On 30 Oct 2013, at 05:25, chris peck wrote:
Hi Jason (again)
in your response to Brent:
>>Personally I believe no theory that aims to attach persons to one
psychological or physiological continuity can be successful.
ok, but in Bruno's step 3 it is taken as axiomatic that you survive
in both branches because there is a continuity of psychological
phenomena like memory. this is the 'yes doctor' axiom. Being an
axiom Bruno doesn't need to defend it. We are obliged to assume it.
That said, taking issue with it is tantamount to admitting that we
do not survive the teleportation, in which case the probability of
me seeing Moscow or Washington is 0.
There is a concept of the observer moment. A discrete snippet of
experience and the UD is churning these out willy nilly in a digital
form. Or maybe they're all just there in an infinite plenitude of
blah.
I don't use the notion of observer moment. But the UD emulates all
possible brains in all possible environment (computable, or not
computable, due to the dovetailing on the reals).
Now the observer moments can be in any old order.
Not statistically. Due to some theorem in computer science, you cannot
change the order in any sense changing what happens on the
neighborhood of infinity (that is the limiting process on which the
first person plural realities should stabilize). We are just
confronted to a monstruous complex problem, but the solution does not
depend on any choice of the UD, and that gives tools to solve it.
A moment from tomorrow can be churned out before a moment from
yesterday. Identity emerges as a trace of coherent memory. There is
no need for an inherent order between the elements so long as there
is some means of coherently connecting the observer moments. In this
scheme the order is implicit in the notion of coherent memory.To use
an analogy from IT , I suspect its the difference between sorting an
array of shuffled digital cards or just keeping track of pointers to
cards in an array when shuffling. Like wise physics emerges in this
coherent trace. For example, in one observer moment a pen is
dropped. Whats next? An observer moment where the pen goes down? One
where it goes up? One where it goes right or left? All these moments
are catered for in the infinite plenitude. So physics, here the law
of gravity, becomes an investigation into a psychologically
consistent trace of pen moments. All those where the pen keeps going
down in my trace. Its going to be tricky to keep track of traces
because they criss-cross. That is, all moments in some sense are
coherent with one another. The pen down one vertical voxel is a
consistent with moments where the pen is at any of the voxel
neighbors, up down, left right, back forward. Taking different
velocities into account it doesn't even have to be a neighboring
voxel. Where is velocity anyway? Is it between the moments? Within
the moments. A problem here I think.
Yes. That's what I did. To formulate a problem.
Anyway, the point is that continuity between moments seems to me to
be a big, big deal in this scenario.
Up to say "no" to the doctor?
A 3p observer moment is determined by a UD computational step, or by
some UD computational step.
A 1p observer "moment" is determined by an infinities of computational
histories. Histories are computations structured by the choice of the
point(s) of view.
Bruno
So, if you are of the view that continuity isn't even sufficient to
maintain identity then I wonder to what degree you really are on the
same page as Bruno.
best regards.
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Step 3
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 02:18:43 +0000
Hi Jason
You're presenting the exact same situation in a different context in
the hope that it will clarify the issues for me, I suppose. My
response is exactly the same for your new version as it is for the
original. The same as it is for Bruno's example in which the
duplications involved explode to cover every possible permutation of
pixel combinations that could occur over a 90 minute period on a
telly.
Perhaps a better tack might be to accept that I understand the
issues under debate, and address the arguments that I offer directly
rather than claim 'misunderstanding' etc.
How can uncertainty arise in a subject who believes he knows all the
relevent facts?
How does a prediction of 50/50 not contravene the axiom that I
survive anihilation and duplication into two (any number of) branches?
regards.
Date: Wed, 30 Oct 2013 10:12:55 +1300
Subject: Re: Step 3
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
I suggested doing this on FOAR (I used HAL from 2001). It simply
makes it easier to visualise if you forget about biological
creatures. Assuming comp, an AI is exactly equivalent to a human
person, so anything you can do to an AI could be done (in theory) to
a human by a teleporter, or to a human by MWI style splitting.
What should the AI expect to see? It should expect to see the ball
turn red and remain red. There are copies of it which see the ball
go blue at various points...
However this answer doesn't assume comp. According to comp it
doesn't know what "it" will see, or to be more exact it knows that
"it" will see all combinations, but by that time it will no longer
be an "it" but a "them". Technically - in this case - we know which
ones are the copies and which ones aren't - however comp says that
the AI will experience becoming many AIs, with varied experiences.
In any case, although one copy is the original, that doesn't really
help, because an AI, by its nature, is probably being constantly
swapped into different parts of computer memory (or stored on disc),
parts of it are being copied, other parts erased, and so on. Comp
says none of this matters - that its experiences are at a
fundamental level exactly like ours.
So. What's wrong with this picture, if anything?
On 30 October 2013 09:41, Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 2:06 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 10/29/2013 8:19 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
Chris,
Perhaps it is simpler to think about first person indeterminacy like
this (it requires some familiaraity with programming, but I will try
to elaborate those details):
Imagine there is a conscious AI inside a virtual environment (an
open field)
Inside that virtual environment is a ball, which the AI is looking
at and next to the ball is a note which reads:
"At noon (when the virtual sun is directly overhead) the protocol
will begin. In the protocol, the process containing this simulation
will fork (split in two), after the fork, the color of the ball will
change to red for the parent process and it will change to blue in
the child process (forking duplicates a process into two identical
copies, with one called the parent and the other the child). A
second after the color of the ball is set, another fork will
happen. This will happen 8 times leading to 256 processes, after
which the simulation will end."
It is 11:59 in the simulation, what can the AI expect to see during
the next 1 minute and 8 seconds?
I don't see that as any different.
It is similar, but it never hurts to look at the same problem from
different angles. What is a little more evident in this case is
that of the 256 possible memories of the AI about to meet its doom,
none contain the memory of seeing all 256 possibilities, an in fact,
the majority of them see the ball change color back and forth at
random. Only 2 see it stay all red or all blue for the last 8
seconds. None of them can predict from the view inside the
simulation, whether the ball will stay the same color or change
after the next fork occurs.
The problem is still what is the referent of "the AI". As John
Clark points out "the AI" is ambiguous when there are duplicates.
Personal identity is less of an issue in this case, because it
concerns the AI or anything/anyone else inside the simulation who
might also be viewing the ball. In this way, it is slightly more
analogous to MWI since it is the environment which is duplicated,
not just the person, and so the apparent random changing of the ball
color is also something that can be agreed upon by the group of
observers within the simulation.
Sometimes Bruno talks about "the universal person" who is merely
embodied as particular persons. So on that view it would be right
to say *the* universal person sees Washington and Moscom.
But not "at the same time" or as "an integrated experience", so the
appearance of randomness still arises from the first person
perspective(s).
But then that's contrary to identifying a person by their memories.
My view is that "a person" is just a useful model, when there is no
duplication - and that's true whether the duplication is via Everett
or Bruno's teleporter.
What model should be used in a world with duplication, fission
machines, mind uploading, split brains, biological clones, amnesia,
etc.? Or does personhood no longer make sense at all in the face of
such situations?
Personally I believe no theory that aims to attach persons to one
psychological or physiological continuity can be successful.
Jason
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