How do you get the "50% chance"? There is a 100% chance of a mind waking up who has been uploaded, and also a 100% chance of a mind waking up who hasn't. This doesn't violate the laws of probability because these aren't mutually exclusive. Asking which one "was you" is silly, because we're assuming they're completely identical at the instant they wake up; they're both you. This is apparently something that needs a lot of explaining; consciousness is not a conserved quantity. If there was some magicky consciousness "stuff" that either was uploaded or not uploaded, then sure, you could talk about a 50% probability of the upload being successful. But if we define "successful" as "you wake up uploaded", and "failure" as "you wake up not uploaded", then there is a 100% (assuming the process always works technically) probability of success and a 100% probability of failure. Both possibilities refer to the *same process*, to the exact same series of atoms getting juggled back and forth. I recognize that this is really confusing, but it seems to match what would happen if you actually tried it.
Now, if you consider the question from the standpoint of utility, it becomes even more confusing because desirableness isn't a conserved quantity. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that each sentient being is given a hundred chips, which they can put toward making the outcome of any event more or less probable. Chips are conserved for any one person, and any chip is exchangeable for any other chip, but *effects* aren't conserved; a single chip will affect some events a lot more than others. Suppose that a guy, Fred, wants to get uploaded. He puts 50 chips towards getting uploaded, as uploading is really nifty and can be used to do all kinds of things because chips are worth a lot more in VR due to the easiness of manipulating events. The FAI looks him over, scans his brain-state, extrapolates his volition, concludes that the vast majority of the possible future Freds are happy, that his desire is genuine, etc. and gives the tech-robot the OK to proceed. Fred is sedated, the brain-state is uploaded, and a new VR being with Fred's memories is formed. When this being, Fred*, wakes up, he is recognized as sentient and *also* given 100 chips, initially allocated according to Fred's preferences. When Fred* wakes up, he deallocates the 50 chips as that goal has been fulfilled, and starts to allocate them towards whatever he thinks is fun in VR. But when Fred wakes up, his goal is still unfulfilled, and so he quite stubbornly keeps his 50 chips allocated on "upload", claiming that he didn't get what the FAI promised. Fred*, seeing Fred over the monitor, feels sorry for him and also allocates 10 chips towards getting Fred uploaded. The normal thing after a goal has been fulfilled is for the chips to be deallocated- they are valuable, after all, and people need to move on to other things. This prevents people from making the FAI bang its resources eternally against something simple like wanting a banana long after the original desire was fulfilled. (Note that simple banana-tiling machines are special cases; I'm talking about ordinary sentient beings who just happen to want a single banana.) But in this instance, the number of chips allocated to the goal is even greater than it was before, and so the FAI is programmed to put even more resources behind getting Fred uploaded. By induction, Fred will never be uploaded, even though the pressure to get him uploaded will keep increasing from successive generations of uploaded Freds. This is something of a paradoxical situation akin to quark confinement- the more you try and fulfill the goal of "uploading Fred", the more desirable it becomes to fulfill the goal, because the copy-upload process actually *creates new goals* as part of its mechanism. This kind of thing, both here and if it turns up anywhere else, is Very Bad for any future society with finite resources, because all those resources will wind up getting sucked into the positive-feedback cycle. - Tom --- Randall Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Jun 28, 2007, at 12:56 PM, Charles D Hixson > wrote: > > > Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > >> 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? > > > > If you ask either copy afterward if they ended up > experience both existences or just one, they'll > say just one. Since there's two possibilities, > and since no single individual will experience > both at once, there's a 50% chance. > > Someone on the outside could well insist that > the original person is experiencing both at once > (and many people do insist that that will be the > case), but you won't be able to find a person to > talk to who is experiencing both at once at any > given time. > > -- > Randall Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > "Someone needs to invent a Bayesball bat that exists > solely for > smacking people [...] upside the head." -- > Psy-Kosh on reddit.com > > > ----- > This list is sponsored by AGIRI: > http://www.agiri.org/email > To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: > http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&; > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Park yourself in front of a world of choices in alternative vehicles. Visit the Yahoo! 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