Re: Quantum Immortality and Information Flow
Tom Caylor writes: In response to Stathis' thought experiment, to speak of an experiment being "set up" in a certain way is to base probabilities on an "irrelevant" subset of the whole, at least if the multiverse hypothesis is true. In the Plenitude, there are an additional 10^100 copies still existing, when you say that 10^100 copies are being shut-down. Talking about these additional 10^100 copies is just as consistent as talking about the original 10^100 copies (even more consistent if you consider Bruno's statement about cul-de-sacs. In the Plenitude, everything washes out to zero. And Bruno, I would even say that all consistent histories wash out to zero. Doesn't this ignore the concept of measure in the multiverse? If I buy a lottery ticket there are an infinite number of versions of me who win and an infinite number of versions who lose, but in some sense there have to be "more" losers than winners, which is why I don't buy lottery tickets. Stathis Papaioannou _ realestate.com.au: the biggest address in property http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Re: Quantum Immortality and Information Flow
From the third person perspective, the annihilation of the 10^100 copies could be seen as 10^100 dead ends. (In fact, when I originally proposed this experiment, Hal Finney thought it represented the ultimate in mass murder.) If I were one of the 10^100, however, I wouldn't be worried in the slightest about the prospect of dying, because as long as at least one copy survives, this guarantees that I survive. This may go again intuition, but if you give up the notion of an immaterial soul, there is no reason why there should be a one to one relationship between earlier and later versions of a person. Stathis Papaioannou Le 11-déc.-05, à 11:58, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : You find yourself alone in a room with a light that alternates red/green with a period of one minute. A letter in the room informs you that every other minute, 10^100 copies of you are created and run in parallel for one minute, then shut down. The transition between the two states (low measure/ high measure) corresponds with the change in the colour of the light, and you task is to guess which colour corresponds to which state. The problem is, whether the light is red or green, you could argue that you are vastly more likely to be sampled from the 10^100 group. You might decide to say that *both* red and green correspond to the larger group, because if you say this 10^100 copies in the multiverse will be correct and only one copy will be wrong. But clearly, this tyranny of the majority strategy brings you no closer to the truth. If you tossed a coin, at least you would have a 1/2 chance of being right. Yes but this is due to the "shut down". (if I got correctly your experiment).The probabilities can be taken only on the stories without dead-ends, and I guess you consider the shut down as sort of "absolute annihilation". I know this is hard to believe, but apparently we are "conscious" only because we belong to a continuum of infinite never ending stories ... I don't believe this, but then that's what the lobian machine's "guardian angel" G* says about that: true and strictly unbelievable. Do you accept that your argument won't go through if the shut down are deleted? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ _ Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee® Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
Re: Quantum Immortality and Information Flow
Stathis Papaioannou wrote: In addition to the above arguments, consider the problem from the point of view of the subject. If multiple copies of a person are created and run in parallel for a period, what difference does this make to his experience? It seems to me that there is no test or experiment the person could do which would allow him to determine if he is living in a period of high measure or low measure. If an OM is the smallest discernible unit of conscious experience, it therefore seems reasonable to treat multiple instantiations of the same OM as one OM. Yes Stathis, I agree with you completely. Bruno wrote: And this already comes from the fact that the "indistinguishabilitty/distinguishabilitty" crux is itself relative. By loosing memory something distinguishable can become indistinguishable, augmenting the class of (normal) self-consistent extensions. Bruno, I find this question extremely difficult. Is indistinguishability established at the physical level or at the psychological level? If we say it is established at the psychological level, then even mental errors ( ie.6+7=11) count in defining a whole world. This is the ultimate in relativism. I can find reasons to go either way. (Ultimately Undecided?) Then I am open that from the 1 point of view, fusion increases measure, duplication decreases measure; although from the 3 pov it is the contrary. I do not agree with you on this point Bruno. >From the one person point of view measures remains constant just like the speed of light, the mass of an electron, or the number of points in a line 1 meter long or 1 kilometer long. (the number of points in a continuum is always the same no matter what the length of the line is). The one person always observes a continuum in the number of opportunities available to him no matter what his past history is. >From the third person point of view, it makes sense to consider ratios in measures, just like it makes sense to take ratios of line segments of different lengths. George
Re: Quantum Immortality and Information Flow
Bruno wrote: Le 11-déc.-05, à 11:58, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : You find yourself alone in a room with a light that alternates red/green with a period of one minute. A letter in the room informs you that every other minute, 10^100 copies of you are created and run in parallel for one minute, then shut down. The transition between the two states (low measure/ high measure) corresponds with the change in the colour of the light, and you task is to guess which colour corresponds to which state. The problem is, whether the light is red or green, you could argue that you are vastly more likely to be sampled from the 10^100 group. You might decide to say that *both* red and green correspond to the larger group, because if you say this 10^100 copies in the multiverse will be correct and only one copy will be wrong. But clearly, this tyranny of the majority strategy brings you no closer to the truth. If you tossed a coin, at least you would have a 1/2 chance of being right. Yes but this is due to the "shut down". (if I got correctly your experiment).The probabilities can be taken only on the stories without dead-ends, and I guess you consider the shut down as sort of "absolute annihilation". I know this is hard to believe, but apparently we are "conscious" only because we belong to a continuum of infinite never ending stories ... I don't believe this, but then that's what the lobian machine's "guardian angel" G* says about that: true and strictly unbelievable. Do you accept that your argument won't go through if the shut down are deleted? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ In response to Stathis' thought experiment, to speak of an experiment being "set up" in a certain way is to base probabilities on an "irrelevant" subset of the whole, at least if the multiverse hypothesis is true. In the Plenitude, there are an additional 10^100 copies still existing, when you say that 10^100 copies are being shut-down. Talking about these additional 10^100 copies is just as consistent as talking about the original 10^100 copies (even more consistent if you consider Bruno's statement about cul-de-sacs. In the Plenitude, everything washes out to zero. And Bruno, I would even say that all consistent histories wash out to zero. Bruno, I've been following your posts about Kripke semantics and have done the exercises, including the one about showing that you need a symmetrical accessibility relation to have LASE. However, my initial reaction still is that choosing a particular modal logic is scary to me, sending up red flags about hidden assumptions that are being made in the process. But I will continue to follow you as you present your case. Earlier Stathis wrote: Bruno: OK but with comp I have argued that OMs are not primitive but are "generated", in platonia, by the Universal Dovetailer. A 3- OM is just an UD-accessible state, and the 1-OMs inherit relative probabilities from the computer science theoretical structuring of the 3-OMs. Are OMs directly generated by the UD, or does the UD generate the physical (apparently) universe, which leads to the evolution of conscious beings, who then give rise to OMs? Stathis Papaioannou It's interesting that symmetry (Bruno's requirement for LASE) has come up lately, because Stathis' question seems to be what we are all wondering. That's the bottom line of multiverse theories: Where does the symmetry breaking come from? I maintain still that it can't come from the multiverse itself. Even considering only consistent histories, there is no asymmetry to be found. I maintain that it needs to come from outside the multiverse, which is something that we cannot explain. Tom Caylor
Re: Quantum Immortality and Information Flow
Le 11-déc.-05, à 11:58, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : You find yourself alone in a room with a light that alternates red/green with a period of one minute. A letter in the room informs you that every other minute, 10^100 copies of you are created and run in parallel for one minute, then shut down. The transition between the two states (low measure/ high measure) corresponds with the change in the colour of the light, and you task is to guess which colour corresponds to which state. The problem is, whether the light is red or green, you could argue that you are vastly more likely to be sampled from the 10^100 group. You might decide to say that *both* red and green correspond to the larger group, because if you say this 10^100 copies in the multiverse will be correct and only one copy will be wrong. But clearly, this tyranny of the majority strategy brings you no closer to the truth. If you tossed a coin, at least you would have a 1/2 chance of being right. Yes but this is due to the "shut down". (if I got correctly your experiment).The probabilities can be taken only on the stories without dead-ends, and I guess you consider the shut down as sort of "absolute annihilation". I know this is hard to believe, but apparently we are "conscious" only because we belong to a continuum of infinite never ending stories ... I don't believe this, but then that's what the lobian machine's "guardian angel" G* says about that: true and strictly unbelievable. Do you accept that your argument won't go through if the shut down are deleted? Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
