add-on memory chips will become available one day :-) OK. (And even if the chips become available, you'd probably only be able to add a finite # before collapsing into a black hole.) Right. Do you think you are in an infinitesimal fraction, or in a typical fraction? Infinitesimal, if QTI is correct, otherwise fairly typical. Assuming QTI is correct and ignoring any other objections to it, it's *possible* for me to be in an infinitesimal fraction - in fact it's necessary. Right - which is why Bayesian reasoning falsifies FIN, but only with 100% reliability as opposed to complete reliability. but according to QTI I *must* pass through a phase when I see the unlikely bits, no matter how unlikely it is that a typical moment will fall into that phase. Even if I later spend 99.999% of my observer moments seeing the stars going out one by one, there still has to be that starting point! Right, again, that's why the reliability is just 100%. My (ahem) point is, though, that none of us ARE at a typical point (again, assuming QTI). In fact we're in a very atypical point, just as the era of stars might be a very atypical point in the history of the universe - but it's a point we (or the universe) HAVE TO PASS THROUGH to reach more typical points (e.g. very old, no stars left...). Hence it's consistent with QTI that we find ourselves passing through this point... Right, consistent with it but only 0% of the time, hence the Bayesian argument is to put 0 credence in the FIN rather than strictly no credence. I'm not arguing for QTI here, but I do think that you can't argue from finding yourself at a particular point on your world-line to that world-line having finite length, because you are guaranteed to find yourself at that particular point at some (ah) point. Right, which is why I'm (now) careful not to make *that* argument by arbritarily using one's current age to base a reference point on. (e.g. in my reply to Bruno.) Rather, I argue that from being at a point prior to some _natural reference point_ such as the can calculate my age crierion, one
Re: FIN insanity
Jacques Mallah wrote: From: Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED] There are different versions of QTI (let's not call it FIN). I'm certainly not going to call it a theory. Doing so lends it an a priori aura of legitimacy. Words mean things, as Newt Gingrich once said in one of his smarter moments. The most reasonable one (my version, of course) takes into account the possibility that you find yourself alive somewhere else in the universe, without any memory of the atomic bomb that exploded. I totally ignore the possibility that one could survive an atomic bomb exploding above one's head. My version doesn't imply that your a priory expected lifetime should be infinite. Your version may not imply immortality, but I don't really see how it's different from other versions (and thus why it doesn't). As I have written before, a person is just a computation being implemented somewhere. Suppose that the person has discovered that he suffers from a terminal ilness and he dies (the computation ends). Now in principle the person in question could have lived on if he wasn't diagnosed with this terminal ilness. Somewhere in the multiverse this person exists. Some time ago I wrote (I think on the FoR list) that the transformation from the old dying person to the new person is a continuous one. The process of death must involve the destruction of the brain. At some time the information that the person is dying will be lost to the person. The person might even think he is 20 years old while in reality he is 92. Anyway, the point is that his brain had stored so much information that adding new information would lead to an inconsistency. By dumping some of the information, the information left will be identical to the information in a similar brain somewhere else of a younger person, free from disease. I say: 1) If you are hurt in a car accident and the surgeon performes brain surgery and you recover fully, then you are the same person. OK, that's merely a matter of definition though. 2) You would also be the same person if the surgeon made a new brain identically to yours. I'm not sure what you mean here. The new brain would be the same as the old you, the old one would remain the same, the old one was destroyed, or what? Well, suppose that the damaged brain contains enough information to reconstruct the original one. It doesn't matter if you repair the old one or create a new one. 3) From 2) it follows that if your brain was first copied and then destroyed, you would become the copy. A matter of definition agin, but let me point out something important. If your brain is copied, then there is a causal link between the old brain and any copies. Thus it's quite possible for an extended implementation of a computation to start out in the old brain and end up in the copy, without violating the requirement that implementations obey the proper direct causal laws. 4) From 3) you can thus conclude that you will always experience yourself being alive, because copies of you always exist. I don't see how 4 is supposed to follow from 3. In any case, it's certainly not true that copies of you always exist. Rather, people who are structurally identical do exist, but they are not copies as they are not causally linked. Even if they were linked in the past, they have diverged on the level of causal relationships between your brain parts vs. their brain parts. I don't understand why it is necessary for one person to qualify as a copy of another iff there is a causal link. 5) It doesn't follow that you will experience surviving terrible accidents. If 4 were true, I don't see how 5 could be true. 5) is true because you can survive with memory loss (see above). You would be killed, but copies of you exist that never experienced the accident. Saibal
RE: FIN
Hi, I'm sorry, it's an accident. I keep hitting 'reply' rather than 'reply to all' and because of the way the list is set up, which means I reply to the person who posted the message. It's a bad habit, because other lists I post to allow you to just hit 'reply' and your message goes to the list. There's something in the email header which tells it where to send the reply to, apparently Apologies to anyone I've replied to directly, it wasn't intentional. Charles -Original Message- From: Brent Meeker [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Sunday, 2 September 2001 6:59 a.m. To: Everything-list Subject: Re: FIN Hello Jacques On 01-Sep-01, Jacques Mallah wrote: Hello. (This is not posted to the list as you just replied to me directly. If that was unintentional you can sent replies to the list, I'm just pointing it out.) Ok, although I would say to be more precise that you should identify yourself with an implementation of a computation. A computation must be performed (implemented) for it to give rise to consciousness. This seems incoherent. What's the point of a computational explanation of the world if it requires that the computation be implemented...in some super-world? The basic computational explanation is not of the world - it's of conscious observations. As for the arena where things get implemented - that could either be a physical world, or it could be Plato's realm of math. Either way makes little difference for these issues, but surely at least one of those exists. That an implementation might be in another physical world I can understand. I don't see how an implementation can be in Plato's realm of mathematics. In mathematics there are axioms and theorems and proofs - none of these imply any occurence in time. You might be able to impose an order on theorems (ala' Godel) and it might be possible to identify this with time (although I doubt this can work), but even so it is just a single order that is implicit - there is no way to distinguish two different implementations of this order. Brent Meeker The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. ---Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden
FW: FIN insanity
-Original Message- From: Saibal Mitra [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] There are different versions of QTI (let's not call it FIN). The most reasonable one (my version, of course) takes into account the possibility that you find yourself alive somewhere else in the universe, without any memory of the atomic bomb that exploded. I totally ignore the possibility that one could survive an atomic bomb exploding above one's head. My version doesn't imply that your a priory expected lifetime should be infinite. Death involves the destruction of your brain. But there are many brains in the universe which are almost identical to yours. Jacques says that you can't become one of them. I say: 1) If you are hurt in a car accident and the surgeon performes brain surgery and you recover fully, then you are the same person. 2) You would also be the same person if the surgeon made a new brain identically to yours. 3) From 2) it follows that if your brain was first copied and then destroyed, you would become the copy. 4) From 3) you can thus conclude that you will always experience yourself being alive, because copies of you always exist. 5) It doesn't follow that you will experience surviving terrible accidents. Saibal Ok, that's a similar argument to the one Frank Tipler used in 'The physics of immortality' (except that he allowed a simulation of a brain to have continuous consciousness with the original physical brain). Your version is more reasonable that Tiplers, imo, because it only assumes that 2 objects in the same quantum state *are* the same object (rather than an object and its simulation). There will almost certainly be objects in the same quantum state if the universe is infinite OR the MWI is correct, AND space-time really is quantised, AND quantum-identical objects really *are* the same object. This seems like a reasonable theory on the face of it. Hard to prove, though, unless you've had personal experience of living a *very* long time Charles
FW: FIN too
-Original Message- From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] The problem is that the probability isn't 0% that you'd find yourself at your current age (according to the QTI - assume I put that after every sentence!). Because you HAVE to pass through your current age to reach QTI-type ages, the probability of finding yourself at your current age at some point is 100%. At some point, yes. At a typical point? 0%. My (ahem) point is, though, that none of us ARE at a typical point (again, assuming QTI). In fact we're in a very atypical point, just as the era of stars might be a very atypical point in the history of the universe - but it's a point we (or the universe) HAVE TO PASS THROUGH to reach more typical points (e.g. very old, no stars left...). Hence it's consistent with QTI that we find ourselves passing through this point... I'm not arguing for QTI here, but I do think that you can't argue from finding yourself at a particular point on your world-line to that world-line having finite length, because you are guaranteed to find yourself at that particular point at some (ah) point. So I'm rejecting, not Bayesian logic per se, but the application of it to what (according to QTI) would be a very special (but still allowable) case. The basic problem is that we experience observer moments as a sequence. Hence we *must* experience the earlier moments before the later ones, and if we happen to come across QTI before we reach QTI-like observer moments then we might reject it for lack of (subjective) evidence. But that doesn't contradict QTI, which predicts that we have to pass through these earlier moments, and that we will observe everyone else doing so as well. I wish I could put that more clearly, or think of a decent analogy, but do you see what I mean? Our observations aren't actually *incompatible* with QTI, even if they do only cover an infinitsimal chunk of our total observer moments. Charles
RE: FIN too
From: Charles Goodwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Um, OK, I don't want to get into an infinite argument here. I guess we both understand the other's viewpoint. (For the record: I don't see any reason to accept QTI as correct, but think that *if* it is, it would fit in with the available (subjective) observational evidence - that being the point on which we differ. Um, no, I still don't understand your view. I think the point that Bayesian reasoning would work with 100% reliability, even though the FIN is technically compatible with the evidence, is perfectly clear. Any reason for disagreeing, I have no understanding of. It may help you to think of different moments of your life as being different observers (observer-moments). That's really just a matter of definition. - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/ _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
RE: FIN too
-Original Message- From: Russell Standish [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] This case bothers me too. The initial (or perhaps traditional) response is that consciousness is lost the instant blood pressure drops in the brain, a few hundred milliseconds after the neck is severed, thus the beheading is not experienced. However, there is some anecdotal evidence (eg the beheading of Lavoisier) that consciousness can survive up to 10-20 seconds after the neck is severed. Even if this is true, it still does not eliminate magical solutions, such as waking up Matrix-style in an alternative reality. Yesor in a tipler style afterlife inside some megacomputer trillions of years in the future (or equivalently, I suppose, somewhere else in the multiverse). Definitely starts to sound like an act of faith to believe that's what would happen, though Even if you lost consciousness a split second after having your head removed, QTI would still have to explain how you got from 'immediately after being beheaded' to anywhere else...! Charles
Re: FIN too
Charles Goodwin wrote: Another question is what happens in cases of very violent death, e.g. beheading. After someone's head is cut off, so they say, it remains conscious for a few seconds (I can't see why it wouldn't). According to QTI it experiences being decapitated but then survives indefinitely - somehow . . . well, I'd like to hear what QTI supporters think happens next (from the pov of the victim). Are they magically translated into a non-decapitated version of themselves, and if so, how? Surely it can't be in the same quantum state that they're in? If not, do they experience indefinitely continued survival as a severed head, or . . . what??? Just curious! Charles This case bothers me too. The initial (or perhaps traditional) response is that consciousness is lost the instant blood pressure drops in the brain, a few hundred milliseconds after the neck is severed, thus the beheading is not experienced. However, there is some anecdotal evidence (eg the beheading of Lavoisier) that consciousness can survive up to 10-20 seconds after the neck is severed. Even if this is true, it still does not eliminate magical solutions, such as waking up Matrix-style in an alternative reality. Cheers Dr. Russell Standish Director High Performance Computing Support Unit, Phone 9385 6967, 8308 3119 (mobile) UNSW SYDNEY 2052 Fax 9385 6965, 0425 253119 () Australia[EMAIL PROTECTED] Room 2075, Red Centrehttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02
RE: FIN too
Charles Goodwin, [EMAIL PROTECTED], writes: Another question is what happens in cases of very violent death, e.g. beheading. After someone's head is cut off, so they say, it remains conscious for a few seconds (I can't see why it wouldn't). According to QTI it experiences being decapitated but then survives indefinitely - somehow . . . well, I'd like to hear what QTI supporters think happens next (from the pov of the victim). Are they magically translated into a non-decapitated version of themselves, and if so, how? Surely it can't be in the same quantum state that they're in? If not, do they experience indefinitely continued survival as a severed head, or . . . what??? Just curious! The answer is very simple. The future that is experienced is the least unlikely that allows for continuation of consciousness. (More precisely, the probability distribution over those futures where you are still alive determines the relative probability of experience given that you find yourself alive, a tautology.) So, your head has been cut off and clunk, you fall on the ground, getting a nasty knock on the head, not to mention the neck soreness and missing body. How could you survive? There are several alternatives. It is possible that entropy ceases to operate in your brain, and that you continue to think despite the loss of blood flow. This however would be an astronomically unlikely future. More likely, aliens or supernatural intelligences of some sort would intervene to keep you alive. Alternatively, it would turn out that you were playing a futuristic video game where you had temporarily blanked out your memory to make it more realistic. Then next thing you see is Game Over. These possibilities makes most sense if you consider the set of all physical systems where you have the same mental state, rather than just the systems which are part of your corner of the QM multiverse. There are universes where aliens are monitoring the earth, unknown to its inhabitants, and the mental states of residents of earth in such universes will be identical to the states of people in some other universes without aliens. When you find yourself with head chopped off, you don't know which class of universe you are in. I would argue that there is no fact of the matter about it (this is our old argument about whether your consciousness is tied to a specific instance of the many which instantiate it). Hence you will experience the most likely continuation which is consistent with your mental experiences in any branch of the QM universe which could produce that experience. I think we all agree with the objective facts of the situation here. For any observer moment there exist other observer moments which are subjectively in its future (equivalently, for which it is subjectively in the past). The question is whether to interpret this fact as meaning continued survival. Ultimately that is a matter of definitions. Hal Finney
RE: FIN too
From: Charles Goodwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Jacques Mallah wrote] But there's one exception: your brain can only hold a limited amount of information. So it's possible to be too old to remember how old you are. *Only if you are that old, do you have a right to not reject FIN on these grounds.* Are you that old? Yeah, that's one of my objections to QTI. Although perhaps add-on memory chips will become available one day :-) OK. (And even if the chips become available, you'd probably only be able to add a finite # before collapsing into a black hole.) Right. Do you think you are in an infinitesimal fraction, or in a typical fraction? Infinitesimal, if QTI is correct, otherwise fairly typical. Assuming QTI is correct and ignoring any other objections to it, it's *possible* for me to be in an infinitesimal fraction - in fact it's necessary. Right - which is why Bayesian reasoning falsifies FIN, but only with 100% reliability as opposed to complete reliability. but according to QTI I *must* pass through a phase when I see the unlikely bits, no matter how unlikely it is that a typical moment will fall into that phase. Even if I later spend 99.999% of my observer moments seeing the stars going out one by one, there still has to be that starting point! Right, again, that's why the reliability is just 100%. My (ahem) point is, though, that none of us ARE at a typical point (again, assuming QTI). In fact we're in a very atypical point, just as the era of stars might be a very atypical point in the history of the universe - but it's a point we (or the universe) HAVE TO PASS THROUGH to reach more typical points (e.g. very old, no stars left...). Hence it's consistent with QTI that we find ourselves passing through this point... Right, consistent with it but only 0% of the time, hence the Bayesian argument is to put 0 credence in the FIN rather than strictly no credence. I'm not arguing for QTI here, but I do think that you can't argue from finding yourself at a particular point on your world-line to that world-line having finite length, because you are guaranteed to find yourself at that particular point at some (ah) point. Right, which is why I'm (now) careful not to make *that* argument by arbritarily using one's current age to base a reference point on. (e.g. in my reply to Bruno.) Rather, I argue that from being at a point prior to some _natural reference point_ such as the can calculate my age crierion, one can conclude that one's world-line is finite. So I'm rejecting, not Bayesian logic per se, but the application of it to what (according to QTI) would be a very special (but still allowable) case. There are no grounds to reject it in this case, since it would be reliable almost all of the time. There's no difference between using a method because it works for most people vs. using a method because it works for me most of the time. At any given time, it works for most people, too. The basic problem is that we experience observer moments as a sequence. Hence we *must* experience the earlier moments before the later ones, and if we happen to come across QTI before we reach QTI-like observer moments then we might reject it for lack of (subjective) evidence. But that doesn't contradict QTI, which predicts that we have to pass through these earlier moments, and that we will observe everyone else doing so as well. I wish I could put that more clearly, or think of a decent analogy, but do you see what I mean? Our observations aren't actually *incompatible* with QTI, even if they do only cover an infinitsimal chunk of our total observer moments. Indeed so, I know only too well what you mean. This has come up more than once on the list. I hope you understand why I say it's irrelevant. _Just like_ in the A/B case, it would be wrong to not use Bayesian reasoning just because seeing A is, yes, compatible with both #1 and #2. Seeing A could even have been a way to confirm theory #2, if the rival theory #1 hadn't existed. The bottom line is that Bayesian reasoning usually works for most people. - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/ _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
Re: FIN insanity
From: Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED] There are different versions of QTI (let's not call it FIN). I'm certainly not going to call it a theory. Doing so lends it an a priori aura of legitimacy. Words mean things, as Newt Gingrich once said in one of his smarter moments. The most reasonable one (my version, of course) takes into account the possibility that you find yourself alive somewhere else in the universe, without any memory of the atomic bomb that exploded. I totally ignore the possibility that one could survive an atomic bomb exploding above one's head. My version doesn't imply that your a priory expected lifetime should be infinite. Your version may not imply immortality, but I don't really see how it's different from other versions (and thus why it doesn't). I say: 1) If you are hurt in a car accident and the surgeon performes brain surgery and you recover fully, then you are the same person. OK, that's merely a matter of definition though. 2) You would also be the same person if the surgeon made a new brain identically to yours. I'm not sure what you mean here. The new brain would be the same as the old you, the old one would remain the same, the old one was destroyed, or what? 3) From 2) it follows that if your brain was first copied and then destroyed, you would become the copy. A matter of definition agin, but let me point out something important. If your brain is copied, then there is a causal link between the old brain and any copies. Thus it's quite possible for an extended implementation of a computation to start out in the old brain and end up in the copy, without violating the requirement that implementations obey the proper direct causal laws. 4) From 3) you can thus conclude that you will always experience yourself being alive, because copies of you always exist. I don't see how 4 is supposed to follow from 3. In any case, it's certainly not true that copies of you always exist. Rather, people who are structurally identical do exist, but they are not copies as they are not causally linked. Even if they were linked in the past, they have diverged on the level of causal relationships between your brain parts vs. their brain parts. 5) It doesn't follow that you will experience surviving terrible accidents. If 4 were true, I don't see how 5 could be true. - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/ _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
Re: FIN
Hello Jacques On 01-Sep-01, Jacques Mallah wrote: Hello. (This is not posted to the list as you just replied to me directly. If that was unintentional you can sent replies to the list, I'm just pointing it out.) Ok, although I would say to be more precise that you should identify yourself with an implementation of a computation. A computation must be performed (implemented) for it to give rise to consciousness. This seems incoherent. What's the point of a computational explanation of the world if it requires that the computation be implemented...in some super-world? The basic computational explanation is not of the world - it's of conscious observations. As for the arena where things get implemented - that could either be a physical world, or it could be Plato's realm of math. Either way makes little difference for these issues, but surely at least one of those exists. That an implementation might be in another physical world I can understand. I don't see how an implementation can be in Plato's realm of mathematics. In mathematics there are axioms and theorems and proofs - none of these imply any occurence in time. You might be able to impose an order on theorems (ala' Godel) and it might be possible to identify this with time (although I doubt this can work), but even so it is just a single order that is implicit - there is no way to distinguish two different implementations of this order. Brent Meeker The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference. ---Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden
RE: FIN too
Jacques Mallah wrote: It's nice that you reject FIN! Of course, those who support it can give (and have given) no reason ... Surely this is an exageration. I recall that I am still waiting for you showing a flaw in the UDA (the Joel version). But here you betraye yourself: ... since it's a nonsensical belief. You admit not having read the reasons/explanations we propose because you know at the start it's a nonsensical belief!!! You are begging the question since the beginning. But I am still waiting *you* explain me how in the W M duplication, you can both still believe in comp and pretend the question of what I will feel is nonsense. Oh yes I remember, you don't see the difference between 1 and 3 person point of view ... Like some physicist you tranform the methodological evacuation of the subject in an ontological dogma. Indeed I see you say that words like me or you are mere definition. I believe the contrary, from the 1 person point of view, the word me is not even definissable. That is what makes grandma psychology not really intuitive in the multiplication settings, but that is why I replace it eventually by the self-reference logics where the consistency of comp immortality (and so at least the sensicalness) is beyond doubt. Of course I have infinite doubt about that immortality, but I have no doubt comp entails it logicaly/arithmeticaly. About your saying you are sane, at first i take it for an attempt being comical. Your last answer to Hal Finney is really uncomical. Scientist always doubt ... You talk like you have certainty on our subject matter, which as Hal said is certainly not easy (not easy at all). Also I (re)read you implementation paper where, as I said, you definitely and admittedly don't have solved the implementation problem, but then why do you injuriate us with seemingly certainties? I'm also less and less sure bayesian reasoning works in our mathematically infinite context ... Bruno
Re: FIN insanity
Charles Goodwin wrote: -Original Message- From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] On the other hand I can't see how FIN is supposed to work, either. I *think* the argument runs something like this... Even if you have just had, say, an atom bomb dropped on you, there's still SOME outcomes of the schrodinger wave equation which just happen to lead to you suriviving the explosion. Although these are VERY unlikely - less likely than, say, my computer turning into a bowl of petunias - they do exist, and (given the MWI) they occur somewhere in the multiverse. For some reason I can't work out, all the copies who are killed by the bomb don't count. Only the very very very (etc) small proportion who miraculously survive do, and these are the only ones you personally experience. Is that a reasonable description of FIN? Ignoring statistical arguments, what is wrong with it? There are different versions of QTI (let's not call it FIN). The most reasonable one (my version, of course) takes into account the possibility that you find yourself alive somewhere else in the universe, without any memory of the atomic bomb that exploded. I totally ignore the possibility that one could survive an atomic bomb exploding above one's head. My version doesn't imply that your a priory expected lifetime should be infinite. Death involves the destruction of your brain. But there are many brains in the universe which are almost identical to yours. Jacques says that you can't become one of them. I say: 1) If you are hurt in a car accident and the surgeon performes brain surgery and you recover fully, then you are the same person. 2) You would also be the same person if the surgeon made a new brain identically to yours. 3) From 2) it follows that if your brain was first copied and then destroyed, you would become the copy. 4) From 3) you can thus conclude that you will always experience yourself being alive, because copies of you always exist. 5) It doesn't follow that you will experience surviving terrible accidents. Saibal
RE: FIN too
From: Charles Goodwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] you can't apply any sort of statistical argument to your own experience unless you assume that you're a typical observer. But if you do that you're just assuming the result you want. Not so. You don't assume you're typical exactly, just that you are more likely to be typical. You have no choice but to believe that, or else you reject basic Bayesian logic. My objections to the QTI are more along the lines of how the mechanism is supposed to work - why can't you experience your own death, or just stop having experiences altogether, in 99.9(etc)% of the universes that contain you? It's nice that you reject FIN! Of course, those who support it can give (and have given) no reason, since it's a nonsensical belief. From: Jacques Mallah [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] The problem is that the probability isn't 0% that you'd find yourself at your current age (according to the QTI - assume I put that after every sentence!). Because you HAVE to pass through your current age to reach QTI-type ages, the probability of finding yourself at your current age at some point is 100%. At some point, yes. At a typical point? 0%. Using your argument (assuming QTI...) then your chances of finding yourself at ANY age would be 0%. This imples to me that the SSA can't be used in this case, rather than that QTI *must* be wrong. Nope! It's just that with FIN, your expected age diverges. If you want to say that's impossible, fine with me. FIN is logically impossible for a sane person to believe! But there's one exception: your brain can only hold a limited amount of information. So it's possible to be too old to remember how old you are. *Only if you are that old, do you have a right to not reject FIN on these grounds.* Are you that old? (Of course, you must still reject it on other grounds!) After all whether QTI is correct or not, you can imagine that it is and see what the results would be; and one result is that you will find yourself (at some point) having any age from 0 to infinity, which is consistent with your current observations. Consistent with them, but not nearly as likely in the FIN case. Remember Bayes' theorem: the posterior favored hypothesis is the one that would be more likely to predict your observations. That's OK so far. And it turns out correctly for most cases (i.e. 99.(etc)% of observers WILL turn out to have ages of infinity (if QTI etc)). But an infinitesimal fraction won't - including everyone you observe around you (the multiverse is very very very (keep typing very til doomsday) big! (assuming MWI)). Right. Do you think you are in an infinitesimal fraction, or in a typical fraction? In the same way, the SSA helps you guess things. It's just a procedure to follow which usually helps the people that use it to make correct guesses. It doesn't seem to help in this case though. I don't need to guess my age, it's a given. Maybe the following example will help. Suppose there are two possibilities: 1. 90% of people see A, 10% see B 2. 10% of people see A, 90% see B You see A. But you want to know whether #1 or #2 is true. A priori, you feel that they are equally likely to be true. Should you throw up your hands simply because both #1 and #2 are both consistent with your observation? No. So use Bayes' theorem as follows: p(1|A) = [p(A|1) p_0(1)] / [p(A|1) p_0(1) + p(A|2) p_0(2)] = [ (.9) (.5) ] / [ (.9) (.5) + (.1) (.5) ] = .9 So you now think #1 is 90% likely to be true, if you use this procedure. So you will guess #1. OK, lets try and check to see if this procedure is good. If #1 is true then 90% of people who use the procedure guess #1 (right). If #2 is true then 10% of people who use the procedure guess #1 (wrong). Well I'd say that's pretty good, and also the best you can do. I gotta go. - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/ _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
Re: FIN Again (was: Re: James Higgo)
From: Jesse Mazer [EMAIL PROTECTED] I don't understand your objection. It seems to me that it is perfectly coherent to imagine a TOE which includes both a universal objective measure on the set of all observer-moments and also a relative conditional probability which tells me what the probability is I'll have experience B in the future if I'm having experience A right now. You is just a matter of definition. As for the conditional effective probability of an observation with characteristics A given that it includes characteristics B, p(A|B), that is automatically defined as p(A|B) = M(A and B) / M(B). There is no room to have a rival relative conditional probability. (E.g. A = I think I'm in the USA at 12:00 today, B=I think I'm Bob.) In statistics we have both absolute and conditional probability, so what's wrong with having the same thing in a TOE? In fact there is no choice but to have conditional probability - as long as it's the one that the absolute measure distribution automatically defines. I suppose one objection might be that once we have an objective measure, we understand everything we need to know about why I find myself having the types of experiences I do Indeed so. and that defining an additional conditional probability measure on the set of all observer-moments would be purely epiphenomenal and inelegant. Is that what your problem with the idea is? It's not just inelegant. It's impossible, if by additional you mean one that's not the automatic one. self-sampling assumption--what does it mean to say that I should reason as if I had an equal probability of being any one of all possible observer-moments? It means - and I admit it does take a little thought here - _I want to follow a guessing procedure that, in general, maximizes the fraction of those people (who use that procedure) who get the right guess_. (Why would I want a more error-prone method?) So I use Bayesian reasoning with the best prior available, the uniform one on observer-moments, which maximizes the fraction of observer-moments who guess right. No soul-hopping in that reasoning, I assure you. if I am about to step into a machine that will replicate one copy of me in heaven and one copy in hell, then as I step into the imaging chamber I will be in suspense about where I will find myself a moment from now, and if the conditional probability of each possible future observer-moment is 50% given my current observer-moment, then I will interpret that as a 50/50 chance that I'm about to experience torture or bliss. That depends on the definition of you. In any case, one copy will be happy (the one partying with the succubi in hell) and the other will be sad (the one stuck hanging out with Christians). So your utility function should be about even. I assume you'd care about both future copies at that point. Surely you agree that there is nothing *mathematically* incoherent about defining both absolute and conditional probability measures on the set of all observer-moments. So what's your basis for calling the idea crazy? I've explained that in other posts, but as you see, the idea is indeed mathematically incoherent - unless you just mean the conditional effective probability which a measure distribution defines by definition. And _that_ one, of course, leads to a finite expectation value for ones's observed age (that is, no immortality). - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/ _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
RE: FIN
Hi, I have just joined this list after seeing it mentioned on the Fabric of Reality list Would someone mind briefly explaining what FIN is (or at least what the letters stand for)? Is it some version of QTI (Quantum theory of immortality) ? Assuming it *is* related to QTI... Why should a typical observer find himself to be older than the apparent lifetime of his species? Given that survival for indefinite time becomes thermodynamically unlikely (TU) after some age (i.e. has a measure incredibly close to zero compared to other outcomes for anyone except the observer concerned) - say this age is 120 for a human being, then he still has to live through 120 years to get there. But most of his copies in the multiverse (you are assuming MWI for this argument, I assume?) will in fact die at a reasonable age, so *very* few observeres are going to notice the TU versions of anyone else. So the only way to actually experience this phenomenon is to live to be that old yourself. I must ask, though, what makes you think that a typical observer ISN'T much older than the lifetime of his species would allow? Given that you can't observe anyone but yourself in this state (or it's TU that you ever will) (and I'm assuming you haven't reached 120 yet), you can't really use a self-sampling argument on this, surely? if FIN isn't related to QTI (it appears to be from the stuff I'm replying to but you never know) please ignore the above comments :-) Charles -Original Message- From: Saibal Mitra [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, 30 August 2001 9:05 p.m. To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: FIN Jacques Mallah wrote: From: Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jacques Mallah wrote: `` I have repeated pointed out the obvious consequence that if that were true, then a typical observer would find himself to be much older than the apparent lifetime of his species would allow; the fact that you do not find yourself so old gives their hypothesis a probability of about 0 that it is the truth. However, they hold fast to their incomprehensible beliefs.´´ According to FIN, however, the probability of being alive at all is almost zero, which contradicts our experience of being alive. Whatchya mean? I wouldn't mind acquiring a new argument against FIN to add to the ones I give, but your statement doesn't appear to make any sense. You wrote earlier that consciousness can't be transferred to a copy. But consciousness isn't transferred, the copies had the same consciousness already because they were identical. I would say: I exist because somewhere I am computed. You appear to say that (forgive me if I am wrong) I must identify myself with one computation. Even an identical computation performed somewhere else will have a different identity. My objection is that the brain is constantly changing due to various processes. The typical timescales of these processes is about a millisecond. FIN thus predicts that I shouldn't find myself alive after a few milliseconds. Saibal
Re: FIN
Jacques Mallah wrote: From: Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jacques Mallah wrote: `` I have repeated pointed out the obvious consequence that if that were true, then a typical observer would find himself to be much older than the apparent lifetime of his species would allow; the fact that you do not find yourself so old gives their hypothesis a probability of about 0 that it is the truth. However, they hold fast to their incomprehensible beliefs.´´ According to FIN, however, the probability of being alive at all is almost zero, which contradicts our experience of being alive. Whatchya mean? I wouldn't mind acquiring a new argument against FIN to add to the ones I give, but your statement doesn't appear to make any sense. You wrote earlier that consciousness can't be transferred to a copy. But consciousness isn't transferred, the copies had the same consciousness already because they were identical. I would say: I exist because somewhere I am computed. You appear to say that (forgive me if I am wrong) I must identify myself with one computation. Even an identical computation performed somewhere else will have a different identity. My objection is that the brain is constantly changing due to various processes. The typical timescales of these processes is about a millisecond. FIN thus predicts that I shouldn't find myself alive after a few milliseconds. Saibal
Re: FIN
From: Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED] You wrote earlier that consciousness can't be transferred to a copy. But consciousness isn't transferred, the copies had the same consciousness already because they were identical. No, they weren't _identical_. They were different people, who happened to have the same type of experiences and the same brain design. I would say: I exist because somewhere I am computed. You appear to say that (forgive me if I am wrong) I must identify myself with one computation. Even an identical computation performed somewhere else will have a different identity. Ok, although I would say to be more precise that you should identify yourself with an implementation of a computation. A computation must be performed (implemented) for it to give rise to consciousness. At this point I would like to reiterate something I have stated in the past. We all agree, I think, that not all computations have the same measure associated with them. But what you don't seem to realize is the implication of that fact: the mere existance of the abstract computation is not what is associated with measure of consciousness, so the number of implementations must be what determines the measure. That's why leaping is a necessary part of the Fallacious Immortality Nonsense (FIN). The mind must be associated with an implementation, and if it termintates that measure then is said to (in effect) leap to the remaining implementations. (Although, as I have also said, in that case the remaining implemementations would really be of a different computation.) This also means that knowing the current situation would not be enough, for one who believes the FIN, to in principle determine the measure distribution either at that time or any time in the future. In other words, the FIN requires mind-like hidden variables. the brain is constantly changing due to various processes. The typical timescales of these processes is about a millisecond. True. FIN thus predicts that I shouldn't find myself alive after a few milliseconds. I'm guessing here that you misunderstood what I meant by FIN. By FIN I mean that belief which some have called QTI. So I guess you are attacking my position, but I don't see on what grounds. Suppose that your current implementation is indeed localized in time, and that at other moments you are considered to be a different person. (It's really just a matter a definition, especially if input is allowed.) So what? All that means is that the old you sees only that moment. Now there is a new you seeing this moment. So if you want to just define yourself to be a one-moment guy, then indeed you are no longer with the living. By the same token, the would be a new guy in your body and (hypothetically, not that you would) he'd be the one typing nonsense like I'm still here. - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/ _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
RE: FIN too
From: Charles Goodwin [EMAIL PROTECTED] Hi, I have just joined this list after seeing it mentioned on the Fabric of Reality list Hi. BTW, what's up on the FOR list? Ever see anything interesting there? I thought the book sucked except for chapter 2 (I think; the one explaining the MWI), but at least there are some MWIers on that list I would think. Would someone mind briefly explaining what FIN is (or at least what the letters stand for)? Is it some version of QTI (Quantum theory of immortality) ? Yes, any version of QTI is FIN. Why should a typical observer find himself to be older than the apparent lifetime of his species? I guess you mean assuming FIN, why ... so *very* few observeres are going to notice the TU versions of anyone else. So the only way to actually experience this phenomenon is to live to be that old yourself. Right ... I must ask, though, what makes you think that a typical observer ISN'T much older than the lifetime of his species would allow? I'm not so old, but if FIN were true, the effective chance of me being old would be 100%. So by Bayesian reasoning, it must be false. Given that you can't observe anyone but yourself in this state (or it's TU that you ever will) (and I'm assuming you haven't reached 120 yet), you can't really use a self-sampling argument on this, surely? On the contrary, you do use a SSA. After all, you will never (for any question) have more than the one data point for use in the SSA. But with a probability of 0% or 100%, that's plenty! It means - and I admit it does take a little thought here - _I want to follow a guessing procedure that, in general, maximizes the fraction of those people (who use that procedure) who get the right guess_. (Why would I want a more error-prone method?) So I use Bayesian reasoning with the best prior available, the uniform one on observer-moments, which maximizes the fraction of observer-moments who guess right. No soul-hopping in that reasoning, I assure you. I'm sorry, I still don't see how that applies to me. If I know which observer moments I'm in (e.g. I know how old I am) why should I reason as though I don't? Because you want to know things, don't you? It's no different from any Bayesian reasoning, in that regard. Suppose you know that you just flipped a coin 10 times in a row, and it landed on heads all ten times. Now you can apply Bayesian reasoning to guess whether it is a 2-headed coin, or a regular coin. How to do it? p(2-headed|got 10 heads) = [p(got 10 heads|2-headed) p_0(2-headed)] / N p(1-headed|got 10 heads) = [p(got 10 heads|1-headed) p_0(1-headed)] / N where N = p(got 10 heads) is the normalization factor so that these two conditional probabilities sum to 1 (they are the only possibilities). That's a standard use of Bayes' theorem. But - whoa there - what's the p(got 10 heads) and the like? You already _know_ you got 10 heads, so why not just set p(got 10 heads) to 1? Obviously, you consider the counterfactual case of (didn't get 10 heads) for a reason - that is, to help you guess something about the coin. In the same way, the SSA helps you guess things. It's just a procedure to follow which usually helps the people that use it to make correct guesses. - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/ _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
Re: FIN
. Eventually one notices how thoughts interact. One even experiences pure awareness irrespective of the five senses. One develops senses in terms of pure abstract creations. One in effect creates senses with thoughts. From observations made with the new senses, one creates new ones. This process can be optimized into a continuous flow. One might dare to consider that if consciousness is already infinite, but simply unrealized, that he can simple imagine an arrival point without considering the method for arriving there. Meditating upon this hypothetical point using the thought chaining method outlined, one does arrive somewhere. If my theory is correct, the intelligence already there, will answer the request of the observer focal point. The observer merges with the entire process required to deliver the conscious focal point to the desired arrival point. I offer this above description and exercise as a method to collect more data. I feel if one imposes to many expectations in terms of theories and logic that they effectively box themselves in by what they expect. Robert W. Saibal Mitra wrote: Jacques Mallah wrote: From: Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jacques Mallah wrote: `` I have repeated pointed out the obvious consequence that if that were true, then a typical observer would find himself to be much older than the apparent lifetime of his species would allow; the fact that you do not find yourself so old gives their hypothesis a probability of about 0 that it is the truth. However, they hold fast to their incomprehensible beliefs.´´ According to FIN, however, the probability of being alive at all is almost zero, which contradicts our experience of being alive. Whatchya mean? I wouldn't mind acquiring a new argument against FIN to add to the ones I give, but your statement doesn't appear to make any sense. You wrote earlier that consciousness can't be transferred to a copy. But consciousness isn't transferred, the copies had the same consciousness already because they were identical. I would say: I exist because somewhere I am computed. You appear to say that (forgive me if I am wrong) I must identify myself with one computation. Even an identical computation performed somewhere else will have a different identity. My objection is that the brain is constantly changing due to various processes. The typical timescales of these processes is about a millisecond. FIN thus predicts that I shouldn't find myself alive after a few milliseconds. Saibal _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: FIN Again (was: Re: James Higgo)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jacques Mallah writes: The problem comes when some people consider death in this context. I'll try to explain the insane view on this, but since I am not myself insane I will probably not do so to the satisfaction of those that are. I have mixed feelings about this line of reasoning, but I can offer some arguments in favor of it. I guess you mean in favor of FIN. How about against it too, since you have mixed feelings? The insane view however holds that the mind of the killed twin somehow leaps into the surviving twin at the moment he would have been killed. Thus, except for the effect on other people who might have known the twins, the apparent death is of no consequence. It's not that the mind leaps. That would imply that minds have location, wouldn't it? And spatial limits? But that notion doesn't work well. Mind is not something that is localized in the universe in the way that physical objects are. You can't pin down the location of a mind. Where in our brains is mind located? In the glial cells? In the neurons? The whole neuron, or just the synapse? It doesn't make sense to imagine that you can assign a numerical value to each point in the brain which represents its degree of mind-ness. Location is not a property of mind. A computationalist would say that the mind is due to the functioning of the brain, and thus is located where the parts that function are. But this is totally irrelevant. Suffice it to say that a mind is associated with that brain, while a different mind would be associated with a different brain. Hence we cannot speak of minds leaping. I remind you that _I_ never said they leap, could leap, or that such a thing is logically possible at all. I said only that the insane hold such a view, which many posters on this list do. Whatever they may mean by what they say, the effect is best described as saying they think minds leap. It makes more sense to think of mind as a relational phenomenon, like greater than or next to, but enormously more complicated. In that sense, if there are two identical brains, then they both exhibit the same relational properties. That means that the mind is the same in both brains. It's not that there are two minds each located in a brain, but rather that all copies of that brain implement the mind. Nope. That make no (0) sense at all. Sure, you could _define_ a mind to be some computation, as you seem to want, rather than being a specific implementation of that computation. But that's a rather silly definition, since it's a specific implementation that would be associated with conscious thinking of a particular brain, and thus with measure. Of course, even a twin who dies could never have the same computation as one that lived, since HALT is obviously a significant difference in the computation. Further support for this model can be found by considering things from the point of view of that mind. Let it consider the question, which brain am I in at this time? Which location in the universe do I occupy? There is no way for the mind to give a meaningful, unique response to this question. There's no way to know for sure, you mean. OK, I agree with that. You can still guess with high confidence. In any case, there's still a fact of the matter, regardless of whether you know that fact. Any answer will be both wrong and right. That makes no sense. The answer will be either wrong XOR right, for a particular mind; but you can't know for sure which of those minds is you. Hence you use indexical Bayesian reasoning or SSA. In this model, if the number of brains increases or decreases, the mind will not notice, it will not feel a change. Surviving minds won't notice a change. Dead minds won't feel a thing, which is the reason death sucks. No introspection will reveal the number of implementations of itself that exist in a universe or a multiverse. True, although with the SSA you can make some reasonable guesses. This is only dangerous if the belief is wrong, of course. The contrary belief could be said to be dangerous in its way, if it were wrong as well. (For example, it might lead to an urgent desire to build copies.) Even supposing the logical belief to be wrong - what's so dangerous about building copies? In any case, that would require a lot more tech than we have. I have repeated pointed out the obvious consequence that if that were true, then a typical observer would find himself to be much older than the apparent lifetime of his species would allow; the fact that you do not find yourself so old gives their hypothesis a probability of about 0 that it is the truth. However, they hold fast to their incomprehensible beliefs. This is a different argument and has nothing to do with the idea of leaping, which is mostly what I want to take issue with. Sure it has to do with it, because it proves
Re: FIN
From: Saibal Mitra [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jacques Mallah wrote: `` I have repeated pointed out the obvious consequence that if that were true, then a typical observer would find himself to be much older than the apparent lifetime of his species would allow; the fact that you do not find yourself so old gives their hypothesis a probability of about 0 that it is the truth. However, they hold fast to their incomprehensible beliefs.´´ According to FIN, however, the probability of being alive at all is almost zero, which contradicts our experience of being alive. Whatchya mean? I wouldn't mind acquiring a new argument against FIN to add to the ones I give, but your statement doesn't appear to make any sense. - - - - - - - Jacques Mallah ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate I know what no one else knows - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/ _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
QTI/FIN
Jacques Mallah wrote: `` I have repeated pointed out the obvious consequence that if that were true, then a typical observer would find himself to be much older than the apparent lifetime of his species would allow; the fact that you do not find yourself so old gives their hypothesis a probability of about 0 that it is the truth. However, they hold fast to their incomprehensible beliefs.´´ According to FIN, however,the probability of being alive at all is almost zero, which contradicts our experience of being alive. Saibal
