2010/1/5 Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> > 2010/1/5 Nick Prince <[email protected]>: > > Is this because you think of your stream of consciousness as somehow > > like a reel of film? All the individual pictures could be cut from > > the reel and laid out any which way but the implicit order is always > > there. I can understand this because all the spatio temporal > > relationships for the actors in the film remain "normal" i.e obey the > > laws of physics. Deutsch argues similarly in the Fabric of reality. > > In my work I often come across the idea of a foliation of > > hypersurfaces which is really a set of 3D pictures "stuck together and > > stacked in the direction of the time coordinate of the world at a > > given instant of time. In MW interpretation though I guess that the > > stacking is less certain as in the block universe idea but that's > > another issue. Is this analogy similar to how you feel the "obvious" > > experience of time being normal? > > (I'm afraid the idea of a foliation of hypersurfaces is wasted on me > as an explanatory aid!) > > It's like a reel of film in which the characters are conscious. For an > outside observer rearranging the frames out of sequence and playing > the film would be totally confusing, but for the characters in the > film it would make no difference. because the ordering is implicit in > the information contained in each frame. > > Consider a set of three one minute intervals of experience, {S1, S2, > S3}, which belong to a person S. S2 remembers S1 and remembers no gap > or intervening experiences between S2 and S1; S3 remembers S1 and S2 > and remembers that S1 preceded S2; and S3 also remembers no gap or > intervening experiences between S2 and S1 or between S3 and S2. In > other words, they are subjectively three consecutive minutes in the > life of S. S is aware that his experiences are generated on a > computer, and he is also aware that they are being generated in one of > two ways: in sequence as S1, S2, S3 or out of sequence as S2, S1, S3. > Does S have any basis for deciding that it is more likely that his > experiences are being generated in sequence? > > It seems to me that it depends if the computation is iterative or not... in other words, to compute step N you must have computed step N-1 before that.
If you can directly compute step N without computing prior step, S2/S1/S3 is possible. If not you had necessarily computed step S1 before S2, only by doing a replay of a previously done computation you could do it : - first generate S1/S2/S3 in order and save each intermediate result, then you can do - S2 (taking the previously intermediate result of S1), S1 then S3 (taking S2 result). But running the same thing more times add a priori nothing. If the process is iterative then "in order" computation win the measure battle (because any out of order one require a genuine in order computation before). Regards, Quentin > > -- > Stathis Papaioannou > > -- > > 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]<everything-list%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > > > -- All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. -- 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?hl=en.
