Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 28/06/07, Niels-Jeroen Vandamme <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
An interesting thought experiment: if the universe is infinite,
according to
a ballpark estimate there would be an exact copy of you at a distance of
10^(10^29) m: because of the Bekenstein bound of the information of
matter,
there are only a limited (though inconceivably large) number of
configurations your energy can have, so that you can, in principle,
have an
exact duplicate. In fact, according to the ergodic hypothesis
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_hypothesis), in a universe of
infinite
volume there would be an infinite number of such exact copies. What
would
happen if you'd die? Would you just live on in one of those copies,
as if
uploaded? If so, which one? Is this merely stochastic? What would this
depend on? If consciousness is nothing else than patterns, then the
"selection" of this copy is purely random, and therefore acausal.
Yes, you would live on in one of the copies as if uploaded, and yes
the selection of which copy would be purely random, dependent on the
relative frequency of each copy (you can still define a measure to
derive probabilities even though we are talking infinite subsets of
infinite sets). What do you think would happen?
Why in only one of the copies? This is the part of the argument that I
don't understand. I accept that over time the copies would diverge, but
originally they would be substantially the same, so why claim that the
original consciousness would only be present in one of them?
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