On 11/4/2015 1:16 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
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.
But when I was an infant and later a child I didn't feel I had survived
some previous life. I just felt alive in this life as I do now and my
memory of the past was limited to the few years I'd been alive.
Penfield made a lot of experiment confirming this, by disabling brain
(with electrodes planted in the brain of a subject) for some time.
Confirming what? My experience of NOT feeling I had survived a previous
life is a common one confirmed by billions of people.
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).
But he will also be dead. To be alive in some parallel universe is for
some similar but certainly different person to be alive. In your theory
a person is not a unity, but only a loose collection of experiences. I
suppose that is why you say there is only one person. But that's a
cheap explanation that avoids explaining why each of us seems to be a
unity; why our experiences and memories have the unity and consistency
from which we infer a common world and reject solipism.
Brent
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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