On Sun, Aug 06, 2006 at 11:59:42PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> My thought was that if there are twice as many copies of you running in
> parallel,
> you are in a sense cramming twice as much experience into a given objective
> time
> period, so maybe this "stretches out" the time period to seem twice as long.
> There
> is admittedly no good reason to accept that this is so (that's why it's a
> cracked
> idea, as you say!), and I would bet that it *isn't* so, but it's the only
> half-plausible
> subjective effect I can think of due to change in measure alone.
>
> I believe that what you mean when you say that a lower measure OM will appear
> more complex is somewhat different to the scenario I had in mind: a
> controlled
> experiment in which measure can be turned up and down leaving everything else
> the same, such as having an AI running on several computers in perfect
> lockstep.
> (I realise this is not the same as changing measure in the multiverse, which
> would
> not lend itself so easily to experiment.) Would the AI notice anything if
> half the
> computers were turned off then on again? I think it would be impossible for
> the AI
> to notice that anything had changed without receiving external information.
> If I
> were the AI the only advantage I can think of in having multiple computers
> running
> is for backup in case some of them broke down; beyond that, I wouldn't care
> if there
> were one copy or a million copies of me running in parallel.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
This thought experiment has been discussed a few times in this
list. I agree with you that one wouldn't expect there to be any
difference in subjective experience, but more than that wrt Bruno's
work, assuming COMP (which you have to anyway to consider the thought
experiment), there is actually no way to change the measure of a
particular computation - computations exist in Platonia wuth
presumably some measure (measure is fixed in my approach by the
actions of the observer, but others do not necessarily have an answer
to what the measure is). That is why Bruno can eliminate the concrete
universe hypothesis altogether.
Cheers
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