Tom Caylor writes: > Stathis Papaioannou wrote: > > Tom Caylor writes: > > > > > After many life-expectancy-spans worth of narrow escapes, after > > > thousands or millions of years, wouldn't the probability be pretty high > > > for my personality/memory etc. to change so much that I wouldn't > > > recognize myself, or that I could be more like another person than my > > > original self, and so for all practical purposes wouldn't I be another > > > person? How do I know this hasn't happened already? If it has, what > > > difference does it make? Isn't it true that the only realities that > > > matter are the ones that make any difference to my reality? (almost a > > > tautology) > > > > The only guarantee fom QTI is that you will experience a "next moment": > > that there exists an observer moment in the universe which considers your > > present moment to be its predecessor. > > And this "guarantee" of a next "experience" is based on what?
It's based on every possible event, including every possible mental state that you or I could experience, actually occurring somewhere in the multiverse. If there is no multiverse, or only a limited multiverse, then there is no guarantee. > Also, if an observer moment can "consider", this must be a very special > observer moment. I don't understand observer moments to be anything magical. They are just arbitrarily small units of experience. We could say there is just one non-branching reality and talk of observer seconds: if you have one second of experience today, and your brain is snap-frozen so that your next observer second occurs when it is thawed out in a thousand years from now, then (technical limitations aside) you would have experienced a continuous two seconds of consciousness despite the intervening gap. Computers do this sort of thing all the time, time-sharing computations or spreading them across a network. From the computations' point of view it's all seamless, unless you actually include data informing it that it has been chopped up into pieces. > > This leads to difficulties with partial > > memory loss, which are not unique to QTI but might actually occur in real > > life. > > For example, if you are in a car crash and end up in a vegetative state, > > this > > is usually taken as being effectively the same as ending up dead. If you > > wake > > up after the accident mentally intact except you have forgotten what you had > > for breakfast that morning then you have survived in much the same way you > > would have if you had never had the accident. If you consider that the world > > splits and there are only these two outcomes, or if you consider a > > teleportation > > experiment in which you are reconstituted in these two states at separate > > receiving stations, the conclusion seems straightforward enough: you will > > survive > > the ordeal having lost only your memory of what you had for breakfast. > > > > Now, consider a situation where there are 10 possible outcomes, or 10 > > possible > > teleportation destinations, ranging from #1 vegetative state (or headless > > corpse) > > to #10 intact except for memory of breakfast. In this scheme, #8 might be > > intact > > except you have forgotten 10% of what you have done in the past year, while > > #3 might be you have forgotten everything except what you learned before the > > age of two years. What is your expectation of survival in this situation? Stathis Papaiaonnou _________________________________________________________________ Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail. http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
