>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 the pattern is more and more altered, until eventually the guy who comes out the other side is a totally different person from me, so presumably I don't have a significant chance of "becoming" him (although the probability of this might not be zero, either). I think questions like these show the need for some kind of "theory of consciousness" to quantify this stuff and give a specific conditional probability distribution for transitions from one observer-moment to another. I am sure others on this list would have very different opinions about what these thought-experiments show, though--some, like Jaques Mallah, might consider them a reductio ad absurdum of the whole concept of "continuity of consciousness." Jesse _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp
