Re: Conscious descriptions
On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 03:37:05PM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote: Le 15-juin-05, ? 01:39, Russell Standish a ?crit : 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. I just identify the first person with the knower. Think about someone being cutted in Brussels and being pasted in thwo cities: A and B, and nowhere else. Each copy makes an experience, one in A, the other in B. Each of them know where they have been reconsituted and so each of them get one bit of information. But this bit is uncommunicable from a third person point of view. An outsider would get 0 bit from a phone call by each copy (by default I assume the cut/past device is 100% reliable. I identify the third person with the body or with any third person description of the body, it could be program (with comp). Despite Jonathan (I know you agrees with me) I consider as fundamental to distinguish the 1-person knower from the 3-person body/brain/program. So when I say that only a person can think, I am really meaning a 1-person. Ah - 1st person helps nail down what you mean. I do distinguish between 1st person and 3rd person, but would probably use the same language to describe the two different cases: 1. The mind thinks (1st person) 2. The brain thinks (3rd person) Of course the word thinks has a different meaning in these two different cases, so obviously there is the potential for confusion if not properly qualified in some circumstances. However if you say that just the mind thinks, then I suspect you _are_ implicitly supporting a type of dualism that Jonathon Colvin is trying to nail me with :) 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. I was not making that distinction. I was distinguishing between a program (being a product of another program or not) and the computation, that is the running of the program. The computation can be described by the description of the trace of the program (like when we debug a program). For example the basic program 10 goto 10 has an infinite trace, like 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 ... That distinction is primordial for the understanding of the work of the Universal Dovetailer which dovetails on all programs. The UD generates all programs and dovetail on all their executions. The possibility or consistency of this is a consequence of Church's thesis. Since I merely posit that all descriptions are there (by virtue of the zero information principle), the descriptions are not actually supposed to have been generated by a program. However, a la Schmidhuber they could be. They are, however interpreted by an observer, which in the computationalist case would correspond to them being run as a program. Does that then answer the question? 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. I am using the original thesis by Church, Post, Markov, Turing, ... They are equivalent and can be summarizes anachronically by all universal digital machine computes the same functions from N to N. Hmm - this is really a definition of a universal machine. That such a machine exists is a theorem. Neither depend on the Church-Turing thesis, which says that any effective computation can be done using a Turing machine (or recursive function, or equivalent). Of course the latter statement can be considered a definition, or a formalisation, of the term effective computation. Instead of saying that comp entails that machine can think, it is less misleading to say that comp entails machine can vehiculate a knower,
RE: Dualism and the DA
Russell Standish wrote: Well, actually I'd say the fist *is* identical to the hand. At least, my fist seems to be identical to my hand. Even when the hand is open Define fist. You don't seem to be talking about a thing, but some sort of Platonic form. That's an expressly dualist position. According to the Oxford Concise dictionary: fist: a clenched hand, esp. as used in boxing Another example. You cannot say that a smile is separate from someone's mouth. Yet a smile is not identical to the mouth. Depends whether you are a Platonist (dualist) about smiles. I'd say a smiling mouth *is* identical to a mouth. Even when the mouth is turned down??? As above. Is it your position that you are the same sort of thing as a smile? That's a dualist position. I'd say I'm the same sort of thing as a mouth. ??? You're being incoherent. How can you be the same sort of thing as a smile or a mouth? What do you mean? A mouth is a thing. A smile is not. If I define myself as the body that calls itself Jonathan Colvin, that is the same sort of thing as a mouth (a material object). A smile is a different category entirely. But we are getting side-tracked here. But your response above is ambiguous. I'm not sure if you are agreeing that our appropriate reference class is *not* all humans, but disagreeing as to whether email is important, or disagreeing with the entire statement above (in which case presumably you think our appropriate refererence class for the purposes of the DA is all humans). Can you be more specific about what you disagree with? The reference class is all conscious beings. Since we know of no other conscious beings, then this is often taken to be all humans. The case of extra terrestrial intelligences certainly complicates the DA, however DA-like arguments would also imply that humans dominate to class of conscious beings. This conclusion is not empirically contradicted, but if it ever were, the DA would be refuted. Absent a good definition for conscious, this reference class seems unjustifiable. Could I have been a chimpanzee? If not, why not? Could I have been an infant who died at the age of 5? And why pick on conscious as the reference class. Why couldn't I have been a tree? Constraining the reference to class to subsets of conscious beings immediately leads to contradictions - eg why am I not a Chinese, instead of Australian - Chinese outnumber Australians by a factor of 50 (mind you a factor of 50 is not really enough to base anthropic arguments, but one could easily finesse this). Indeed. This is a further indication that there are problems with the DA. The only way to rescue the DA is to assume that I *could have had* a different birth rank; in other words, that I could have been someone other than me (me as in my body). If the body I'm occupying is contingent (ie. I could have been in any human body, and am in this one by pure chance), then the DA is rescued. Yes. Ok, at least we agree on that. Let's go from there. This seems to require a dualistic account of identity. Why? Explain this particular jump of logic please? I'm not being stubborn here, I seriously do not understand how you draw this conclusion. Read the above again (to which I assume you agree, since you replied yes.) Note particularly the phrase If the body I'm occupying is contingent. How can I occupy a body without a dualistic account of identity? How could I have been in a different body, unless I am somehow separate from my body (ie. Dualism)? I have just finished Daniel Dennett's book Consciousness Explained, and gives rather good account of how this is possible. As our minds develop, first prelingually, and then as language gains hold, our self, the I you refer to, develops out of a web of thoughts, words, introspection constrained by the phylogeny of the body, and also by the environment in which my self awakened (or bootstrapped as it were). Since this must happen in all bodies with the requisite structure (ie humans, and possibly som non-humans), it can easily be otherwise. It can easily be contingent. Yet Daniel Dennett is expressly non-dualist. I'm sure he'd be most interested if you were to label him as a dualist. This is simply an account of how we gain a sense of self. I don't see the relevance to this discussion. I sincerely doubt that Dennett would find the question Why I am I me and not someone else? meaningful in any way. How could *your* self have awakened or been bootstrapped in someone else's body? Dennett expressly *denies* that we occupy our minds. ... You are dodging the question. Assuming for a second that lions and trees are both conscious, you still haven't answered the question as to how a tree could be a lion, without dualism of some sort. I think I have given several examples of such answers. And above I gave yet another answer, this time
RE: Dualism and the DA
Jonathan Colvin writes: In the process of writing this email, I did some googling, and it seems my objection has been independantly discovered (some time ago). See http://hanson.gmu.edu/nodoom.html In particular, I note the following section, which seems to mirror my argument rather precisely: It seems hard to rationalize this state space and prior outside a religious image where souls wait for God to choose their bodies. This last objection may sound trite, but I think it may be the key. The universe doesn't know or care whether we are intelligent or conscious, and I think we risk a hopeless conceptual muddle if we try to describe the state of the universe directly in terms of abstract features humans now care about. If we are going to extend our state desciptions to say where we sit in the universe (and it's not clear to me that we should) it seems best to construct a state space based on the relevant physical states involved, to use priors based on natural physical distributions over such states, and only then to notice features of interest to humans. I've looked for rebuttals of Hanson, and haven't found any. Nick references him, but comments only that Hanson also seems to be comitted to the SIA (not sure why he thinks this). There was an extensive debate between Robin Hanson and Nick Bostrom on the Extropians list in mid 1988. You can pick it up from the point where Robin came up with the rock/monkey/human/posthuman model which he describes in the web page you cite above, at this link: http://forum.javien.com/conv.php?new=trueconvdata=id::vae825qL-Gceu-2ueS-wFbo-Kwj0fIHLv6dh You can also try looking this earlier thread, http://forum.javien.com/conv.php?new=trueconvdata=id::U9mLfRBF-z8ET-BDyq-8Sz1-5UotvKx2iIS2 and focus on the postings by Nick and Robin, which led Robin to produce his formal model. I think if you look at the details however you will find it is Robin Hanson who advocates the you could have been a rock position and Nick Bostrom who insists that you could only have been other people. This seemed to be one of the foundations of their disagreement. As far as the Self Indication Axiom, it might be due to such lines as this, from Robin's essay you linked to: And even if everyone had the same random chance of developing amnesia, the mere fact that you exist suggests a larger population. After all, if doom had happend before you were born, you wouldn't be around to consider these questions. I think this is similar to the reasoning in the SIA. Hal Finney
Re: another puzzzle
On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 11:02:01AM +1000, Russell Standish wrote: Applying the SSA, the colour of the light when you first find yourself in the room is more likely to be the high measure state than the low measure state. (You didn't state what that colour was, but hopefully the fictional prisoner can remember it). The subjective duty cycle is 1:1. Because of the their minds perfectly synchronized constraint there's only one individuum. The number of instances doesn't matter, because they have no chance of experiencing anything else but what the sync master experiences. Unless I'm missing something there's no way to tell but to flip a coin, which gives you a 0.5 probability of being sent home. With the RSSA, subsequent states tell you no information whatsoever about which state is high measure. With the ASSA, you would expect that the light remains in one state most of the time (googol out of googol+1). So the fact that the light is alternating (and that you trust that the letter is in fact true) implies that the ASSA does not apply in this thought experiment. Cheers On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 12:12:59AM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how you got there. The room is sparsely furnished: a chair, a desk, pen and paper, and in one corner a light. The light is currently red, but in the time you have been in the room you have observed that it alternates between red and green every 10 minutes. Other than the coloured light, nothing in the room seems to change. Opening one of the desk drawers, you find a piece of paper with incredibly neat handwriting. It turns out to be a letter from God, revealing that you have been placed in the room as part of a philosophical experiment. Every 10 minutes, the system alternates between two states. One state consists of you alone in your room. The other state consists of 10^100 exact copies of you, their minds perfectly synchronised with your mind, each copy isolated from all the others in a room just like yours. Whenever the light changes colour, it means that God is either instantaneously creating (10^100 - 1) copies, or instantaneously destroying all but one randomly chosen copy. Your task is to guess which colour of the light corresponds with which state and write it down. Then God will send you home. Having absorbed this information, you reason as follows. Suppose that right now you are one of the copies sampled randomly from all the copies that you could possibly be. If you guess that you are one of the 10^100 group, you will be right with probability (10^100)/(10^100+1) (which your calculator tells you equals one). If you guess that you are the sole copy, you will be right with probability 1/(10^100+1) (which your calculator tells you equals zero). Therefore, you would be foolish indeed if you don't guess that you in the 10^100 group. And since the light right now is red, red must correspond with the 10^100 copy state and green with the single copy state. But just as you are about to write down your conclusion, the light changes to green... What's wrong with the reasoning here? -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Re: another puzzzle
Le 17-juin-05, 07:47, Eric Cavalcanti a crit : if you believe God's story, the most likely is that you have just been created after the last switch, and you have a false memory of being there for a while. I don't see why you call that memory false. Suppose you begin to play chess with the computer at your job office, and, after having save the play on a disk, you continue to play chess with your computer at home. Would say the computer at home has false memories of the play? In that case it is obvious that comp makes *all* memories false, so that we can drop out the adjective false, it does not add information. Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Dualism and the DA
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.). Bruno Le 16-juin-05, 23:02, Quentin Anciaux a crit : Le Jeudi 16 Juin 2005 10:02, Jonathan Colvin a crit: Switch the question. Why aren't you me (Jonathan Colvin)? I'm conscious (feels like I am, anyway). Hi Jonathan, I think you do not see the real question, which can be formulated (using your analogy) by : Why (me as) Russell Standish is Russell Standish rather Jonathan Colvin ? I (as RS) could have been you (JC)... but it's a fact that I'm not, but the question is why I'm not, why am I me rather than you ? What force decide for me to be me ? :) Quentin http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: another puzzzle
Le Jeudi 16 Juin 2005 23:31, Quentin Anciaux a crit: Le Jeudi 16 Juin 2005 16:12, Stathis Papaioannou a crit : One state consists of you alone in your room. The other state consists of 10^100 exact copies of you, their minds perfectly synchronised with your mind, each copy isolated from all the others in a room just like yours. Whenever the light changes colour, it means that God is either instantaneously creating (10^100 - 1) copies, or instantaneously destroying all but one randomly chosen copy. Your task is to guess which colour of the light corresponds with which state and write it down. Then God will send you home. SNIP But just as you are about to write down your conclusion, the light changes to green... What's wrong with the reasoning here? Hi Stathis, If I was in this position, I would not even try to guess, because you (or god :) are explaining me that it is possible to copy me (not only me, but really all the behavior/feelings/mental state/indoor/outdoor state copying, a copy as good as an original or a copy cannot say which is which and even a 3rd person observer could not distinguish). If it is the case, this means that : 1- I'm clonable 2- I is not real 3- A single I does not means anything So I ask you, if it's the case (real complete copy...), why should I guess anything ? Who is the I that must guess ? You can only experience being one person at a time, no matter how faithful and how numerous the copies are. A simpler example than the above to demonstrate what this would be like is given by Bruno Marchal in step 3 of his UDA. You get into a teleporter in Brussels, and it transmits the information to build a copy of your body to Moscow and Washington. To a third person observing this, he notes, as you have above, that after the teleportation there is no longer a toi, because you have become a vous (and not because we're being polite). For you, the effect is that you find yourself *either* in Moscow *or* Washington, each with probability 0.5. Unless you meet the other Quentin, there is no way you can tell, however many times you try this, that the machine operator hasn't flipped a coin to decide which (one) city to send you. This is rather like the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where all possibilities are realised, so that it is a deterministic theory, but from the viewpoint of the inhabitants of any of the worlds, it is indistinguishable from the probabilistic Copenhagen interpretation. --Stathis Papaioannou _ Have fun with your mobile! Ringtones, wallpapers, games and more. http://fun.mobiledownloads.com.au/191191/index.wl
Re: another puzzzle
Hi Jesse, I was still trying to put some sort of reply together to your last post, but I think your water analogy is making me more rather than less confused as to your actual position on these issues, which is obviously something you have thought deeply about. With the puzzle in this thread, I was hoping that it would be clear that the subject in the room *has* to experience the light changing colour every 10 minutes, and therefore can draw no conclusion about which state is the high measure one. It seems that many on this list would indeed say that running a mind in parallel increases its measure, and some would say (eg. Saibal Mitra in recent discussions - I still have to get back to you too, Saibal) that the subject would therefore find himself continually cycling in the 10^100 group. To summarise my position, it is this: the measure of an observer moment is relevant when a given observer is contemplating what will happen next. If there are 2N successor OM's where he will experience A and 3N successor OM's where he will experience B, then he can assume Pr(A)=0.4 and Pr(B)=0.6. Only the ratio matters. Moreover, the ratio/ relative measure can only be of relevance at a particular time point, when considering the immediate future. To say that an individual will not live to 5000 years even though there exist OM's where he is this age, because his measure is much higher when he is under 100 years of age, makes no sense to me. Now, minimising acronym use, could you explain what your understanding is of how measure changes with number of copies of an OM which are instantiated, and if it doesn't, then how does it change, and when you use it in calculating how someone's life will go from OM to OM. Also, you have talked about memory loss, perhaps even complete memory loss, while still being you: in what sense are you still you? Isn't that like saying I am the reincarnation of Alexander the Great or something? You say we need a theory of consciousness to understand these things, but don't you mean a theory of personal identity? I can't see the former knocking on our door in the near future, but I'm pretty confidant about the latter. Thanks for the effort you are putting into explaining this stuff. --Stathis Papaioannou Stathis Papaioannou wrote: I agree you have given the correct answer to my puzzle: from a first person perspective, identical mental states are the same mental state, and at any point there is a 50-50 chance that you are either one of the 10^100 group or on your own. But not everyone on this list would agree, which is why I made up this puzzle. Would you say that because you think running multiple identical copies of a given mind in parallel doesn't necessarily increase the absolute measure of those observer-moments (that would be my opinion), or because you don't believe the concept of absolute measure on observer-moments is meaningful at all, or for some other reason? Jesse _ Sell your car for $9 on carpoint.com.au http://www.carpoint.com.au/sellyourcar
RE: Dualism and the DA
Ok, does that not imply that it is a meaningless question? 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? This seems to be the crux of the objection to any theory which reifies 1st person phenomena. Jonathan Colvin 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.). Bruno Le 16-juin-05, 23:02, Quentin Anciaux a crit : Le Jeudi 16 Juin 2005 10:02, Jonathan Colvin a crit: Switch the question. Why aren't you me (Jonathan Colvin)? I'm conscious (feels like I am, anyway). Hi Jonathan, I think you do not see the real question, which can be formulated (using your analogy) by : Why (me as) Russell Standish is Russell Standish rather Jonathan Colvin ? I (as RS) could have been you (JC)... but it's a fact that I'm not, but the question is why I'm not, why am I me rather than you ? What force decide for me to be me ? :) Quentin http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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. We aren't thrown into a maelstrom of existential confusion as we struggle to understand what it could mean to have different memories than those we do. How could I have not gotten into that traffic jam? What would happen to those memories? Would I still be the same person? We deal with these kinds of counterfactuals all the time. They are one of our main tools for understanding the world and learning which strategies work and which don't. Then there are much more extreme counterfactuals. Apple Computer head Steve Jobs gave a pretty good graduation speech at Stanford last week, http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html. He explains that he was adopted, and his life was changed in a major way by the circumstances. His biological mother, an unwed grad student, wanted him raised by college graduates, so he was set to be adopted by a lawyer and his wife. At the last minute the lawyer decided he wanted a girl, so Jobs ended up being given to a blue collar couple, neither of whom had gone to college. They were good parents and treated him well, sacrificing so he could go to college, but after six months Jobs dropped out, seeing little value to consuming his family's entire savings. He continued to attend classes on the sly, got into computers and the rest is history. But imagine how different his life would have been if the original plan had gone through and he had been adopted by a successful lawyer, perhaps raised in an upper class household with his every wish met. He would have gone to an Ivy League college and probably done well. But it would have been a totally different life path. Does it make sense for Jobs to say, who would I have been if that had happened? Or would he have been such a totally different person that this stretches the idea of a counterfactual beyond reason? I think his telling the story demonstrates that he does think this way sometimes. Yet none of the memories or experiences that he has would have been present in this other version. At most the two versions might have shared some personality traits, but even those are often strongly influenced by upbringing - his tenacity in the face of adversity, for example, might never have become so strong in a life where everything came easily. Probably there are many people in the world who are at least as similar to Steve Jobs in personality as the person he would have been if his early life had gone that other way. The point is that we can imagine a range of counterfactuals where the difference is a matter of degree, not kind, from trivial matters all the way up to situations where we would have to consider ourselves a different person. There is no bright line to draw that I can see. So yes, if you can imagine what it would have been like to eat something else for breakfast, then you should be able to imagine what it would have been like to be born as someone else. It's the same basic technique, just applied to a greater degree. 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. There's a continuous, definable identity that follows a physical/causal/genetic/mental chain all the way from when egg and sperm met up to Jobs' graduation. It does not seem problematic to alter contingent aspects of this identity-chain and yet insist that we retain the same Jobs. It is a great deal harder to see how to make sense of a counterfactual such 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
RE: Dualism and the DA
Hal Finney wrote: Jonathan Colvin writes: In the process of writing this email, I did some googling, and it seems my objection has been independantly discovered (some time ago). See http://hanson.gmu.edu/nodoom.html In particular, I note the following section, which seems to mirror my argument rather precisely: It seems hard to rationalize this state space and prior outside a religious image where souls wait for God to choose their bodies. This last objection may sound trite, but I think it may be the key. The universe doesn't know or care whether we are intelligent or conscious, and I think we risk a hopeless conceptual muddle if we try to describe the state of the universe directly in terms of abstract features humans now care about. If we are going to extend our state desciptions to say where we sit in the universe (and it's not clear to me that we should) it seems best to construct a state space based on the relevant physical states involved, to use priors based on natural physical distributions over such states, and only then to notice features of interest to humans. I've looked for rebuttals of Hanson, and haven't found any. Nick references him, but comments only that Hanson also seems to be comitted to the SIA (not sure why he thinks this). There was an extensive debate between Robin Hanson and Nick Bostrom on the Extropians list in mid 1988. You can pick it up from the point where Robin came up with the rock/monkey/human/posthuman model which he describes in the web page you cite above, at this link: http://forum.javien.com/conv.php?new=trueconvdata=id::vae825qL -Gceu-2ueS-wFbo-Kwj0fIHLv6dh You can also try looking this earlier thread, http://forum.javien.com/conv.php?new=trueconvdata=id::U9mLfRBF -z8ET-BDyq-8Sz1-5UotvKx2iIS2 and focus on the postings by Nick and Robin, which led Robin to produce his formal model. I think if you look at the details however you will find it is Robin Hanson who advocates the you could have been a rock position and Nick Bostrom who insists that you could only have been other people. This seemed to be one of the foundations of their disagreement. I think Robin is assuming (as I do) that the only way counterfactuals such as I could have been someone/something else make sense, absent dualism, is if we adopt a strictly physical identity theory (ie. The atoms in my body could have been a rock rather than a person). Nick then points out that if you were a rock, you wouldn't be you (it looks like he's assuming a pattern identity theory such as Morovacs'). I agree with Nick that if you were a rock, you wouldn't be you. But under pattern identity theory, if you were someone else, you wouldn't be you either. Absent some sort of identity dualism, this is not any improvement on physical identity. The last time I discussed the issue of personal identity with Nick, he agreed with me that the answer to the question why am I me and not someone else? was *not* I am a random observer, and so I'm me by chance, but it's a meaningless question; I could not have been anyone else. But that discussion was not in the context of the DA. Jonathan Colvin
Re: Dualism and the DA
On Jun 17, 2005, at 10:24 AM, Hal Finney wrote: Does it make sense for Jobs to say, who would I have been if that had happened? Yes, it makes sense, but only because we know that the phrase Who would I have been, uttered by Steve Jobs, is just a convenient way for expressing a third-person proposition, What would have happened to Steve Jobs if Which in turn is also a short way of asking about the whole world, i.e., What would the world have been like if Steve Jobs had been adopted by someone else. The part of the world that's the main target of this question is the part that wears turtlenecks, makes Apple computers and calls itself Steve - so here it just gets replaced by I. But logically, by asking who would I have been, Steve's not inquiring into anything that a third-person observer could not also inquire into. The apparent problems can be solved by translating these questions into third-person terms. for example, So yes, if you can imagine what it would have been like to eat something else for breakfast, then you should be able to imagine what it would have been like to be born as someone else. For breakfast: what would have happened to the world (especially the Steve Jobs part of the world) if Steve Jobs had had something else for breakfast? For birth: what would the world be like if Steve Jobs hadn't been born, but his biological parents had had some other child? There's no sense in asking what if I was born as someone else, no more than there is asking what would Steve Jobs be like if Steve Jobs had never been born? But there is sense in asking what would be different about the world. The problems here all come from overzealous emphasis on the first person perspective. In other words, I think the mistake is made by asking the question what would it have been like, instead of the question what would the world have been like. The thing that the it refers to (a first- person perspective, presumably) is not a thing that exists in the world framed by the question.
Re: another puzzzle
Stathis wrote: ...Once the difficulty of creating an AI was overcome, it would be a trivial matter to copy the program to another machine (or as a separate process on the same machine) and give it the same inputs. OK this is weird. Every time I get an email from Stathis, I actually get two of them exactly alike (to the nearest bit). Will the real Stathis please send me an email? Tom Caylor
Re: another puzzzle
... or should I say "spooky"? Tom Caylor
Re: another puzzzle
Just to clarify my view on copies, if they start to diverge from me the moment they are created, then they aren't me and I don't care about them in a *selfish* way. That is, if a copy experiences a pain, I don't experience that pain, which I think is as good a test as any to distinguish self from other. This doesn't mean I should be indifferent to the copy's suffering just because he is a copy; I should treat him just like anyone else. What my actual attitude to the copy would be I'm not really sure, having never been in such a situation. I might be resentful and uncomfortable around him, or I may be over-solicitous. But whatever my feelings are, there is a good chance they will be reciprocated. Your scenario with the person being shot when he has just walked out of a duplicating booth reminds me of a number of SF novels where people back up their minds on a regular basis, in case they get killed in an accident. This may help the dead person's family, but it always seemed to me rather pointless from a selfish point of view, since I would still be losing the memories since the backup, and I would therefore still be afraid of dying. If the backup were done continually, within milliseconds of any thought or experience, that would be a different matter. Which brings us to death. My definition of death is that it occurs at a particular time point in an observer's life when there is no successor observer moment ever, anywhere. So with the backup example above, if you suffered a fatal accident today and had the instantant backup machinery going, everything up to the moment you lost consciousness would have been recorded, so your mind can be emulated using the data, and you wake up as an upload (or robot , or newly grown human clone) just as you would wake up in hospital if the accident had rendered you unconscious rather than killed you. Whereas if you had only the el cheapo once a day backup, the last thing you see before you are killed is the last thing you will ever see. With my example, it is important to remeber that the 10^100 copies are *exact* copies which stay in lockstep for the full 10 minutes. If they were initially exact copies and then allowed to diverge, terminating them after 10 minutes would be an act of mass murder, because once they are terminated, their memories and personalities are gone forever: there is no successor OM. (Whether you can call it murder, which is bad, when God does it is an interesting aside, since by definition God never does anything bad.) However, with the exact copies as described, there definitely *is* a successor OM, provided by the single copy in the room when the 10 minutes is up. The continuity is even better than with the instant backup machine described above, since nothing special needs to be done other than allow one of the 10^100 to continue living. So in this case, terminating the 10^100 copies is not murder at all, because subjectively, all the copies' stream of consciousness would continue seamlessly. Finally, there is the idea that a conscious entity's measure has some effect on the entity. If you have given an explanation of why you think this is so, I have missed it or (more likely) not recognised it. Do you think there is any empirical test that can be done to demonstrate higher or lower measure? Do you accept the way I have presented the thought experiment above, i.e. that when God creates or destroys 10^100 copies the subject notices absolutely nothing other than the light changing colour, or do you think he would notice some other difference? If so, it would have to be an *enormous* difference, given the numbers we are talking about; what difference would it make if the ratio were, say, 2:1 instead? Can you honestly say that this subjective effect of measure isn't something that will be cut down by Occam's Razor as a needless complication? Sorry if the last paragraph sounds like I'm being provocative, but this one topic seems to be the source of most of the disagreement between us. --Stathis Papaioannou Hal Finney writes: Stathis Papaioannou writes: You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how you got there. The room is sparsely furnished: a chair, a desk, pen and paper, and in one corner a light. The light is currently red, but in the time you have been in the room you have observed that it alternates between red and green every 10 minutes. Other than the coloured light, nothing in the room seems to change. Opening one of the desk drawers, you find a piece of paper with incredibly neat handwriting. It turns out to be a letter from God, revealing that you have been placed in the room as part of a philosophical experiment. Every 10 minutes, the system alternates between two states. One state consists of you alone in your room. The other state consists of 10^100 exact copies of you, their minds perfectly synchronised with your mind,
Spooky copies
Not spooky. Stathis is using the Group Reply feature, which sends a copy of the reply to whoever sent the original message, plus a copy to the mailing list. I see this phenomenon all the time with responses to message I've posted. Cheer On Fri, Jun 17, 2005 at 05:59:39PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Stathis wrote: ...Once the difficulty of creating an AI was overcome, it would be a trivial matter to copy the program to another machine (or as a separate process on the same machine) and give it the same inputs. OK this is weird. Every time I get an email from Stathis, I actually get two of them exactly alike (to the nearest bit). Will the real Stathis please send me an email? Tom Caylor -- *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 pgp5pv8JZFfWG.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Dualism and the DA
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!) Cheers -- *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 pgpOOE6roLB1b.pgp Description: PGP signature
