Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Reading your responses here, I don't think we have much to disagree on. Like you, I don't need a concrete universe, with concrete time etc. It was largely your thesis that convinced me of that. Perhaps you confuse me with Schmidhuber too much ! I wouldn't say that time is illusionary. Illusionary means that something either not real, or is not what it seems. I'd prefer to say that time (psychological) is an emergent property of the 1st person description. (Emergent wrt the 3rd person). If you want to know what I mean by emergence, please read my paper On complexity and emergence - its fairly short. By way of analogy, I remember from high school physics that centrifugal force was called imaginary. At the time I thought this was bizarre - the force is real enough, its really a question of reference frames. In the rotating reference frame, centrifugal force is real, balancing centripetal force to make the orbiting body motionless. In the non-rotating reference frame the centripetal force causes the body to orbit (constant acceleration). Emergence has something to do with reference frames... Of course psychological time differs from coordinate time, which is a 3rd person concept, and quite possibly emergent as well (wrt a deeper description of reality) The correlation of psychological and coordinate time is interesting, and I don't feel I understand it fully, but is probably not worth delving into in this email. Cheers On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 09:14:13AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 04-mai-05, ? 01:53, Russell Standish a ?crit : On this list, we seem to have two fairly clear camps: those who identify observer moments as the fundamental concept, and those who regard relationships between observer moments with equal ontological status. OK. As you know I take the relationship into account. With my TIME postulate, I say that a conscious observer necessarily experiences a sequence of related observer moments (or even a continuum of them). With my COMP postulate I say the same. The purely mathematically state transition function plays the role of your TIME. We do experience a continuum of observer moments simultaneously (provably with comp) but just because we are related to a continuum of execution in the mathematical execution of the UD. To argue that observer moments are independent of each other is to argue the negation of TIME. With TIME, the measure of each observer moment is relative to the predecessor state, or the RSSA is the appropriate principle to use. With not-TIME, each observer moment has an absolute measure, the ASSA. OK. You know I belong to the RSSA. On this postulate (which admittedly still fails rigourous statement, and is not as intuitive as one would like axioms to be), hinges the whole QTI debate, and many other things besides. With TIME, one has the RSSA and the possibility of QTI. With not-TIME, one has the ASSA,and Jacques Mallah's doomsday argument against QTI is valid. See the great RSSA vs ASSA debate on the everything list a few years ago. Now I claim that TIME is implied by computationalism. The illusion of time (and even of different sort of time like 1-person subjective duration to local 3-person parameter-time) is implied by comp. Time is needed for machines to pass from one state to another, ie to actually compute something. I guess our divergence relies on the word actually. If you need such a concrete time then you need even a universe. Such actuality is an indexical. The only time I need is contained in arithmetical truth, in which I can embed all the block-space of all computational histories. Bruno apparently disagrees, but I haven't heard his disagreement yet. I am not sure I understand your TIME. Is it physical or mathematical? Cheers, Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ -- *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) Mathematics0425 253119 () UNSW SYDNEY 2052 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Australiahttp://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02 pgpcXavSonMB7.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
On 4 May 2005 Russell Standish wrote: On this list, we seem to have two fairly clear camps: those who identify observer moments as the fundamental concept, and those who regard relationships between observer moments with equal ontological status. With my TIME postulate, I say that a conscious observer necessarily experiences a sequence of related observer moments (or even a continuum of them). To argue that observer moments are independent of each other is to argue the negation of TIME. With TIME, the measure of each observer moment is relative to the predecessor state, or the RSSA is the appropriate principle to use. With not-TIME, each observer moment has an absolute measure, the ASSA. On this postulate (which admittedly still fails rigourous statement, and is not as intuitive as one would like axioms to be), hinges the whole QTI debate, and many other things besides. With TIME, one has the RSSA and the possibility of QTI. With not-TIME, one has the ASSA,and Jacques Mallah's doomsday argument against QTI is valid. See the great RSSA vs ASSA debate on the everything list a few years ago. Now I claim that TIME is implied by computationalism. Time is needed for machines to pass from one state to another, ie to actually compute something. Bruno apparently disagrees, but I haven't heard his disagreement yet. I don't see how you could get anywhere if you disregard the relationship between observer moments. It is this relationship which allows grouping of different observer moments to give the effect of a continuous stream of consciousness. The human brain is a machine which produces just such a sequence of observer moments, which bear a temporal relationship with each other consistent with your TIME postulate. But I would still say that these related observer moments are independent of each other in that they are not necessarily physically or causally connected. I base this on real life experience (the fact that I feel I am the same person as I was 10 years ago even though I am now made up of different atoms, in an only approximately similar configuration, giving rise to only approximately similar memories and other mental properties), and on thought experiments where continuity of identity persists despite disruption of the physical and causal link between the earlier and the later set of observer moments (teleportation etc.). Another question: what are the implications for the TIME postulate raised by certain mental illnesses, such as cerebral lesions leading to total loss of short term memory, so that each observer moment does indeed seem to be unrelated to the previous ones from the patient's point of view? Or, in psychotic illnesses the patient can display what is known as formal thought disorder, which in the most extreme cases can present as total fragmentation of all cognitive processes, so that the patient speaks gibberish (word salad is actually the technical term), cannot reason at all, appears unable to learn from the past or anticipate the future, and reacts to internal stimuli which seem to vary randomly from moment to moment. In both these cases, the normal subjective sense of time is severely disrupted, but the patient is still fully conscious, and often bewildered and distressed. --Stathis Papaioannou _ REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
I would add another point with regard to observer-moments and continuity: probably there is no unique next or previous relationship among observer-moments. The case of non-unique next observer-moments is uncontroversial, as it relates to the universe splitting predicted by the MWI or the analogous effect in more general multiverse theories. Non-unique previous observer-moments can probably happen as well due to the finite precision of memory. Any time information is forgotten we would have mental states merge. This requires a general multiverse theory, or at least a model of mental states that span MWI branches; the conventional MWI does not merge branches which have diverged through irreversible measurements. In this view, then, we can chain observer-moments together to form observer-paths, or more simply, observers. But the chains are non-unique; obervers can intersect (share observer-moments and then diverge), or even braid together in interesting ways. That means that there is no unique sense in which you are a particular observer, at any moment; rather, you can be thought of as any of the observers who share your current observer-moment. Hal Finney
