From: Charles D Hixson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [singularity] critiques of Eliezer's views on AI
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:56:12 -0700
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?
I've not the slightest idea. Actually, I was really just trying to show you
that it's sort of pretentious to believe one can understand something so
enigmatic.
Personally, I do not believe in coincidence. Everything in the universe
might seem stochastic, but it all has a logical explanation. I believe the
same applies to quantum chaos, though quantum mechanics is still far too
recondite for us to understand this phenomenon. If something would be purely
random, then there would be no reason at all why it would be what it is. If
you toss a coin, for example, what side it will land upon depends on the
dynamics of its course, and not of coincidence.
But if there can be no interaction between the copies, why would the
consciousness end up in one copy rather than another, if they are all
exactly alike?
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?
Do you mean that the original consciousness would split up, so as to become
conscious of an infinite number of lives at once?
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