On 10/29/2013 11:03 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 10:25 PM, chris peck <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> 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.
When I said "one" psychological or physiological continuity, I mean exactly that. It is
impossible to attach (define an identity) as any one (1/single) continuation. If you try
to define a person as some physiological, material, or biological continuation, you can
throw a wrench in that with any kind of duplication / slow matter replacement
experiment. If you try to define someone as being one particular psychological
continuation, you fork them or duplicate them, or slowly alter their psychology so they
have a different personality, memories, etc., and you can end up with quite a different
psychology than you started with. Is it still the same person? To remain consistent,
either the definition of person must collapse to that of a single observer moment (a
single lone thought or experience), or it must be expanded quite broadly. But if you
expand it broadly, that leads to an ever-spreading spectrum which encompasses all
experiences and all beings. There is then only a single person. This is all that I
meant, that one cannot consistently say that a person is only this or that individual
and no one else.
That argument seems entirely fallacious to me. It proves that because I can take the
parts of a Rolls Royce and substitute them into my Volkswagen that a Volkswagen and Rolls
are the same car. But this is not only wrong it's even impossible. If I take the fuel
injection system off the Rolls and substitute it for the Volks, it won't work because it's
made for 8 cylinders instead of four and it's designed to work with a different ECU. Now
you may object that I've just chosen the wrong level of subsitution, and to be sure I
could make substitutions at the molecular or atomic level - but then my Volks would still
be a Volks, just made of different atoms. The Volkswagen and Rolls Royce are systems and
you can't just swap parts. And so are brains. If you took a neuron from my brain and
tried to substitute it in your brain it wouldn't function as it does in either brain (or
maybe not at all) because it's connectivity wouldn't match.
Brent
this is the 'yes doctor' axiom. Being an axiom Bruno doesn't need to defend
it. We
are obliged to assume it.
Yes, for the purpose of the reasoning that follows.
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.
That is my understanding.
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. Now the observer moments can be in
any old
order. 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.
That may be one way to view it, but I am not sure if that is how Bruno sees it. He sees
the "flow" of consciousness as governed/ordered by the future directions of the
(infinite) computational processes that support one's current (to use your term)
observer moment. If you could identify your current experience right now with any one
of an infinite number of programs, then your future experiences would consist of a
future continuation of any one of (from your perspective, chosen at random) those
infinite programs supporting your current state.
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.
This is where Bruno speaks of the importance of "long histories". To get to your
current state, probable explanations include evolution of life, etc., which required
stable laws, and many other assumptions about how the world looks. If the majority of
those programs are shorter than the longer programs which are more complex and contain
exceptions to these rules which have worked for billions of years, then with a high
probability, the laws that have held true and led to your current experience will
continue to remain true. Though of course, this is not guaranteed, and such cases are
known as "white rabbit" universes, after Alice in Wonderland.
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.
It may look something like this: http://www.weidai.com/qm-interpretation.txt
Mathematics and mathematical truth, are after all, unchanging. Yet there is an defined
ordering to computational states of recursive functions. Consider the evolution of a
recursive function that executed the Game of Life, and within this game of life are
complex self-aware patterns, that observe the entire state of their world change from
each state to the next. There would be a time-like ordering to each of these states,
and change would appear to occur from within the inside of entities existing as a
pattern within this recursive function.
Anyway, the point is that continuity between moments seems to me to be a
big, big
deal in this scenario. 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.
My point was only that the traditional notions of personal identity: saying this person
is that one particular continuation of that biological organism, or of that one brain,
do not work. They fail in cases of fusion, fission, duplication, radical change,
amnesia, etc. and must be rejected in favor of more consistent definitions of personal
identity.
Jason
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