Hal Finney wrote: > > I presume the answer is that rather than look at physical > size/weight > > of our bodies, one must try to calculate the proportion of the > > universe's information content devoted to that part of our beings > > essential to being an observer (probably something to do > with the amount of grey matter). > > Yes, I think that's right. Our bodies don't directly > contribute to our conscious experiences. > > > But > > again, this surely changes as we age. My brain (and > consciousness) at > > age 2 was much smaller than at age 30, and will start to > shrink again > > as I get senile. Does our measure increase with age? > > I think you meant "decrease", at least in terms of becoming elderly. > Of course we already know that measure decreases with age due > to the continual risk of dying. But yes, I think this > argument would suggest that there is a small decrease in > measure due to brain shrinkage. > It would not be a very large effect, though, I don't think. > > > If we get brain surgery, does > > our measure diminish? > > You mean if they cut out a piece of your brain? I guess that > would depend on whether it affected your consciousness. If > it did you probably have bigger problems than your measure > decreasing. Your consciousness would change so much that > your previous self might not view you as the same person. > > > And once the transhumanist's dream of mental augmentation > is possible, > > will our measure increase as our consciousness increases? > > Yes, I think so, assuming the brains actually become bigger. > Although there is a counter-effect if the brains instead > become faster and smaller, as I wrote earlier. So this > raises a paradox, why are we not super-brains? Perhaps this > is an argument against the possibility that this will ever > happen, a la the Doomsday Argument (why do we not live in the > Galactic Empire with its population billions of times greater > than today?).
There's a simple answer to that one. Presumably, a million years from now in the Galactic Empire, the Doomsday argument is no longer controversial, and it will not be a topic for debate. The fact that we are all debating the Doomsday argument implies we are all part of the reference class: (people debating the doomsday argument), and we perforce can not be part of the Galactic Empire. > > Although these conclusions may be counter-intuitive, I find > it quite exciting to be able to derive any predictions at all > from the AUH in the Schmidhuber model. It suggests that > uploading your brain to a computer might be tantamount to > taking a large chance of dying; unless you could then > duplicate your uploaded brain all over the world, which would > greatly increase your measure. And all this comes from the > very simple assumption that the measure of something is the > fraction of multiverse resources devoted to it, a simple > restatement of the Schmidhuber multiverse model. I find these conclusions counter-intuitive enough to suggest that deriving measure from a physical fraction of involved reasources is not the correct way to derive measure. It is not unlike trying to derive the importance of a book by weighing it. Jonathan Colvin
