Re: possible solution to modal realism's problem of induction
On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 09:26:54AM -0700, Brian Holtz wrote:
> Hi everyone (in this world and all relevantly similar ones :-),
>
> I like the solution to the Induction / Dragon / Exploding Cow problem that I
> see in work by Malcolm, Standish, Tegmark, and Schmidhuber. So I forwarded
> references to Alexander Pruss, whose dissertation raises the Induction
> Objection to modal realism. The full context is on my blog at
> http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=8. I'm interested in how the
> folks on this list would respond to Pruss's most recent comment, below. Can
> anyone recommend a primer on probability in transfinite contexts like ours?
...
I will require some thought, but the approach I take (which is
effectively identical to Malcom's), the Plenitude is a set of
cardinality c (2^\aleph_0). The argument works within such a bound. My
reading of Tegmark and Schmidhuber is that they also have a similar
cardinality bound.
Could it be extended to higher cardinality plenitudes (if such a thing
makes sense)? I don't know without giving it a lot of thought (and
even then?), but I'd hazard a guess that certain paradoxes might step
in making the whole thing untenable.
Cheers
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Re: White Rabbit vs. Tegmark
John Mikes wrote: > ... Those posts were accessible (for me) that started with a > statement of the writer and not a lot of copies with some reply-lines > interjected. I know (and like to use) to copy the phrases to reply to but > even in a 2-week archiving it turns sour. After the first 30-40 post-reviews > I got dizzy. This pertains to the regular listpost. And with regard to Russell's posts: > Your posts are one degree worse: > You had 32 attachment-convoluted posts in the 270 of the 20 day everything > list. The procedure > to glance at your text (and I like to read what you wrote) I have to select > the attachment, then call it up, then select open, then read it, and - If I > want to save it: copy or cut it to file in 3-5 more clicks. The list has certainly been active lately! John, you might want to read the list via the archive at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/ . It's very readable and it does not choke on Russell's posts, which are actually perfectly legal email formats and are legible on many mail readers. Plus you won't be bothered by email interruptions. You can also use the thread index there which will help you to follow conversations. However I would like to echo John's complaint about excessive quoting. There is no need to quote the complete content of another message before replying. Especially lately, people are conversing quickly and the previous message was typically sent only a few hours or a day earlier. We can all remember what was said, or go back in the thread and see it. Just a brief quote to set the stage should be enough. If you want to reply point by point, fine, in that case it does make sense to quote each point before replying. But quoting the whole message is almost never necessary. Hal Finney
Re: White Rabbit vs. Tegmark
I appreciate your difficulty - I have the same problem whenever someone
sends a pure HTML email - I have to navigate down several layers of
menus, and the result is a barely human readable message.
I also understand Microsoft Outlook has trouble understanding RFC
compliant signed emails, hence I have turned off autosigning for list
posts. I'll try to look at messages sent back from the everything list
email server to see if they're still being signed.
Have you tried reading the messages on the escribe archive? I do know
that those messages are plain text, and threaded, so this may be more
convenient for you.
Also, some email threads started off on the FoR list, which I
unsubscribed because I got too irritated with its censureship
policy. Consequently, I missed some of the thread beginnings too.
Cheers
On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 05:59:06PM -0400, jamikes wrote:
> Dear Russell and list:
> this is a personal problem due to my extremely feeble skills in computering.
>
> I had (optimistically in past tense) problems with my internet e-mail
> connection and could not get/send e-mail since the date of this post. Then 2
> times I was lucky and got hundreds of email at a time, (the browser is still
> closed from my usage). To separate chaff from seed, I extracted the
> list-post before deleting the "slumscumspam". From May 24 to June 13 I
> accumulated 270 listposts -absolutely impossible to scan for topical and
> content interest. Those posts were accessible (for me) that started with a
> statement of the writer and not a lot of copies with some reply-lines
> interjected. I know (and like to use) to copy the phrases to reply to but
> even in a 2-week archiving it turns sour. After the first 30-40 post-reviews
> I got dizzy. This pertains to the regular listpost.
>
> Your posts are one degree worse:
> You had 32 attachment-convoluted posts in the 270 of the 20 day everything
> list. The procedure
> to glance at your text (and I like to read what you wrote) I have to select
> the attachment, then call it up, then select open, then read it, and - If I
> want to save it: copy or cut it to file in 3-5 more clicks.
> A regular e-mail requires ONE click to read and ONE to save (in my Outlook
> Express).
>
> I don't want to "reformulate" this list, just tried to communicate a point
> that may make MY life easier.
>
> Apologies for whining
>
> John Mikes
>
> PS: I lost the 'original' post of the Subject:
> "RE:What do you lose if you simply accept..."
> and reading the posts I could not find out WHAT to accept? the posts were
> all over the Library of Congress, nothing to the original subject to
> explain. Just curious. JM
> ==
>
> - Original Message -
> From: "Russell Standish" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "Hal Finney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Cc:
> Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 2:45 AM
> Subject: Re: White Rabbit vs. Tegmark
>
>
>
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email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.
A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
Mathematics0425 253119 (")
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Conscious descriptions
On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 04:39:57PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: > > > OK but it can be misleading (especially in advanced stuff!). neither a > program, nor a machine nor a body nor a brain can think. A person can > think, and manifest eself (I follow Patrick for the pronouns) through a > program, or a machine or a brain, Actually, I think I was the one introducing these 3rd person neutral pronouns (e, er & em). I picked up the habit from Michael Spivak (well known mathematician). Doesn't this beg the question a bit as to what a "person" really is? In loose everyday conversation, a person is a member of the species homo sapiens. However, surely we don't want to rule out the possibility of other conscious things before we even start. And also as you mention below, there are odd corner cases - the sleeping human being etc. > In some reasoning it is like cutting the hair, but once we tackle more > subtle questions it is important to make the distinction, imo. > I agree - it has its place. I'm also notoriously impatient when it comes to nailing down every last nuance, being more physicist than mathematician. > > > Church-Turing thesis and arithmetical platonism (my all > >description strings condition fulfills a similar role to arithmetical > >platonism) are enough. > > > I am not so sure. You are not always clear if the strings describe the > equivalent of a program (be it an universal program or not), or > describes a computations (be it finite or infinite). Both actually. One can feed a description into the input tape of a UTM, hence it becomes a program. They may also be generated by a program running on a machine. > Consciousness > eventually is related to bunch of (sheaves of) infinite computations. > they can be coded by infinite strings, but they are not programs. > Is this because they are ultimately not computable (due to the inherent indeterminism)? > > >Furthermore, if the conscious program _is_ a > >UTM in its own right, it can run on itself (actually this is pretty > >much what my reading of what the Church-Turing thesis is). > > I am not sure I understand this. > Lets assume we have a UTM U, and a program A capable of consciousness when run on U as U(Ax) = UoA(x), where x refers to arbitrary additional input. Furthermore suppose UoA is also a UTM (o is compose operator), so lets rewrite A in terms of the primitives of UoA, and call it B. Hence UoA = UoAoB = UoAoBoB = etc. My reading of the Church-Turing thesis is that universal computation captures all possible forms of computation capable of being performed by a human (and by obvious extension a conscious "person"). Consequently conscious "people" are capable of universal computation. There are various strengthenings of the CT thesis which are far from obvious, and even false in some cases. One of my criticisms of your work is that I'm not sure you aren't using one of the strong CT theses, but we can come back to that. > > >This obviates > >having to fix the UTM. Perhaps this is the route into the anthropic > >principle. > > > ? Church's thesis just say things does not depend on which UTM you > choose initially All programs need to be interpreted with respect to a particular machine. The machine can be changed by appeal to universal computation, but then the program needs to be translated as well. But then, I'm sure you know all this. > > > > >Finally, there is the possibility that a concrete observer (the > >noumenon) exists somewhere, and that "conscious descriptions" are > >merely the anthropic "shadow" of the observer being observed by itself. > > > Again this is to fuzzy for me. I can agree and I can disagree. > With COMP, I'm sure you disagree. Chapter 4 of your thesis directly argues against this possibility. I don't really agree with it either, but cannot rule it out once COMP is relaxed. > I was > just saying that we say with "a machine can think " it is an abuse of > language for "the person associate to that machine is thinking". > > Bruno > Are you saying that it is an abuse of the language to say that my observer maps O(x) can think? In which case I'd agree with you (and I have never made that particular language abuse that I can recall). However, I consider human beings to be machines of a particular kind, and I do consider human beings to think. Of course "machine" in this case has only a rather loose connection to the machine of theoretical computer science (the abstract Turing machine). -- *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you may safely ignore this attachment. A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile) Mathematics
Re: White Rabbit vs. Tegmark
Dear Russell and list: this is a personal problem due to my extremely feeble skills in computering. I had (optimistically in past tense) problems with my internet e-mail connection and could not get/send e-mail since the date of this post. Then 2 times I was lucky and got hundreds of email at a time, (the browser is still closed from my usage). To separate chaff from seed, I extracted the list-post before deleting the "slumscumspam". From May 24 to June 13 I accumulated 270 listposts -absolutely impossible to scan for topical and content interest. Those posts were accessible (for me) that started with a statement of the writer and not a lot of copies with some reply-lines interjected. I know (and like to use) to copy the phrases to reply to but even in a 2-week archiving it turns sour. After the first 30-40 post-reviews I got dizzy. This pertains to the regular listpost. Your posts are one degree worse: You had 32 attachment-convoluted posts in the 270 of the 20 day everything list. The procedure to glance at your text (and I like to read what you wrote) I have to select the attachment, then call it up, then select open, then read it, and - If I want to save it: copy or cut it to file in 3-5 more clicks. A regular e-mail requires ONE click to read and ONE to save (in my Outlook Express). I don't want to "reformulate" this list, just tried to communicate a point that may make MY life easier. Apologies for whining John Mikes PS: I lost the 'original' post of the Subject: "RE:What do you lose if you simply accept..." and reading the posts I could not find out WHAT to accept? the posts were all over the Library of Congress, nothing to the original subject to explain. Just curious. JM == - Original Message - From: "Russell Standish" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Hal Finney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 2:45 AM Subject: Re: White Rabbit vs. Tegmark
Re: possible solution to modal realism's problem of induction
Title: Message Hi everyone (in this world and all relevantly similar ones :-), I like the solution to the Induction / Dragon / Exploding Cow problem that I see in work by Malcolm, Standish, Tegmark, and Schmidhuber. So I forwarded references to Alexander Pruss, whose dissertation raises the Induction Objection to modal realism. The full context is on my blog at http://blog.360.yahoo.com/knowinghumans?p=8. I'm interested in how the folks on this list would respond to Pruss's most recent comment, below. Can anyone recommend a primer on probability in transfinite contexts like ours? Remember that I am working in David Lewis's framework. Each world is a physical object: a bunch of matter, connected together spatiotemporally. So I do not need to work with specifications, but with concrete chunks of stuff. There is nothing further illuminating to be said in a lewisian context, really, about what makes two concrete chunks of stuff the same chunk, is there?That said, I am making an assumption that there is only one copy of each world. I suppose one could recover the "measure" the authors you cite have if you suppose that there is a copy of each world for every arrangement-description of it. But I do not see why one would suppose that.In the Lewisian setting, it is intuitively plausible that the probability that I exist in w1 should equal the probability that I exist in w2, as long as w1 and w2 contain intelligent observers in equal numbers. The "measures" from the authors you cite do not satisfy this criterion IF there is one world for a class of equivalent descriptions, as is going to be the case under the assumptions I am making.Most observers are going to be in worlds with a much higher cardinality of stuff than our world contains. Our world probably only has a finite number of particles. The cardinality of worlds just like ours until tomorrow but where \aleph_8 neutrons appear in San Francisco down-town, causing everything in the universe to collapse is much greater than the cardinality of regular worlds. In fact, I think what I am saying here will apply even on information- theoretic measures. (The one or two papers you linked to that I looked at made the assumption that there was a fixed maximum cardinality of things. But why assume that?)--- For one thing, Pruss seems mistaken to assume that a possible world consists necessarily of matter in a connected spacetime. (I think he inherits this mistake from Lewis, who uses spatiotemporal connectedness rather than causal connectedness to define worlds, because Lewis wants to explain/define causality instead of making it a primitive.) It seems better to define a possible world as a causal closure than as a spatiotemporal closure. But the main problem perhaps is that Pruss misses (or disagrees with?) the point that in the information-theoretic paradigm for specifying possible worlds, the number of worlds with unobserved/unobservable irregularities will vastly outnumber the ones with the observed irregularities like his example, even if those irregular worlds vastly outnumber the lucky few worlds that are like ours and have no irregularities whatsoever, even unobserved/unobservable ones.
Re: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Hal wrote: >I actually think this is a philosphically defensible position. Why should >one OM care about another, merely because they happen to be linked by >a body? There's no a priori reason why an OM should sacrifice, it doesn't >get any benefit by doing so. >But I'll tell you why we don't work this way, and why our current OMs >are willing to sacrifice for the future. It's because of evolution. Then Staphis wrote: > This is *exactly* the way it is! Each moment is ephemeral; once the next moment comes along, the previous one could not be any more thoroughly dead and gone from the universe if it had sat on top of a detonating nuclear bomb There is nothing logically inconsistent in a being who does just live for the present moment, as Hal suggests. The problem, of course, is that evolution has long ago weeded out these unfortunate beings, so they no longer live amongst us. Again, I'll just ask a simple question to try to understand this, bit by bit. What about the "OMs" in the past? I don't think we even have to appeal to evolution to explain why we think planning/working for the future is worth it. If it were not for the sacrificial planning and working of the OMs of the past, we would not be where we are today. It's simply a matter of what has worked in the past should work in the present and future. Or have you abandoned so much of the scientific method, and even simply explanation and prediction, that this is no longer logical to you? What happened to the impression of continuous consciousness? A nuclear bomb going off every second and continuous consciousness don't seem to go together, in my impression. Tom Caylor
Re: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Tom wrote: > Now if continuous consciousness is not necessarily required for immortality, then why are you > waiting around for copying? Won't cloning come far sooner? What is it about > copying that is better than cloning. Stathis wrote: > Why do you say that continuous consciousness is not necessarily required for immortality? It seems to > me that this is the one thing that *is* required, which is what makes it different from cloning or having > children. To answer your question, Stathis, I was picking up on something Hal wrote: >Our attempt to make these novel situations fit our conventional >expectations don't work because we currently have an implicit assumption >of mental continuity which is violated by copying experiments. There >really is no meaningful and non-arbitrary way to map our current ways >of thinking about the future to a world where copying is possible. In fact, you (Stathis) recently responded to the above with:> It isn't really any different than the impression of a single continuous history we get at present if the > MWI is correct... I'm trying to understand, bit by bit, where you all are coming from and where you are going with this stuff (no pun intended). Are you putting forth copying as a theoretical means of creating an "impression of a single continuous history"? To restate my original question in a "corrected" manner, what is different about copying that creates an impression of a single continuous history" any more than cloning or having children, or communicating some of ourself to another person? How much of us is needed to be propagated in order to be considered an "impression of a single continuous history"? I think this is a little of what Hal was getting at: what's so sacred about our current expectations of continuous consciousness? Like my "far away galaxy" copy, an impression of a single continuous history can lead to something very undesirable. It seems that there's something to quality of life that i! s far more important than quantity of life. Perhaps quality vs. quantity is what the "torture" thread is really struggling with. Perhaps it cannot be dealt with purely on a quantitative level. Tom
Re: more torture
> Saibal Mitra writes:
>
> >Because no such thing as free will exists one has to consider three
> >different universes in which the three different choices are made. The
> >three
> >universes will have comparable measures. The antropic factor of 10^100
will
> >then dominate and will cause the observer to find himself having made
> >choice
> >b) as one of the 10^100 copies in the minute without torture.
>
> But what will happen to the observer when the minute is up?
>
> --Stathis
Pretending that these three universes are all that exists, what will happen
is that the OM will find himself being another one of the 10^100 copies.
The
copy survives with memory loss.
Saibal
In what sense can the copy (or anything) become another copy with memory
loss? It is almost as if you are postulating a soul, which flies from one
body to another, and somehow contains the original person's identity so that
it survives memory loss. What is required for an observer moment OM_1 at
time t1 to "become" the next observer moment at time t2 is that at least one
successor OM exist with time stamp t2, a belief that he is the same person
as OM_1, and memories of OM_1 up to time t2. If several such OM's exist
{OM_2.1, OM_2.2, OM_2.3...} then either one may be the successor, with
probability determined by the measure of OM_2.n relative to the measure of
the whole set. Amazingly, being completely swamped with other OM's of
various types and vintages, more or less closely related to OM_1, makes
absolutely no difference to the process, because the OM's don't need to
"find" each other and lock arms, all they need to do is *exist*, anywhere in
the multiverse, related in the way I have described. This is somewhat
analogous to the fact that the integer 56 is always followed by the integer
57, even though there are lots and lots of other integers everywhere amongst
which these two could get lost.
--Stathsi Papaioannou
_
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Re: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...
Le 14-juin-05, à 03:15, Russell Standish a écrit : On Mon, Jun 13, 2005 at 11:45:52AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: To Russell: I don't understand what you mean by a "conscious description". Even the expression "conscious" machine can be misleading at some point in the reasoning. A description could be conscious in the same way that with computationalism, a program might be conscious. OK but it can be misleading (especially in advanced stuff!). neither a program, nor a machine nor a body nor a brain can think. A person can think, and manifest eself (I follow Patrick for the pronouns) through a program, or a machine or a brain, In some reasoning it is like cutting the hair, but once we tackle more subtle questions it is important to make the distinction, imo. With computationalism, a certain program is considered conscious when run on an appropriate UTM. Actually: not necessarily. dangerous way to present the things. However, as you showed in chapter 4 of your thesis it is not necessary to actually run the program on a physical machine. OK. Church-Turing thesis and arithmetical platonism (my all description strings condition fulfills a similar role to arithmetical platonism) are enough. I am not so sure. You are not always clear if the strings describe the equivalent of a program (be it an universal program or not), or describes a computations (be it finite or infinite). Consciousness eventually is related to bunch of (sheaves of) infinite computations. they can be coded by infinite strings, but they are not programs. Furthermore, if the conscious program _is_ a UTM in its own right, it can run on itself (actually this is pretty much what my reading of what the Church-Turing thesis is). I am not sure I understand this. This obviates having to fix the UTM. Perhaps this is the route into the anthropic principle. ? Church's thesis just say things does not depend on which UTM you choose initially (and then my chapter four says you don't need to run it, but this is because the "runned" UTM already exists in arithmetical truth (a very weak subpart of it actually). This is a model of a conscious description, under the assumption of computationalism. Perhaps this model can be extended to not-computationalism, where a description is conscious if it is able to interpret itself as conscious. This makes sense indeed. (Modulo what I have just said). I do not have problem with observers being capable of universal computation as a necessary precondition here, should it be necessary. Like me. OK. Finally, there is the possibility that a concrete observer (the noumenon) exists somewhere, and that "conscious descriptions" are merely the anthropic "shadow" of the observer being observed by itself. Again this is to fuzzy for me. I can agree and I can disagree. It is really some person, which can be (with comp) associate relatively to a machine/machine-history, who can be conscious. Imo, only a person can be conscious. Isn't this the definition of "person"? Or do you define personhood by something else. It is generally agreed that a sleeping 3-person is not conscious (unless in the dream phase). It is still a person. It is ambiguous to ask if a 3-person can be conscious. This is because in natural language we use the same expression for a person description and the first person we infer and relate to the 3-person. It is akin with what I said above about the expression "a program can think". But such talk makes harder for many people just to grasp the "mind-body" problem, for example. Note that it is an open question, with comp, if something can be conscious without being a person. Some description of both mystic and people suffering big brain injuries can look like that. But I was excluding in my comment "pathological" case like that. I was just saying that we say with "a machine can think " it is an abuse of language for "the person associate to that machine is thinking". Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: more torture
Le 13-juin-05, à 21:06, Jesse Mazer a écrit : Hal Finney wrote: Jesse Mazer writes: > If you impose the condition I discussed earlier that absolute probabilities > don't change over time, or in terms of my analogy, that the water levels in > each tank don't change because the total inflow rate to each tank always > matches the total outflow rate, then I don't think it's possible to make > sense of the notion that the observer-moments in that torture-free minute > would have 10^100 times greater absolute measure. If there's 10^100 times > more water in the tanks corresponding to OMs during that minute, where does > all this water go after the tank corresponding to the last OM in this > minute, and where is it flowing in from to the tank corresponding to the > first OM in this minute? I would propose to implement the effect by duplicating the guy 10^100 times during that minute, then terminating all the duplicates after that time. What happens in your model when someone dies in some fraction of the multiverse? His absolute measure decreases, but where does the now-excess "water" go? In my model, death only exists from a third-person perspective, but from a first-person perspective I'm subscribing to the QTI, so consciousness will always continue in some form (even if my memories don't last or I am reduced to an amoeba-level consciousness)--the "water molecules" are never created or destroyed. I agree. This is even related with my "NO KESTRELS, NO STARLINGS" rough summary of physics (see the end of my first combinators post "the chemistry of combinators: http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m5913.html I intend to come back on this. For what would happen when an observer is duplicated from a third-person perspective, it might help to consider the example I discussed on the '"Last-minute" vs. "anticipatory" quantum immortality' thread at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4841.html , where a person is initially duplicated before a presidential election, and then depending on the results of the election, one duplicate is later copied 999 times. All else being equal, I'd speculate that the initial 2-split would "anticipate" the later 999-split, so that 999 out of 1000 "water molecules" of the first observer would split off into the copy that is later going to be split 999 times, so before this second split, OMs of this copy would have 999 times the absolute measure of the copy that isn't going to be split again. I essentially agree. Stathis should not agree, or I have misunderstood Stathis on its last posts. Correct me perhaps. I'm not absolutely sure that this would be a consequence of the idea about finding a unique self-consistent set of absolute and conditional probabilities based only on a "similarity matrix" and the condition of absolute probabilities not changing with time, but it seems intuitive to me that it would. I agree except question of vocabulary. It's not important (at this stage). At some point I'm going to try to test this idea with mathematica or something, creating a finite set of OMs and deciding what the possible successors to each one are in order to construct something like a "similarity matrix", then finding the unique vector of absolute probabilities that, when multiplied by this matrix, gives a unit vector (the procedure I discussed in my last post to you at http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m6855.html ). Hopefully the absolute probabilities would indeed tend to "anticipate" future splits in the way I'm describing. Nice test. I'm curious to see the result. Not sure there is a unique vector. Not sure it is important that there is one. I may be wrong. So if this anticipatory idea works, then any copy that's very unlikely to survive long from a third-person perspective is going to undergoe fewer future splits from a multiverse perspective (there will always be few branches where this copy survives though), so your conditional probability of becoming such a copy would be low, meaning that not much of your "water" would flow into that copy, and it will have a smaller absolute measure than copies that are likely to survive in more branches. Let us see ... Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: more torture
Hal Finney writes: Let us consider these flavors of altruism in the case of Stathis' puzzle: > You are one of 10 copies who are being tortured. The copies are all being > run in lockstep with each other, as would occur if 10 identical computers > were running 10 identical sentient programs. Assume that the torture is so > bad that death is preferable, and so bad that escaping it with your life is > only marginally preferable to escaping it by dying (eg., given the option of > a 50% chance of dying or a 49% chance of escaping the torture and living, > you would take the 50%). The torture will continue for a year, but you are > allowed one of 3 choices as to how things will proceed: > > (a) 9 of the 10 copies will be chosen at random and painlessly killed, while > the remaining copy will continue to be tortured. > > (b) For one minute, the torture will cease and the number of copies will > increase to 10^100. Once the minute is up, the number of copies will be > reduced to 10 again and the torture will resume as before. > > (c) the torture will be stopped for 8 randomly chosen copies, and continue > for the other 2. > > Which would you choose? For the averagist, doing (a) will not change average happiness. Doing (b) will improve it, but not that much. The echoes of the torture and anticipation of future torture will make that one minute of respite not particularly pleasant. Doing (c) would seem to be the best choice, as 8 out of the 10 avoid a year of torture. (I'm not sure why Stathis seemed to say that the people would not want to escape their torture, given that it was so bad. That doesn't seem right to me; the worse it is, the more they would want to escape it.) For the totalist, since death is preferable to the torture, each person's life has a negative impact on total happiness. Hence (a) would be an improvement as it removes these negatives from the universe. Doing (b) is unclear: during that one minute, would the 10^100 copies kill themselves if possible? If so, their existence is negative and so doing (b) would make the universe much worse due to the addition of so many negatively happy OMs. Doing (c) would seem to be better, assuming that the 8 out of 10 would eventually find that their lives were positive during that year without torture. So it appears that each one would choose (c), although they would differ about whether (a) is an improvement over the status quo. (b) is deprecated because that one minute will not be pleasant due to the echoes of the torture. If the person could have his memory wiped for that one minute and neither remember nor anticipate future torture, that would make (b) the best choice for both kinds of altruists. Adding 10^100 pleasant observer-moments would increase both total and average happiness and would more than compensate for a year of suffering for 10 people. 10^100 is a really enormous number. This analysis would be fine were it not for the fact that we are discussing *exact copies* running in lockstep with each other. You have to take into account the special way observers construct their identity as a unique individual persisting through time, which you admitted in a recent post "is a purely contingent, artificial, manufactured set of beliefs and attitudes which have been programmed into us in order to help our genes survive." With choice (a), although it seems like a good idea to end the suffering of 9/10 copies, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference. In order to end a person's suffering at a particular observer moment, you have to either ensure that there will be no successor OM's ever again (i.e., death), or provide a successor OM which does not involve suffering. As long as at least one copy remains alive, that copy will always provide a successor OM for any of the other copies which are killed. Subjectively, it will be impossible for any of the copies to notice that anything has changed when they are killed. This reasoning applies whether you consider the selfish interests of one of the copies or the altruistic interests of all of them. You might argue, as you have with your example of increased measure on alternate days of the week, that it is still better to try to reduce the total number of unpleasant experiences in the world, even if we cannot see any change that may result. Perhaps that would be OK, all else being equal. However, I provided choice (c) to show how this sort of reasoning can lead to unfortunate outcomes. In (c), unlike (a), alternative successor OM's to the torture exist. The result is that at the moment the choice is made, each copy is looking at a 20% chance that the torture will continue and an 80% chance that it will stop. At first glance, this doesn't look quite as good as choice (a), if you follow the "try to reduce the number of unpleasant OM's in the world" rule. But as shown above, it would be a terrible mistake to choose (a), as you would be ensuring that th
Re: Re-Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure
Le 14-juin-05, à 00:35, George Levy a écrit : Bruno Marchal wrote: Godel's theorem: ~Bf -> ~B(~Bf), which is equivalent to B(Bf -> f) -> Bf, Just a little aside a la Descartes + Godel: (assume that "think" and "believe" are synonymous and that f = "you are") All right. Of course this follows that for any p in the language of the machine, we have indeed that the machine can prove B(Bp -> p) -> Bp That is: the machine does prove its Lob's theorem. (in my post to Brent f was the constant "FALSE"). B(Bf -> f) -> Bf can be rendered as: If you believe that "if you think that you are therefore you are", then you think you are. Nice! This makes a relation between Lob's theorem (which generalizes Godel's second incompleteness theorem) and Descartes systematic doubting procedure. The link exists already with Godel's theorem. If you look at the "arithmetical placebo phenomenon" (in my SANE paper), you are relating Descartes and the Placebo. Quite cute! That's what Descartes thought! I agree essentially. See Slezak for a pionering and readable paper relating Godel and Descartes: SLEZAK P., 1983, Descartes 's Diagonal Deduction, Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 34, pp. 13-36. And this is related also with the debate on Godel and Mechanism (against Penrose and Lucas), on which Slezak wrote a paper, which could be needed for the reading of its Godelian reading of Descartes. SLEZAK P., 1982, Gödel's Theorem and the Mind, Brit. J. Phil. Sci. 33, pp. 41-52. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: more torture
- Original Message - From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Sent: Tuesday, June 14, 2005 08:06 AM Subject: Re: more torture > Saibal Mitra writes: > > >Because no such thing as free will exists one has to consider three > >different universes in which the three different choices are made. The > >three > >universes will have comparable measures. The antropic factor of 10^100 will > >then dominate and will cause the observer to find himself having made > >choice > >b) as one of the 10^100 copies in the minute without torture. > > But what will happen to the observer when the minute is up? > > --Stathis Pretending that these three universes are all that exists, what will happen is that the OM will find himself being another one of the 10^100 copies. The copy survives with memory loss. Saibal
