On 3/12/2012 00:39, meekerdb wrote:
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*.
I did make a mistake when typing that up:
"3p indeterminacy in the form of the UD*, 1p determinacy from the
perspective of those minds relative to bodies in the UD*" was supposed
to be "3p determinacy in the form of the UD*, 1p indeterminacy 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).
Maybe, it's more of a conjecture, I don't posses the theoretical tools
to make some headway on the issue for now.
As for physics being essential, I'm not 100% sure, it might be for us,
humans with physical brains and bodies, but I don't see why it would be
for a SIM, or for a detailed emulation of a human body/brain: consider
the case of such a SIMs living in a VR(Virtual Reality) simulation -
they wouldn't really care what the underlying substrate would be, but
then, they would know they are in a simulation (to some degree). A more
interesting question might be not about SIMs living in VRs, but those
beings which live in a physical world and have bodies and are self-aware
of those bodies and their own embedding in such a physical world - what
possible statistically stable laws of physics would be required for such
beings (I think Tegmark called them Self-Aware Substructures)? Since we
know we're in such a situation, what laws of physics are possible that
have conscious self-aware observers with 'physical' bodies?
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.
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