On 03 Nov 2015, at 18:30, Brent Meeker wrote:



On 11/3/2015 1:06 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
Well, in machine's theology, the proof of the immortality of the soul by Socrates is valid, but is not constructive, and its practical aspect is dependent of you degree of appreciation of not knowing who you (first person are). Then, a priori computationalist immortality seems to be something more to fear than to hope, but both computer science and salvia can be reassuring by allowing possibilities of jumps between type of consciousness state (but *that* is still wishful thinking, as such jump are hard to relate with some type of death. Once a machine is above the Gödel-Löbian treshold, it has at each instant an infinite of futures,

Why not infinite pasts? Fundamental physics is time symmetric and your theory of the UD doesn't have any built-in arrow of time.

?
usually, people criticize the UD by saying that it introduces a notion of (digital) time at the start, as the UD is a program, and its steps represent a sort of time (injection in N). But that is not the physical time, and indeed computationalism might imply infinite past, as we might get, with the FPI, longer and longer histories.





and near death or near catastrophes, it continues in the closer world consistent with its memory. If the subject identifies too much with its memory, the experience can be unpleasant. Some training in "let it go" can help, perhaps.

In what sense can "you" continue without memories of who you are? Losing memories causes profound and disturbing changes in personality.

Yes, but not necessarily change in the fact you feel surviving from the first person view. Penfield made a lot of experiment confirming this, by disabling brain (with electrodes planted in the brain of a subject) for some time. To assess this the disabling has to be reversible of course (for ethic reason too!). The salvia experience seems to confirm this too.



My father died of Alzheimers and he was a very different person, almost a non-person, the last years of his life.

I am sorry for your father. Yet, it is hard to assess this as an argument that he died from its first person point of view, as the change are irreversible in this case, and it is hard to extract information. Keep in mind that from his perspective all continuations have to be taken into account. He might recover his memory in some alternate computations, or backtrack in some "past", or be happy (or not) without his memories. If the brain is too damaged here to be said alive, then "he" will be elsewhere (no cul-de-sac for the []p & <>t view, by definition). The dream experience illustrates also that we can "survive" with quite different memories. That the first person does not die is almost trivial, as death (absolute death) cannot be a memorable first person experience: even without "eternity", there is no notion of death from a first person point of view; life is an open set; It is without first person boundaries.

Bruno




Brent

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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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