On 30 Oct 2013, at 07:03, Jason Resch wrote:
On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 10:25 PM, chris peck <[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.
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.
The 3p can be given by a sequence of comp step + one (at least
universal number connecting those steps)
The 1p can be given by a sequence of comp steps + the infinity of
universal numbers competing to connect those steps.
There is no computation without a universal system or number
connecting them "computationally".
No problem with what you say below.
Bruno
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
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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