On 09 Jun 2012, at 22:23, meekerdb wrote:
On 6/9/2012 3:17 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Imagine that you decide to kill yourself with an atomic bomb, so as
to maximize your annihilation probability. Then it might be that
your probability of surviving in a world where you are just not
deciding to kill yourself is bigger than surviving from some
quantum tunnel effect through the bomb's released energy. In that
sense, the effect of the bomb makes you backtrack up to a reality
where you are just not using the bomb.
Or if you died of a heart attack you might backtrack to when you ate
that cheeseburger in 1965. But with such large discontinuities in
memory it emphasizes the point that since comp implies the
possibility of duplication and forking, there is no well defined
'you'. It is at best a working approximation.
You are *precisely* right on this, in comp.
We cannot know our substitution level, so a third person self is
already a bet.
Then we are distributed on infinities of computation below the subst
level.
And then, the fact the first person knower (Bp & p) has no name, so
that the question. Who am I? Not something having a name, but the
owner of the subjective experience.
The whole point of the thought experience consists in reasoning in a
way which does not depend on your conception of identity, it bears
only on statistical differentiation of diary notes and attempt toward
predictions.
I agree that "there is no well defined 'you'" makes a lot of sense,
but the key of comp is to bet that there is (in God's eyes) a
substitution level where you survive/notice-nothing after the digital
functional substitution. It is an invariant for consciousness.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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