On 19 Apr 2017 7:50 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <[email protected]> wrote:
On 4/19/2017 3:56 AM, David Nyman wrote: On 19 April 2017 at 08:24, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: John has never write one clear post refuting the step-3 which would make it > possible to answer by one post. There is no need for this, as the answer is > in the publications, which makes clear the 1-3 distinction, so the > ambiguity that John dreams for cannot occur. I've often wondered whether Hoyle's heuristic could be a way of short-cutting this dispute. Hoyle gives us a way to think about every subjective moment as if it occurred within the 1-view of a common agent. Essentially the heuristic invites us to think of all subjective experiences, aka observer moments, as a single logical serialisation in which relative spatial and temporal orientation is internal to each moment. In comp terms this conceptual agent might perhaps be the virgin (unprogrammed) machine, on the basis that all such machines are effectively computationally equivalent. Anyway, in this way of thinking, after my 3-duplication there are of course two 3-copies; so in the 3-view it can make perfect sense to say that each copy is me (i.e. one of my continuations). Hence my expectation in that same 3-sense is that I will be present in both locations. However, again in terms of the heuristic, it is equally the case that each 1-view is occupied serially and exclusively by the single agent: i.e. *at one time and in one place*. Hence in that sense only a single 1-view can possibly represent me *at that one time and that one place*. Hoyle shows us how all the copies can indeed come to occupy each of their relative spatio-temporal locations in the logical serialisation, but also that *these cannot occur simultaneously*. The crucial point to bear in mind is that according to Hoyle, both of these understandings are equally true and *do not contradict each other*. Furthermore, comp or no comp, they are surely consistent with anything we would reasonably expect to experience: namely, that whenever sufficiently accurate copies of our bodies could be made, using whatever method, our expectation would nevertheless be to find ourselves occupying a single 1-view, representing a subjectively exclusive spatio-temporal location. Indeed it is that very 1-view which effectively defines the relative boundaries of any given time and place. Subjective experiences are temporally and spatially bounded by definition; it is therefore inescapable that they are mutually exclusive in the 1-view. So what Hoyle's method achieves here is a clear and important distinction between the notion of 3-synchronisation (i.e. temporal co-location with respect to a publicly available clock) and that of 1-simultaneity (i.e. the co-occurrence of two spatio-temporally distinct perspectives within a single, momentary 1-view). Whereas the former is commonplace and hence to be expected, the latter is entirely inconsistent with normal experience and hence should not be. By the way, I shall be on holiday in Sicily from April 20th until May 12th (one of me only, I trust) so I probably won't be appearing much in the list during that period. It seems to me that this is mostly a semantic problem arising from a mismatch between common language and a theory built on computations producing "observer moments" or "events of consciousness" or "thoughts". The theory implies that at a fundamental level there is no "you". You are a construct, made of a sequence of experiences. Bruno's "duplication" isn't really duplicating something, it's just forking the sequence. So talk of 1-person or 3-person is misleading - those are emergent concepts at a much higher level than computations and even experiences. They are at a level where physics has emerged and so it makes sense to talk about where "you" are. That's why I tend to emphasize the essential role of an environment as referent for "thoughts" and I think the material world, even if not fundamental, is just as fundamental as the mental world. I don't think I'd take particular issue with any of this. For the record though, Hoyle's metaphor wasn't specifically about computationalism. In the novel, the explicit background assumption was a physical multiverse. The heuristic, as I call it, was Hoyle's view of the relation between that physical context and the self-localisation of sentient agents in perceptual time and space. I guess you could call it Everettian with monopsychic overtones. He also made it clear that this wasn't just a narrative device; he also took it seriously as a scientist. Anyway, as was indeed its purpose in Hoyle's story, I hold out the faint hope that it just might help defuse an otherwise unnecessary misunderstanding and its attendant terminological wrangles. 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