Re: Dualism and the DA
Dear List, I cannot keep to myself remarks on TWO kinds of unreasonabilities surfaced and are still being discussed to saturation (euphemism). #1: the use of the conditional form. This, as usually applied, pertains to a select aspect of the model without (of course) taking the rest of the world into consideration which effacts/affects all changes. One cannot think of changing one aspect and disregard the result of ALL influences onto it. Maybe Job's bluecollar parents provided a firm and steady grip on his growing up giving him the discipline to become a successful person, while the affluent couple's possibilities would have led him into drugs and/or crime. Si nisi non esset, perfectus quodlibet esset. It's a mind-game. Sci (or not so sci?) - fi??? One closing idea: the world is deterministic: All that happens has its origin in intereffectiveness, we have access only to a limited cognitive circle. So those 'facts' we want to hypothetically change are determined by the OM circumstances. It is nonsense: just like the 10^100 pensimilar copies in 10^100 pensimilar universes - all according to our (human and present) understanding, design and conditions. Our own mind-limited artifact. #2: Over the millennia faith-strategists invented dualism to imply something that 'survives' us and can be praised or punished just to secure the grip of 'faith' (organizations?) on the 'faithful, aoup carrying such memes over millennia. It was not an esoteric thought: the basic reductionist thinking humanity developed with its limited models gave rise to thinking in things ie cut models, without understanding of the total interconnectedness. If we step a bit further, we find that the world is change, process, substance is reduceable into such and it is our reductionist logic that looks for material substance on traditional basis. The process, change, ie. the 'function' usually assigned to such 'substance' as being considered a separable entity (like spirit, soul, consciousness, power, whatever) and voila: we have dualism. I do not imply that the soul is the function of the body: the unit we realize as our model of a human being (or anything else) is considered as having a substrate AND a function separately. So the personalized function can(??) 'survive' the substrate's demise. Bovine excrement: there is an intrinsic unity of 'functional units' - no mind separable from the (so called) material tool: the neuronal brain (and its functions). I don't blame Descartes: in his time dualistic basis kept him from the inquisition. And we cannot judge by our present epistemic level of ongoing information at our cognitive inventory, the outcome of another (lower?) level conclusion. Ptolemy was right in his rite. Pass. I like this list, because it 'thinks' for the future. Of course sometimes it is hard to shake off the firm handcuffs in thinking by traditional terms. We all have been brainwashed into them. Please, excuse my unorthodoxy John Mikes - Original Message - From: Jonathan Colvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'Hal Finney' [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Friday, June 17, 2005 4:34 PM Subject: RE: Dualism and the DA Hal Finney wrote: It's an interesting question as to how far we can comfortably or meaningfully take counterfactuals. At some level it is completely mundane to say things like, if I had taken a different route to work today, I wouldn't have gotten caught in that traffic jam. SNIP Computer head Steve Jobs gave a pretty good graduation speech at Stanford last week, ... SNIP Does it make sense for Jobs to say, who would I have been if that had happened? The point is that we can imagine a range of counterfactuals ... ... Those are counterfactuals regarding personal circumstance, and do not seem particularly controversial, even admitting that it is not straightforward to define a single theory of personal identity that covers all the bases. SNIP as Who would I be if my mother and father hadn't had sex?, or who would I be if they'd had sex a day later and a different egg and sperm had met?. I have to disagree with you here, and state that this sort of counterfactual seems to indeed embody a difference of kind, not just degree. We're not talking about imagining_whats_it_likeness. We are talking about me *being* someone different. Jonathan Colvin - And may I quote: Russell St. to JC Thursday, June 16, 2005 2:00 AM: (attachment): On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 10:30:11PM - Jonathan Colvin wrote: Nope, I'm thinking of dualism as the mind (or consciousness) is separate from the body. Ie. The mind is not identical to the body. - RS: These two statements are not equivalent. You cannot say that the fist is separate from the hand. Yet the fist is not identical to the hand. Another example. You cannot say that a smile is separate from someone's mouth. Yet a smile is not identical to the mouth. ... JC: As a little boy once asked, Why are lions, lions? Why
Re: another puzzzle
Le 18-juin-05, 13:09, Eric Cavalcanti a crit : But with comp, then yes, I agree that the memory of the newly created copies is just as real as any other memory. ok Or maybe not quite. Because we cannot find any evidence that we were created 10 minutes ago. That hypothesis is indistinguishable of the hypothesis that we have been existing continually over time. Except in our thought experiments (which *assumes* comp). A comp practitioner, who accepts to travel with teleporters will have evidence (but no proof though) that his local body has been created recently when he goes out of the reconstitution box. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Dualism and the DA
Le 17-juin-05, 19:44, Jonathan Colvin a crit : Bruno wrote: Note that the question why am I me and not my brother is strictly equivalent with why am I the one in Washington and not the one in Moscow after a WM duplication. It is strictly unanswerable. Even a God could not give an adequate explanation (assuming c.). Ok, does that not imply that it is a meaningless question? Not at all. If you want to insist that this question is meaningful, I don't see how this is possible without assuming a dualism of some sort (exactly which sort I'm trying to figure out). If the material universe is identical under situation (A) (I am copy #1 in washington) and (B) (I am copy#2 in washington), then in what way does it make sense to say that situation A OR situation B might have obtained? Just ask the one in Washington. He will tell you that he feels really be the one in washington. The experience from his personal point of view *has* given a bit of information he feels himself to be the one in washington, and not in Moscow. At this stage he can have only an intellectual (3-person) knowledge that its doppelganger has been reconstituted in Moscow. And he remember correctly by comp his past history in Brussels. It is even simpler to reason by assuming, well not comp, but the fact that the reasoner believes in comp, not as a philosopher, but as someone practicing comp everyday. He believes that, as far as he is consistent he will remain consistent (or alive with its correct memories) after a teletransportation from Brussels to Mars. An independant unknown reconstitution elsewhere will not change the fact that he survives. So he believes he will survive a duplication, in the same mundane sense that he would survive a medical operation. Only, he can by introspection realize that the reconstitution will break the 3-symmetry of the duplication. By numerical identity and 3-symmetry he knows he will no convey one bit of information to an external observer (by saying I am the one in W), but he *knows* he is the one in w, like the other konws he is the one in m. (unless he is transformed into a zombie after the duplication, but by definition of comp that should not happen). The or situation makes sense from the first person point of views. Then, by introspective anticipation the one in brussels will infer he is just maximally ignorant about where, in W or M he feel to be after the experiment will be done. This seems to be the crux of the objection to any theory which reifies 1st person phenomena. You are right, but only from the naturalist/physicalist/materialist theoretical point of view. With comp I suspect (let us say) that it is the crux of the objection to any theory which reifies the 3 person phenomena (except a part of arithmetic). The fact is that when I have a headache, or just when someone I care off has a headache, I am not sure I find even just polite the accusation of reification. If I am the one with the headache, I would consider as a lie to myself to believe I am reifying the headache. Contrarily if you tell me there are moon, galaxies, big bangs and gluons, and when I ask you the evidences, you can give me only numbers which represent relative but apparently stable relation with other numbers. This I don't take as an evidence for moons and gluons, but only as evidence that we probably share a long and non trivial comp history. But with comp, the stability of that history is in need to be explained, without reifying anything substancial, material or physical: it *is* the 1-dragon problem. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
death
Hal Finney writes: God creates someone with memories of a past life, lets him live for a day, then instantly and painlessly kills him. What would you say that he experiences? Would he notice his birth and death? I would generally apply the same answers to the 10^100 people who undergo your thought experiment. Some people might argue that death is not intrinsically bad; rather, it is the pain and anxiety associated with dying and the grief the dying person's loved ones will go through that is bad. I don't agree, and it appears you don't either: death *is* intrinsically bad. Knowing that I will never again have any experiences of any kind is something I find deeply disturbing, and I think that most people, if they are honest with themselves, would feel the same way. Therefore, in the example you have given, if God creates someone and then kills him, painlessly or not, that is bad. In my thought experiment, if the 10^100 copies are allowed to diverge after they are created and then all but one killed, that would be very bad indeed. Similarly, if the 10^100 copies were created, stayed perfectly synchronised, and then all of them killed, that would be very bad. Before continuing, it is worth looking at the definition of death. The standard medical definition will not do for our purposes, because it doesn't allow for future developments such as reviving the cryogenically preserved, mind uploads, teleportation etc. A simple, general purpose definition which has been proposed before on this list is that a person can be said to die at a particular moment when there is no chance that he will experience a next moment, however that experience might come about. Equivalently, death occurs when there is no successor observer moment, anywhere or ever. One consequence of this definition is that everyone who appears to be dead can only be said to be provisionally dead, until it can actually be shown that there will never be a successor OM anywhere in the multiverse (or whatever larger mathematical structure contains it). Even people who are unconscious or in the dreamless phase of sleep, having no guarantee that they will ever wake up again, can be said to be provisionally dead. Taking this idea further, a person can be said to be provisionally dead with the passing of every conscious moment, since (QTI aside) it is never certain that there will be a successor OM. You could say that death happens to us all the time and is no big deal; it's not living again which is the problem. Returning to your example, if God creates a person, call him A, and a day later kills him, A will be really dead (as opposed to provisionally dead) if there will never be any successor OM's to his last conscious moment. Now, suppose God kills A and then creates an exact copy of A along with his environment, call him B, on the other side of the planet. B has all of A's memories up to the moment before he was killed. This destruction/creation procedure is, except for the duplication of the environment, exactly how teleportation is supposed to work. I think most people on this list would agree that teleportation (if it could be made to work, which not everyone does agree is possible) would be a method of transportation, not execution: even though the original dies, the copy has all his memories and provides the requisite successor OM in exactly the same way as would have happened if the original had continued living. So in the example above, if B is an exact copy of A in an exact copy of A's environment, A would become B and not even notice that there had been any change. Now, consider the same situation with one difference. Instead of creating B at the instant he kills A, God creates A and B at the same time, on opposite sides of the planet but in exactly the same environment which will provide each of them with exactly the same inputs, and their minds at all time remain perfectly synchronised. God allows his two creatures to live for a day, and then instantly and painlessly kills A. In the previous example, we agreed that the creation of B means that A doesn't really die. Now, we have *exactly* the same situation when A is killed: B is there to provide the successor OM, and A need not even know that anything unusual had happened. How could the fact that B was present a day, a minute or a microsecond before A's death make any difference to A? All that matters is that B is in the correct state to provide continuity of consciousness when A is killed. Conversely, A and A's death cannot possibly have any direct effect on B. It is not as if A's soul flies around the world and takes over B; rather, it just so happens (because of how A and B were created) that B's mental states coincide with A's, or with what A's would have been if he hadn't died. The above mechanism would still work even if, as in my thought experiment, there were 10^100 exact copies running in lockstep and all but
Re: death
At 10:55 AM 6/18/2005, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: (snip) The above mechanism would still work even if, as in my thought experiment, there were 10^100 exact copies running in lockstep and all but one died. Each one of the 10^100-1 copies would experience continuity of consciousness through the remaining copy, so none would really die. RM: None would really die only if the behavioral configurations were uniform and equal (thus equivalent) *and* only if their environment was in an equivalent state. However, that is not the case here. The environment and behavioral configurations of those who died are not commensurate with the one who lived. No equivalence means differing results---and differing paths. Let's look at it this way: take two boxes, perfectly equivalent in every way and place inside each two similar marbles. Assume that both systems are equivalent configurations and are, in effect, copies of one another. When you remove one marble from its box, the other marble doesn't follow suit---it stays put.
copy method important?
All, Though we're not discussing entanglement per se, some of these examples surely meet the criteria. So, my thought question for the day: is the method of copying important? Example #1: we start with a single marble, A. Then, we magically create a copy, marble B--perfectly like marble B in every way. . .that is, the atoms are configured similarly, the interaction environment is the same--and they are indistinguishable from one another. Example #2: we start with a single marble A. Then, instead of magically creating a copy, we search the universe, Tegmarkian-style, and locate a second marble, B that is perfectly equivalent to our original marble A. All tests both magically avoid QM decoherence problems and show that our newfound marble is, in fact, indistinguishable in every way from our original. Here's the question: Are the properties of the *relationship* between Marbles A and B in Example #1 perfectly equivalent to those in Example #2? If the criteria involves simply analysis of configurations at a precise point in time, it would seem the answer must be yes. On the other hand, if the method by which the marbles were created is crucial to the present configuration, then the answer would be no. R. Miller
RE: Dualism and the DA
Russell Standish wrote: On What would it be like to have been born someone else, how does this differ from What is it like to be a bat? Presumably Jonathon Colvin would argue that this latter question is meaningless, unless immaterial souls existed. I still find it hard to understand this argument. The question What is it like to be a bat? still has meaning, but is probably unanswerable (although Dennett, I notice considers it answerable, contra Nagel!) No... What is it like to be (or have been born) a bat? is a *very* different question than Why am I me rather than a bat?. Certainly, assuming immaterial souls or a similar identity dualism, (and that I am my soul, not my body), and that bats have souls like people, it is a meaningful question to ask why am I me rather than a bat, or to state that I could have been a bat, because my soul could have been placed in a bat rather than a human body. The universe would be objectively different under the circumstances I am Jonathan Colvin and I am a bat. If you want to insist that What would it be like to be a bat is equivalent to the question What would the universe be like if I had been a bat rather than me?, it is very hard to see what the answer could be. Suppose you *had* been a bat rather than you (Russell Standish). How would the universe be any different than it is now? If you can answer that question, (which is the key question, to my mind), then I'll grant that the question is meaningful. Jonathan Colvin
Re: copy method important?
I'm no physicist, but doesn't Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle forbid making exact quantum-level measurements, hence exact copies? If so, then all this talk of making exact copies is fantasy. Norman Samish ~ - Original Message - From: rmiller [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 10:05 AM Subject: copy method important? All, Though we're not discussing entanglement per se, some of these examples surely meet the criteria. So, my thought question for the day: is the method of copying important? Example #1: we start with a single marble, A. Then, we magically create a copy, marble B--perfectly like marble B in every way. . .that is, the atoms are configured similarly, the interaction environment is the same--and they are indistinguishable from one another. Example #2: we start with a single marble A. Then, instead of magically creating a copy, we search the universe, Tegmarkian-style, and locate a second marble, B that is perfectly equivalent to our original marble A. All tests both magically avoid QM decoherence problems and show that our newfound marble is, in fact, indistinguishable in every way from our original. Here's the question: Are the properties of the *relationship* between Marbles A and B in Example #1 perfectly equivalent to those in Example #2? If the criteria involves simply analysis of configurations at a precise point in time, it would seem the answer must be yes. On the other hand, if the method by which the marbles were created is crucial to the present configuration, then the answer would be no. R. Miller -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.7.8/22 - Release Date: 6/17/2005
Re: death
Stathis Papaioannou writes: Hal Finney writes: God creates someone with memories of a past life, lets him live for a day, then instantly and painlessly kills him. What would you say that he experiences? Would he notice his birth and death? I would generally apply the same answers to the 10^100 people who undergo your thought experiment. Keep in mind that I was just trying to answer your question very directly and literally, about the person would experience in your thought experiment. I wasn't trying to get all moralistic about it. Maybe he minds about being killed, maybe he doesn't. I think most people would mind, in which case I think God is being pretty cruel. But all that morality is pretty much irrelevant to the simple question of what he would experience. I have tried to answer that as straightforwardly as I can, above. Before continuing, it is worth looking at the definition of death. The standard medical definition will not do for our purposes, because it doesn't allow for future developments such as reviving the cryogenically preserved, mind uploads, teleportation etc. A simple, general purpose definition which has been proposed before on this list is that a person can be said to die at a particular moment when there is no chance that he will experience a next moment, however that experience might come about. Equivalently, death occurs when there is no successor observer moment, anywhere or ever. That definition doesn't make any sense in the context of everything exists, because by definition every possible observer moment exists. Hal Finney
Re: copy method important?
You ca still create two identical systems starting from another system. E.g. in stimulated emission two photons are created in the same state. Another example is a Bose Einstein condensate, in which all the atoms are in the same state. Note that you can still teleport an unknown quantum state despite Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (you do this without measuring the state). It can be shown that you can't copy an unknown quantum state, because that would violate the Schrodinger equation. Saibal - Defeat Spammers by launching DDoS attacks on Spam-Websites: http://www.hillscapital.com/antispam/ - Original Message - From: Norman Samish [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 08:36 PM Subject: Re: copy method important? I'm no physicist, but doesn't Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle forbid making exact quantum-level measurements, hence exact copies? If so, then all this talk of making exact copies is fantasy. Norman Samish ~ - Original Message - From: rmiller [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Stathis Papaioannou [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 10:05 AM Subject: copy method important? All, Though we're not discussing entanglement per se, some of these examples surely meet the criteria. So, my thought question for the day: is the method of copying important? Example #1: we start with a single marble, A. Then, we magically create a copy, marble B--perfectly like marble B in every way. . .that is, the atoms are configured similarly, the interaction environment is the same--and they are indistinguishable from one another. Example #2: we start with a single marble A. Then, instead of magically creating a copy, we search the universe, Tegmarkian-style, and locate a second marble, B that is perfectly equivalent to our original marble A. All tests both magically avoid QM decoherence problems and show that our newfound marble is, in fact, indistinguishable in every way from our original. Here's the question: Are the properties of the *relationship* between Marbles A and B in Example #1 perfectly equivalent to those in Example #2? If the criteria involves simply analysis of configurations at a precise point in time, it would seem the answer must be yes. On the other hand, if the method by which the marbles were created is crucial to the present configuration, then the answer would be no. R. Miller -- No virus found in this incoming message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.7.8/22 - Release Date: 6/17/2005
Re: copy method important?
I'm no physicist, but doesn't Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle forbid making exact quantum-level measurements, hence exact copies? If so, then all this talk of making exact copies is fantasy. Norman Samish You can't *specifically* copy a quantum state, but you can create systems in *every possible* quantum state (of a finite size), hence you can make an ensemble which contains a copy of a given quantum system. You can't say which specific item in the ensemble is the copy, but you can make a copy. That may or may not be sufficient for a particular thought experiment to go forward. In practice most people believe that consciousness does not depend critically on quantum states, so making a copy of a person's mind would not be affected by these considerations. Hal Finney
Re: copy method important?
Hal, Isn't it possible that decision processes of the brain, hence consciousness, DOES depend critically on quantum states? My understanding of the workings of the brain is that my action, whether thought or deed, is determined by whether or not certain neurons fire. This depends on many other neurons. So the brain can be in a state of delicate balance, where it could be impossible to predict whether or not the neuron fires. We all have to make decisions where the pluses apparently equal the minuses. It would take very little to tip the balance one way or the other. Perhaps, at the deepest level, the route we take depends on whether an electron has left or right polarization, or some other quantum property - which we agree can't be measured. If this is true, then perhaps Free Will (or at least behavior that is, in principle, unpredictable) does exist. Norman - Original Message - From: Hal Finney [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: everything-list@eskimo.com Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 2:02 PM Subject: Re: copy method important? I'm no physicist, but doesn't Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle forbid making exact quantum-level measurements, hence exact copies? If so, then all this talk of making exact copies is fantasy. Norman Samish You can't *specifically* copy a quantum state, but you can create systems in *every possible* quantum state (of a finite size), hence you can make an ensemble which contains a copy of a given quantum system. You can't say which specific item in the ensemble is the copy, but you can make a copy. That may or may not be sufficient for a particular thought experiment to go forward. In practice most people believe that consciousness does not depend critically on quantum states, so making a copy of a person's mind would not be affected by these considerations. Hal Finney
Re: copy method important?
Norman Samish writes: Isn't it possible that decision processes of the brain, hence consciousness, DOES depend critically on quantum states? Yes, it's possible. There is a school of thought which advances this position. Penrose, Hamerhoff are a couple of the names, off the top of my head. There is an extensive literature on the subject to which you could find some entries via Google. I just did so and found archives of a mailing list called QUANTUM-MIND which is all about this subject. Nevertheless I think it is safe to say that the opposite opinion is more widespread, that the mind does not depend critically on any quantum property. One of the main reasons is that quantum coherence is very difficult to maintain outside of carefully prepared laboratory conditions. Another point is that our models of neurons do not require quantum behavior, yet computer simulations suggest that they can learn patterns and respond in meaningful ways similar to actual neural tissue. Of course we are far from being able to simulate anything at the level of consciousness, but so far there is nothing observable about neural behavior that suggests nonclassical effects. My understanding of the workings of the brain is that my action, whether thought or deed, is determined by whether or not certain neurons fire. This depends on many other neurons. So the brain can be in a state of delicate balance, where it could be impossible to predict whether or not the neuron fires. We all have to make decisions where the pluses apparently equal the minuses. It would take very little to tip the balance one way or the other. Perhaps, at the deepest level, the route we take depends on whether an electron has left or right polarization, or some other quantum property - which we agree can't be measured. I think it is doubtful that neurons often get into a condition where they are so delicately balanced that a single electron could make a difference. There are a lot of electrons in a neuron! But even if it did happen, it wouldn't mean that the neuron *depends* on this effect. A simulation of a brain that was non-quantum might not behave 100% the same as the real brain being modelled, but it would probably work ok. By their nature, brains need to be robust and immune to disturbances. Neurons are constantly dying, their internals assaulted by changes in blood chemistry, but the brain keeps chugging away. It's not exactly a delicate flower. Again, this is exactly the opposite of the quantum behavior we observe in the lab, which is extremely sensitive and gets messed up if you look at it funny. If this is true, then perhaps Free Will (or at least behavior that is, in principle, unpredictable) does exist. Right, well, for many people, being at the mercy of unpredictable and uncontrollable randomness may be free but it's hardly willful. Hal Finney
RE: Dualism and the DA (and torture once more)
Bruno wrote: Note that the question why am I me and not my brother is strictly equivalent with why am I the one in Washington and not the one in Moscow after a WM duplication. It is strictly unanswerable. Even a God could not give an adequate explanation (assuming c.). (JC) Ok, does that not imply that it is a meaningless question? Not at all. If you want to insist that this question is meaningful, I don't see how this is possible without assuming a dualism of some sort (exactly which sort I'm trying to figure out). If the material universe is identical under situation (A) (I am copy #1 in washington) and (B) (I am copy#2 in washington), then in what way does it make sense to say that situation A OR situation B might have obtained? Just ask the one in Washington. He will tell you that he feels really be the one in washington. The experience from his personal point of view *has* given a bit of information he feels himself to be the one in washington, and not in Moscow. At this stage he can have only an intellectual (3-person) knowledge that its doppelganger has been reconstituted in Moscow. And he remember correctly by comp his past history in Brussels. snip I'm sure the one in Moscow will also answer that he feels really to be the one in Moscow. But what you haven't answered is in what way the universe is any different under circumstance (A) than (B). This is because there is surely *no* difference at all. This is the reason why it makes no sense (to me) to take the position that if I copy myself, there is a 50% chance of (A) me being observer A, and a 50% chance of (B) me being observer B. There is no difference between (A) and (B). This is also the reason why I choose (A) a 50% chance of torture over (B) being copied ten times, and one copy getting tortured (where it is suggested there is only a 10% chance of me getting tortured). There are clearly two different possible universes under (A) (one where I get tortured, one where I don't). Under (B), there is no way I can make sense of what the 10% probability applies to. The universe is identical under situation (a) I'm person 1 who gets tortured and (b) I'm person 2-10 who doesn't. To insist that there *is* a difference surely requires some new kind of dualism. Perhaps it is a valid dualism; but I think it should be accepted that theories reifying the 1st person are fundamentally dualistic. But I know what your response will be..the dualism comes from reifying the 3rd person independent universe, and if we accept only the 1st person as real, there is no dualism. It is quite a metaphysical leap, though, to discard the 3rd person universe. I'd like to know how to justify such a shift. It does not seem simpler by Occam, because instead of 1 universe containing many observers, we have a multiplicity of universes, each with 1 observer. How does this differ from solipsism? How do we make sense of other observers within *our* universe? If there questions have been addressed before on the list, feel free to point me to the relevant archive section. Jonathan Colvin
Re: Dualism and the DA (and torture once more)
Le Dimanche 19 Juin 2005 02:39, Jonathan Colvin a crit: the dualism comes from reifying the 3rd person independent universe, and if we accept only the 1st person as real, there is no dualism. It is quite a metaphysical leap, though, to discard the 3rd person universe. I'd like to know how to justify such a shift. Yes, exactly... this is what is called a monism and not dualism... if you accept only 1st person experience as real, and 3rd person phenomena as emergent of 1st person experience, it is not dualism. It is called phenomenalism. phenomenalism - The monistic view that all empirical statements (such as the laws of physics) can be placed in a one to one correspondence with statements about only the phenomenal (i.e. mental appearances). Quentin
RE: copy method important?
-Original Message- From: Norman Samish [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 11:20 PM To: everything-list@eskimo.com Subject: Re: copy method important? Hal, Isn't it possible that decision processes of the brain, hence consciousness, DOES depend critically on quantum states? My understanding of the workings of the brain is that my action, whether thought or deed, is determined by whether or not certain neurons fire. This depends on many other neurons. So the brain can be in a state of delicate balance, where it could be impossible to predict whether or not the neuron fires. We all have to make decisions where the pluses apparently equal the minuses. It would take very little to tip the balance one way or the other. Perhaps, at the deepest level, the route we take depends on whether an electron has left or right polarization, or some other quantum property - which we agree can't be measured. If this is true, then perhaps Free Will (or at least behavior that is, in principle, unpredictable) does exist. Norman Certainly the processes of the brain might be influenced this way or that by random events; but as Tegmark showed the randomness from the environment (i.e. thermal random motion) is orders of magnitude higher than the intrinsic quantum randomness. So you don't need to posit quantum randomness to avoid the predicament of Buridan's ass. Brent Meeker
