On 04-08-2016 03:05, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 8/3/2016 4:30 PM, smitra wrote:
On 04-08-2016 01:16, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 8/3/2016 4:09 PM, smitra wrote:
On 04-08-2016 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
Only if you wake up and find out winning the lottery was a
mistake,
which seems less likely than waking up a winner. Waking up as one
of
the many copies who didn't win is not one of the options - those
copies are not continuations of the you who won the lottery.
I'm imagining waking up after a night of heavy drinking with
memories gradually returning. Now, you can, of course, condition
everything on the person who will find that he won the lottery. But
making that a hard part of my identity doesn't make sense to me,
otherwise you could not be the same person and forget about it, or
consider being the same person who participated in the lottery who
then went on to win it.
Now,while this boils down to an arbitrary definition of personal
identity, we should be consistent about this; you can be the same
person as the won who had not yet won it, and you could imagine
being a person who did not win it, then you'll likely end up waking
up as a copy in another branch who did not win it.
That seems to invoke a dualism, such that there's only one real
"you"
who may be in different branches at different times. I'd say that if
"you" wake up as a copy in another branch where "you" didn't win,
it's
because "you" didn't win. It's the same as saying the man who sees
Moscow didn't "wake up" as the man who sees Washington.
Brent
We can turn this into a reverse Bruno-like problem. If your memory is
temporarily cleared then copies of different branches merge.
You mean there are branches of the world in which your memory of
yesterday, when the lottery was drawn, is erased (and we're supposing
there is no physics, so there is no physical evidence of yesterday?).
Then the threads of consciousness constituting Saibal before yesterday
AND suffering amnesia about yesterday will merge with each other, but
NOT with the threads of Saibal that do remember yesterday.
The branches will of course be different, but you without a memory of
having won in the branch where you did win is the same you as the you
in another branch were you did not win where you also have forgotten
about not winning.
The question is then if it is advisable to go through this procedure
if you have won.
You're supposing there's a "procedure" for erasing memory of
yesterday? How could there be, there's no physics? So there are some
Saibals that forgot yesterday, and whether or not "they" won, but the
forgetting wasn't a "procedure" because that would imply a physical
world context in which whether on not Saibal won would be evident in
the physical world and beyond mere "forgetting". The forgetting would
just have to be a result of the computation.
I've written in the past about an elaborate procedure involving an AI
that resets its memory, but I now think that this is not necessary. It
seems to me that every moment we experience is a new measurement of our
state that is equivalent to forgetting everything and then just
reloading all the information. Predictions of outcomes of experiments
should not depend on making this assumption. Put differently, at any one
time you could imagine yourself as being sampled randomly from the set
of all observer moments.
Saibal
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