On 3/11/2012 2:43 PM, acw wrote:
On 3/11/2012 21:44, R AM wrote:
This discussion has been long and sometimes I am confused about the whole
point of the exercise.
I think the idea is that if comp is true, then the future content of
subjective experience is indeterminated? Although comp might seem to entail
100% determinacy, just the contrary is the case. Is that correct?
3p indeterminacy in the form of the UD*, 1p determinacy from the perspective of those
minds relative to bodies in the UD*.
However, I think that if comp is true, future experience is not only
indeterminate, but also arbitrary: our future experience could be anything
at all. But given that this is not the case, shouldn't we conclude that
comp is false?
You're basically presenting the "White Rabbit" problem here. I used to wonder if that is
indeed the case, but after considering it further, it doesn't seem to be: your 1p is
identified with some particular abstract machine - that part is mostly determinate and
deterministic (or quasi-deterministic if you allow some leeway as to what constitutes
persona identity) in its behavior, but below that substitution level, anything can
change, as long as that machine is implemented correctly/consistently. If the level is
low enough and most of the machines implementing the lower layers that eventually
implement our mind correspond to one world (such as ours), that would imply reasonably
stable experience and some MWI-like laws of physics - not white noise experiences. That
is to say that if we don't experience white noise, statistically our experiences will be
stable - this does not mean that we won't have really unusual "jumps" or changes in
laws-of-physics or experience when our measure is greatly reduced (such as the current
statistically winning machines no longer being able to implement your mind - 3p death
from the point of view of others).
This implies that our measure is strongly correlated with the regularity of physics. I'm
not sure you can show that, but if it's true it means that physics is fundamental to our
existence, even if physics can be explained by the UD. Only worlds with extremely
consistent physics can support consciousness (which seems unlikely to me).
Brent
Also, one possible way of showing COMP false is to show that such stable implementations
are impossible, however this seems not obvious to me. A more practical concern would be
to consider the case of what would happen if the substitution level is chosen slightly
wrong or too high - would it lead to too unstable 1p or merely just allow the
SIM(Substrate Independent Mind) to more easily pick which lower-level machines implement
it (there's another thought experiment which shows how this could be done, if a machine
can find one of its own Godel-number).
Ricardo.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
