Re: Holiday Exercise

[Brent Meeker]

On 8/4/2016 7:40 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:



On 5 August 2016 at 04:01, Brent Meeker > wrote:




On 8/4/2016 2:57 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

The problem with (3) is a general problem with multiverses.  A
single, infinite universe is an example of a multiverse theory,
since there will be infinite copies of everything and every
possible variation of everything, including your brain and your
mind.


That implicitly assumes a digital universe, yet the theory that
suggests it, quantum mechanics, is based on continua; which is why
I don't take "the multiverse" too seriously.


It appears that our brains are finite state machines. Each neuron can 
either be "on" or "off", there are a finite number of neurons, so a 
finite number of possible brain states, and a finite number of 
possible mental states. This is analogous to a digital computer:


Not necessarily. A digital computer also requires that time be digitized 
so that its registers run synchronously.  Otherwise "the state" is ill 
defined.  The finite speed of light means that spacially separated 
regions cannot be synchronous.  Even if neurons were only ON or OFF, 
which they aren't, they have frequency modulation, they are not synchronous.


even if you postulate that electric circuit variables are continuous, 
transistors can only be on or off. If the number of possible mental 
states is finite, then in an infinite universe, whether continuous or 
discrete, mental states will repeat.



We live in an orderly world with consistent physical laws. It
seems to me that you are suggesting that if everything possible
existed then we would not live in such an orderly world,


Unless the worlds were separated in some way, which current
physical theories provide - but which is not explicable if you
divorce conscious thoughts from physics.


The worlds are physically separated - there can be no communication 
between separate worlds in the multiverse and none between 
sufficiently widely separated copies of subsets of the world in an 
infinite single universe. But the separate copies are connected 
insofar as they share memories and sense of identity, even if there is 
no causal connection between them.


Of course "copy" implies a shared past in which there was an "original", 
they have a cause in common.


Brent

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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 5 August 2016 at 04:01, Brent Meeker  wrote:

>
>
> On 8/4/2016 2:57 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> The problem with (3) is a general problem with multiverses.  A single,
> infinite universe is an example of a multiverse theory, since there will be
> infinite copies of everything and every possible variation of everything,
> including your brain and your mind.
>
>
> That implicitly assumes a digital universe, yet the theory that suggests
> it, quantum mechanics, is based on continua; which is why I don't take "the
> multiverse" too seriously.
>

It appears that our brains are finite state machines. Each neuron can
either be "on" or "off", there are a finite number of neurons, so a finite
number of possible brain states, and a finite number of possible mental
states. This is analogous to a digital computer: even if you postulate that
electric circuit variables are continuous, transistors can only be on or
off. If the number of possible mental states is finite, then in an infinite
universe, whether continuous or discrete, mental states will repeat.

> We live in an orderly world with consistent physical laws. It seems to me
> that you are suggesting that if everything possible existed then we would
> not live in such an orderly world,
>
>
> Unless the worlds were separated in some way, which current physical
> theories provide - but which is not explicable if you divorce conscious
> thoughts from physics.
>

The worlds are physically separated - there can be no communication between
separate worlds in the multiverse and none between sufficiently widely
separated copies of subsets of the world in an infinite single universe.
But the separate copies are connected insofar as they share memories and
sense of identity, even if there is no causal connection between them.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Bruce Kellett]

On 5/08/2016 3:41 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 04 Aug 2016, at 04:37, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 4/08/2016 1:04 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 03 Aug 2016, at 07:16, Bruce Kellett wrote:


You use the assumption that the duplicated consciousnesses 
automatically differentiate when receiving different inputs.


It is not an assumption.


Of course it is an assumption. You have not derived it from anything 
previously in evidence.


See my answer to Brent. It is just obvious that the first person 
experience differentiated when it get different experience, leading to 
different memories. We *assume* computationalism. How coud the diaries 
not differentiate? What you say does not make any sense.


I have been at pains to argue (in several different ways) that the 
differentiation of consciousness is not automatic. It is very easy to 
conceive of a situation in which a single consciousness continues in two 
bodies, with the streams of consciousness arising from both easily 
identifiable, but still unified in the consciousness of a single person. 
(I copy below my recent argument for this in a post replying to 
Russell.) So the differentiation you require is not necessary or 
automatic -- it has to be justified separately because it is not "just 
obvious".


Your recent expansion of the argument of step 3 in discussions with John 
Clark does not alter the situation in any way -- you still just assert 
that the differentiation takes place on the receipt of different input data.


I had thought that the argument for such differentiation of 
consciousness in different physical bodies was a consequence of some 
mind-brain identity thesis. But I am no longer sure that even that is 
sufficient -- the differentiation clearly requires separate 
bodies/brains (separate input data streams), but separate bodies are not 
sufficient for differentiation, as I have shown. What is required is a 
much stronger additional assumption, namely an association between minds 
and brains such that a mind can occupy only one brain. (Whether a single 
brain can host only one mind is a separate matter, involving one's 
attitude to the results of split brain studies and the psychological 
issues surrounding multiple personalities/minds.) In other words, the 
differentiation assumption is an additional assumption that does not 
appear to follow from either physicalism or YD+CT.


As I have further pointed out, one cannot just make this an additional 
assumption to YD+CT because it is clearly an empirical matter: until we 
have a working person duplicator, we cannot know whether differentiation 
is automatic or not. Science is, after all, empirical, not just a matter 
of definitions.


Bruce

Here is part of my discussion with Russell:

[BK]I could perhaps expand on that response. On duplication, two 
identical consciousnesses are created, and by the identity of 
indiscernibles, they form just a single consciousness. Then data is 
input. It seems to me that there is no reason why this should lead the 
initial consciousness to differentiate, or split into two. In normal 
life we get inputs from many sources simultaneously -- we see complex 
scenes, smell the air, feel impacts on our body, and hear many sounds 
from the environment. None of this leads our consciousness to 
disintegrate. Indeed, our evolutionary experience has made us adept at 
coping with these multifarious inputs and sorting through them very 
efficiently to concentrate on what is most important, while keeping 
other inputs at an appropriate level in our minds.


[BK]I have previously mentioned our ability to multitask in complex 
ways: while I am driving my car, I am aware of the car, the road, other 
traffic and so on; while, at the same time, I can be talking to my wife; 
thinking about what to cook for dinner; and reflecting on philosophical 
issues that are important to me. And this is by no means an exhaustive 
list of our ability to multitask -- to run many separate conscious 
modules within the one unified consciousness.


[BK]Given that this experience is common to us all, it is not in the 
least bit difficult to think that the adding of yet another stream of 
inputs via a separate body will not change the basic structure of our 
consciousness -- we will just take this additional data and process in 
the way we already process multiple data inputs and streams of 
consciousness. This would seem, indeed, to be the default understanding 
of the consequences of person duplication. One would have to add some 
further constraints in order for it to be clear that the separate bodies 
would necessarily have differentiated conscious streams. No such 
additional constraints are currently in evidence.



PS. Please keep your personal comments and insults to yourself.

You are inventing this. Step 3 does not use step 7. Please follows the 
thread or avoid trolling the discussion. Read my exchange with Clark, 
I just give him a new proof of the FPI.


Bruce, I have to say that you 

Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[Quentin Anciaux]

2016-08-04 19:20 GMT+02:00 smitra :

> On 04-08-2016 03:05, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
>> On 8/3/2016 4:30 PM, smitra wrote:
>>
>>> On 04-08-2016 01:16, Brent Meeker wrote:
>>>
 On 8/3/2016 4:09 PM, smitra wrote:

 On 04-08-2016 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> Only if you wake up and find out winning the lottery was a
>> mistake,
>> which seems less likely than waking up a winner. Waking up as one
>> of
>> the many copies who didn't win is not one of the options - those
>> copies are not continuations of the you who won the lottery.
>>
>
> I'm imagining waking up after a night of heavy drinking with
> memories gradually returning. Now, you can, of course, condition
> everything on the person who will find that he won the lottery. But
> making that a hard part of my identity doesn't make sense to me,
> otherwise you could not be the same person and forget about it, or
> consider being the same person who participated in the lottery who
> then went on to win it.
>
> Now,while this boils down to an arbitrary definition of personal
> identity, we should be consistent about this; you can be the same
> person as the won who had not yet won it, and you could imagine
> being a person who did not win it, then you'll likely end up waking
> up as a copy in another branch who did not win it.
>

  That seems to invoke a dualism, such that there's only one real "you"
 who may be in different branches at different times.  I'd say that if
 "you" wake up as a copy in another branch where "you" didn't win, it's
 because "you" didn't win.  It's the same as saying the man who sees
 Moscow didn't "wake up" as the man who sees Washington.

  Brent

>>>
>>> We can turn this into a reverse Bruno-like problem. If your memory is
>>> temporarily cleared then copies of different branches merge.
>>>
>>
>> You mean there are branches of the world in which your memory of
>> yesterday, when the lottery was drawn, is erased (and we're supposing
>> there is no physics, so there is no physical evidence of yesterday?).
>> Then the threads of consciousness constituting Saibal before yesterday
>> AND suffering amnesia about yesterday will merge with each other, but
>> NOT with the threads of Saibal that do remember yesterday.
>>
>> The branches will of course be different, but you without a memory of
>>> having won in the branch where you did win is the same you as the you in
>>> another branch were you did not win where you also have forgotten about not
>>> winning.
>>>
>>> The question is then if it is advisable to go through this procedure if
>>> you have won.
>>>
>>
>> You're supposing there's a "procedure" for erasing memory of
>> yesterday?  How could there be, there's no physics?  So there are some
>> Saibals that forgot yesterday, and whether or not "they" won, but the
>> forgetting wasn't a "procedure" because that would imply a physical
>> world context in which whether on not Saibal won would be evident in
>> the physical world and beyond mere "forgetting".  The forgetting would
>> just have to be a result of the computation.
>>
>
>
> I've written in the past about an elaborate procedure involving an AI that
> resets its memory, but I now think that this is not necessary.  It seems to
> me that every moment we experience is a new measurement of our state that
> is equivalent to forgetting everything and then just reloading all the
> information. Predictions of outcomes of experiments should not depend on
> making this assumption. Put differently, at any one time you could imagine
> yourself as being sampled randomly from the set of all observer moments.
>
>
This is basically ASSA... and it has all the problems ASSA has


> Saibal
>
>
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>



-- 
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. (Roy
Batty/Rutger Hauer)

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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Bruce Kellett]

On 5/08/2016 1:28 am, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/4/2016 2:51 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 4/08/2016 6:00 pm, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 4/08/2016 5:52 pm, Russell Standish wrote:

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 04:27:21PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 3/08/2016 12:01 pm, Russell Standish wrote:
However, we are being asked to consider two conscious states 
where the
conscious state differs by at least one bit - the W/M bit. 
Clearly, by the YD

assumption, both states are survivor states from the original
conscious state, but are not the same consciousness because of the
single bit difference.

By that reasoning, no consciousness survives through time.

Not at all! Both conscious states survive through time by 
assumption (YD).


Methinks you are unnecessarily assuming transitivity again.


No, I was just referring to the continuation of a single 
consciousness through time. We get different input data all the time 
but we do not differentiate according to that data.


I could perhaps expand on that response. On duplication, two 
identical consciousnesses are created, and by the identity of 
indiscernibles, they form just a single consciousness. Then data is 
input. It seems to me that there is no reason why this should lead 
the initial consciousness to differentiate, or split into two. In 
normal life we get inputs from many sources simultaneously -- we see 
complex scenes, smell the air, feel impacts on our body, and hear 
many sounds from the environment. None of this leads our 
consciousness to disintegrate. Indeed, our evolutionary experience 
has made us adept at coping with these multifarious inputs and 
sorting through them very efficiently to concentrate on what is most 
important, while keeping other inputs at an appropriate level in our 
minds.


I have previously mentioned our ability to multitask in complex ways: 
while I am driving my car, I am aware of the car, the road, other 
traffic and so on; while, at the same time, I can be talking to my 
wife; thinking about what to cook for dinner; and reflecting on 
philosophical issues that are important to me. And this is by no 
means an exhaustive list of our ability to multitask -- to run many 
separate conscious modules within the one unified consciousness.


Given that this experience is common to us all, it is not in the 
least bit difficult to think that the adding of yet another stream of 
inputs via a separate body will not change the basic structure of our 
consciousness -- we will just take this additional data and process 
in the way we already process multiple data inputs and streams of 
consciousness. This would seem, indeed, to be the default 
understanding of the consequences of person duplication. One would 
have to add some further constraints in order for it to be clear that 
the separate bodies would necessarily have differentiated conscious 
streams. No such additional constraints are currently in evidence.


Not empirically proven constraints, but current physics strongly 
suggests that the duplicates would almost immediately, in the 
decoherence time for a brain, differentiate; i.e. the consciousness is 
not separate from the physics.  It's only "not in evidence" if your 
trying to derive the physics from the consciousness.


Of course,  that is what I was trying to get people to see: the 
additional constraint that is necessary for differentiation is 
essentially a mind-brain identity thesis. And my suspicion is that the 
mind-brain identity thesis plays havoc with the rest of Bruno's argument.


Bruce

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Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[Brent Meeker]

On 8/4/2016 12:45 PM, smitra wrote:

On 04-08-2016 21:35, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/4/2016 10:15 AM, smitra wrote:

On 04-08-2016 05:48, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/3/2016 6:59 PM, smitra wrote:


Actually, there will objective evidence as to whether or not you
have
won the lottery. There will be a winning number and you will have
a
ticket that will have this number on it or not, regardless of
whether
you forget anything or not. The idea that branches in the MWI can

recombine after the relevant quantum measurement has been
irreversibly
recorded is nonsense.


There is no recombination of branches here, it's just that you
become identical to another version of you located in another
branch. Then, upon a new measurement, you'll spit over the different
branches again. If somehow you would not be identical to another
copy of you located on a branch where the outcome of the lottery is
different, then that means that you actually did not forget the
outcome as the information about the outcome is still present in
your memory (the algorithm that defines you).


 And then you'll become Bruno, and then you'll become John Clark, and
then you'll become Sherlock Holmes and then you'll become a unicorn
and each of them infinitely many times...  That's the trouble with
"everything thing happens" .



Yes, but this is not a problem, this is just an artifact of 
introducing an unphysical "you". All that really exists are 
algorithms and they can be identified by the particular 
computational state that refers to them uniquely. So, your statement 
reduces to the fact that I, Bruno, and many other persons exist, 
which is not all that shocking.


Right.  But it destroys the indicial meaning of "you" so your so your
statement that, "... it's just that you become identical to another
version of you located in another branch."  becomes meaningless.



Yes, we need to be careful with precisely defining what we mean. In 
principle, we can only access information stored in our present 
moment. Anything that we experience that refers to the past is 
actually stored inside our present computational state.


How can past and future even be defined in that model.   To "access" 
information already implicitly assumes time and a duration of the 
"present moment".


Brent



It should therefore always be possible to reformulate all arguments in 
terms of only present moments, then that leads to convoluted argument. 
But I think this is a good way to go about things, also in the other 
thread about Bruno's duplication experiment to eliminate assumptions 
that are not physical.


Saibal



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Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[smitra]

On 04-08-2016 21:35, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/4/2016 10:15 AM, smitra wrote:

On 04-08-2016 05:48, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/3/2016 6:59 PM, smitra wrote:


Actually, there will objective evidence as to whether or not you
have
won the lottery. There will be a winning number and you will have
a
ticket that will have this number on it or not, regardless of
whether
you forget anything or not. The idea that branches in the MWI can

recombine after the relevant quantum measurement has been
irreversibly
recorded is nonsense.


There is no recombination of branches here, it's just that you
become identical to another version of you located in another
branch. Then, upon a new measurement, you'll spit over the different
branches again. If somehow you would not be identical to another
copy of you located on a branch where the outcome of the lottery is
different, then that means that you actually did not forget the
outcome as the information about the outcome is still present in
your memory (the algorithm that defines you).


 And then you'll become Bruno, and then you'll become John Clark, and
then you'll become Sherlock Holmes and then you'll become a unicorn
and each of them infinitely many times...  That's the trouble with
"everything thing happens" .



Yes, but this is not a problem, this is just an artifact of 
introducing an unphysical "you". All that really exists are algorithms 
and they can be identified by the particular computational state that 
refers to them uniquely. So, your statement reduces to the fact that 
I, Bruno, and many other persons exist, which is not all that 
shocking.


Right.  But it destroys the indicial meaning of "you" so your so your
statement that, "... it's just that you become identical to another
version of you located in another branch."  becomes meaningless.



Yes, we need to be careful with precisely defining what we mean. In 
principle, we can only access information stored in our present moment. 
Anything that we experience that refers to the past is actually stored 
inside our present computational state.


It should therefore always be possible to reformulate all arguments in 
terms of only present moments, then that leads to convoluted argument. 
But I think this is a good way to go about things, also in the other 
thread about Bruno's duplication experiment to eliminate assumptions 
that are not physical.


Saibal

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Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[Brent Meeker]

On 8/4/2016 10:20 AM, smitra wrote:

On 04-08-2016 03:05, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/3/2016 4:30 PM, smitra wrote:

On 04-08-2016 01:16, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/3/2016 4:09 PM, smitra wrote:


On 04-08-2016 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:


Only if you wake up and find out winning the lottery was a
mistake,
which seems less likely than waking up a winner. Waking up as one
of
the many copies who didn't win is not one of the options - those
copies are not continuations of the you who won the lottery.


I'm imagining waking up after a night of heavy drinking with
memories gradually returning. Now, you can, of course, condition
everything on the person who will find that he won the lottery. But
making that a hard part of my identity doesn't make sense to me,
otherwise you could not be the same person and forget about it, or
consider being the same person who participated in the lottery who
then went on to win it.

Now,while this boils down to an arbitrary definition of personal
identity, we should be consistent about this; you can be the same
person as the won who had not yet won it, and you could imagine
being a person who did not win it, then you'll likely end up waking
up as a copy in another branch who did not win it.


 That seems to invoke a dualism, such that there's only one real "you"
who may be in different branches at different times.  I'd say that if
"you" wake up as a copy in another branch where "you" didn't win, it's
because "you" didn't win.  It's the same as saying the man who sees
Moscow didn't "wake up" as the man who sees Washington.

 Brent


We can turn this into a reverse Bruno-like problem. If your memory 
is temporarily cleared then copies of different branches merge.


You mean there are branches of the world in which your memory of
yesterday, when the lottery was drawn, is erased (and we're supposing
there is no physics, so there is no physical evidence of yesterday?).
Then the threads of consciousness constituting Saibal before yesterday
AND suffering amnesia about yesterday will merge with each other, but
NOT with the threads of Saibal that do remember yesterday.

The branches will of course be different, but you without a memory 
of having won in the branch where you did win is the same you as the 
you in another branch were you did not win where you also have 
forgotten about not winning.


The question is then if it is advisable to go through this procedure 
if you have won.


You're supposing there's a "procedure" for erasing memory of
yesterday?  How could there be, there's no physics?  So there are some
Saibals that forgot yesterday, and whether or not "they" won, but the
forgetting wasn't a "procedure" because that would imply a physical
world context in which whether on not Saibal won would be evident in
the physical world and beyond mere "forgetting".  The forgetting would
just have to be a result of the computation.



I've written in the past about an elaborate procedure involving an AI 
that resets its memory, but I now think that this is not necessary.  
It seems to me that every moment we experience is a new measurement of 
our state that is equivalent to forgetting everything and then just 
reloading all the information. Predictions of outcomes of experiments 
should not depend on making this assumption. Put differently, at any 
one time you could imagine yourself as being sampled randomly from the 
set of all observer moments.


Sure.  And you can imagine that God created the world last Thursday.  
But I see any predictive or explanatory power in such an "imagining".


Brent




Saibal



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Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[Brent Meeker]

On 8/4/2016 10:15 AM, smitra wrote:

On 04-08-2016 05:48, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/3/2016 6:59 PM, smitra wrote:


Actually, there will objective evidence as to whether or not you
have
won the lottery. There will be a winning number and you will have
a
ticket that will have this number on it or not, regardless of
whether
you forget anything or not. The idea that branches in the MWI can

recombine after the relevant quantum measurement has been
irreversibly
recorded is nonsense.


There is no recombination of branches here, it's just that you
become identical to another version of you located in another
branch. Then, upon a new measurement, you'll spit over the different
branches again. If somehow you would not be identical to another
copy of you located on a branch where the outcome of the lottery is
different, then that means that you actually did not forget the
outcome as the information about the outcome is still present in
your memory (the algorithm that defines you).


 And then you'll become Bruno, and then you'll become John Clark, and
then you'll become Sherlock Holmes and then you'll become a unicorn
and each of them infinitely many times...  That's the trouble with
"everything thing happens" .



Yes, but this is not a problem, this is just an artifact of 
introducing an unphysical "you". All that really exists are algorithms 
and they can be identified by the particular computational state that 
refers to them uniquely. So, your statement reduces to the fact that 
I, Bruno, and many other persons exist, which is not all that shocking.


Right.  But it destroys the indicial meaning of "you" so your so your 
statement that, "... it's just that you become identical to another 
version of you located in another branch."  becomes meaningless.


Brent



Saibal



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Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[John Clark]

A few years ago on this list I made a modest proposal, it's a low tech way
to test the Many World's interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and as a bonus
it'll make you rich too. First you buy one Powerball lottery ticket, the
drawing of the winning number is on Saturday at 11pm, now make a simple
machine that will pull the trigger on a 44 magnum revolver aimed at your
head at exactly 11:00:01pm UNLESS yours is the winning ticket. Your
subjective experience can only be that at 11:00:01pm despite 80 million to
one odds stacked against you a miracle occurs and the gun does not go off
and you're rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Of course for every universe
you're rich in there are 80 million in which your friends watch your head
explode, but that's a minor point, your consciousness no longer exists in
any of those worlds so you never have to see the mess, it's their problem
not yours.

Actually I like Many Worlds and think it may very well be right, but I
wouldn't bet my life on it.

  John K Clark

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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Brent Meeker]

On 8/4/2016 2:57 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:



On 4 August 2016 at 11:16, Brent Meeker > wrote:




On 8/3/2016 5:55 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:



On 3 August 2016 at 16:02, Brent Meeker > wrote:



On 8/2/2016 10:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:



On Wednesday, 3 August 2016, Brent Meeker
 wrote:



On 8/2/2016 3:29 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:



On Wednesday, 3 August 2016, Brent Meeker
 wrote:



On 8/2/2016 6:15 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

It's not that it can't, but rather that it
doesn't, and if it does then that would require
some extra physical explanation, a radio link
between brains or something.


That's what I mean by illegitimately appealing to
physics while claiming that physics must be derived
from computation of consciousness.


 Whatever theory we propose must be consistent with
observation.


But, "if it does then*/that would require some extra
physical explanation/*, a radio link between brains or
something." Is not an observation, it's an assumption
that all information transfer must be physical.


There is no convincing evidence for telepathic
communication, so a theory that predicts it should occur
would have to explain why we don't observe it.


Yes, and physical theories of consciousness do that quite
well.  But computationalist theories of consciousness can't
invoke the physics they're trying to derive.


Bruno, I believe, proposes that his theory accounts for the
universe that we observe.


ISTM his argument is of the form:

1) Consciousness is instantiated by certain computation.
2) All possible computation is realized by a UDA that exists
because arithmetic is true.
3) Then the conscious thoughts that constitute our experience of a
physical world are among those instantiated by the UDA and the
physical world need not be anything more than threads of those
computations that exhibit the consistent patterns which we explain
as an external reality.

The problem I have with this is that "arithmetic is true" doesn't
make anything, much less a UDA, exist. And the conclusion (3) just
brings in Everett's measure problem amplified to the nth degree. 
It explains too much as "existing" and doesn't assign

probabilities to anything.  So far as I can tell Bruno is just
relying on 1-3 as a "proof" that the physics we observe MUST BE
derived from the UDA.


The problem with (3) is a general problem with multiverses.  A single, 
infinite universe is an example of a multiverse theory, since there 
will be infinite copies of everything and every possible variation of 
everything, including your brain and your mind.


That implicitly assumes a digital universe, yet the theory that suggests 
it, quantum mechanics, is based on continua; which is why I don't take 
"the multiverse" too seriously.


We live in an orderly world with consistent physical laws. It seems to 
me that you are suggesting that if everything possible existed then we 
would not live in such an orderly world,


Unless the worlds were separated in some way, which current physical 
theories provide - but which is not explicable if you divorce conscious 
thoughts from physics.


Brent

and we would not be able to have coherent thoughts. So the fact that 
we do have coherent thoughts implies that multiverses cannot exist, 
and we must live in a finite universe. That seems a lot to conclude 
from the mere fact that you are able to think.



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Re: Step 4? (Re: QUESTION 2 (Re: Holiday Exercise

[John Clark]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 12:15 PM, Marchal  wrote:
>
> ​> ​
>> The question is not about duplication.
>
>
> ​OK.​
>
>
> ​And that part is still OK. Assigning probabilities about what "YOU" will
see next is not ambiguous as long as "YOU" duplicating machine are not
around.

​> ​
> So, you are OK that the guy in Helsinki write P("drinking coffee") = 1.
>

​The
 guy in Helsinki
​?​
NO!!! Bruno Marchal said  "The question is not about duplication" but the
guy in Helsinki is just about to walk into a *YOU*
 ​
duplicating machine
​,​
so John Clark
​will not
 assign any probability of any sort​ about
​the​
 one and only one thing
​that ​
will happen to "
​*YOU​*
"
​.​

​
It's just
​plain ​
dumb.


​> ​
> Now, the guy in Helsinki is told that we have put a painting by Van Gogh
> in one of the reconstitution box, and a painting by Monet in the other
> reconstitution box.
> ​ ​
>
>

​Let's see if John Clark can guess what's coming. After "*YOU*" have been
duplicated by a *YOU* duplicating machine what is the probability that "
*YOU*" will blah blah blah. What on earth made Bruno Marchal think that
substituting a painting for a cup of coffee would make things less
ambiguous?

​> ​
> The key point here, is that we don't tell you which reconstitution box
> contains which painting.
> ​[...]
>

​
Why is that the key point? Suppose we
​ ​
change the experiment and this time before the experiment we tell "Y*OU*"
which box contains which painting, we tell "*YOU*" that the red box on the
left contains the Van Gogh
​ ​
and the blue box on the right contains the Monet , and we tell "*YOU*" that
after "*YOU*" are duplicated by the *YOU* duplicating machine "*YOU*" will
be in both boxes. Does that information help in the slightest way in
determining what one and only one painting "*YOU*" will see after "*YOU*"
​are​
 duplicated?
​ ​
It's just plain
​ ​
dumb.

​>​
>  P("being uncertain about which city is behind the door")


​P is equal to who's uncertainty? After the experiment is​

​over how do we determine what the true value of P turned out to be? To
find out that value we need to ask "*YOU*" what "*YOU*" saw after "*YOU*"
walked into the *YOU *duplicating machine and opened one and only one door.
But who exactly do we ask? We can't ask the Helsinki man as he's no longer
around, oh I know, we ask "*YOU*".


​> ​
> OK?
>

​No it's not OK, it's about as far from OK as things get.​


​> ​
> Can we move to step 4?
>

​Just as soon as Bruno Marchal explains what one and only one thing "*YOU*"
refers to in a world with "*YOU*" duplicating machines.

John K Clark ​

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Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[Bruno Marchal]

On 04 Aug 2016, at 05:48, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 8/3/2016 6:59 PM, smitra wrote:


Actually, there will objective evidence as to whether or not you  
have

won the lottery. There will be a winning number and you will have a
ticket that will have this number on it or not, regardless of  
whether

you forget anything or not. The idea that branches in the MWI can
recombine after the relevant quantum measurement has been  
irreversibly

recorded is nonsense.


There is no recombination of branches here, it's just that you  
become identical to another version of you located in another  
branch. Then, upon a new measurement, you'll spit over the  
different branches again. If somehow you would not be identical to  
another copy of you located on a branch where the outcome of the  
lottery is different, then that means that you actually did not  
forget the outcome as the information about the outcome is still  
present in your memory (the algorithm that defines you).


And then you'll become Bruno, and then you'll become John Clark, and  
then you'll become Sherlock Holmes and then you'll become a unicorn  
and each of them infinitely many times...  That's the trouble with  
"everything thing happens" .



Fortunately for mechanism, some diophantine equation have no  
solutions, some programs never stop, and nothing impossible happens at  
the base level, or we are all gravely inconsistent.


But what is interesting is that for any machine, the truth is bigger  
than its believable/justifiable part, and the exploration is infinite,  
and can only lead to more surprises and more surprises, and more  
doubts ...


"everything" has no meaning out of the theory of thing that we  
postulate.


Bruno





Brent

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http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/



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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Bruno Marchal]

On 04 Aug 2016, at 04:37, Bruce Kellett wrote:


On 4/08/2016 1:04 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 03 Aug 2016, at 07:16, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 3/08/2016 2:55 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 02 Aug 2016, at 14:40, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 2/08/2016 3:07 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:

On 01 Aug 2016, at 09:04, Bruce Kellett wrote:

Consider ordinary consequences of introspection: I can be  
conscious of several unrelated things at once. I can be  
driving my car, conscious of the road and traffic conditions  
(and responding to them appropriately), while at the same time  
carrying on an intelligent conversation with my wife, thinking  
about what I will make for dinner, and, in the back of my mind  
thinking about a philosophical email exchange. These, and many  
other things, can be present to my conscious mind at the same  
time. I can bring any one of these things to the forefront of  
my mind at will, but processing of the separate streams goes  
on all the time.


Given this, it is quite easy to imagine that a subset of these  
simultaneous streams of consciousness might be associated with  
myself in a different body -- in a different place at a  
different time. I would be aware of things happening to the  
other body in real time in my own consciousness -- because  
they would, in fact, be happening to me.


If you dissociate consciousness from an actual single brain,  
then these things are quite conceivable.


Dissociating consciousness from any actual single brain is what  
UDA explains in detail. Then the math shows that this  
dissociation run even deeper, as your 1p consciousness is  
associated with the infinitely many relative and faithful (at  
the correct substitution level or below) state in the (sigma_1)  
arithmetical relations.


Duplication experiments would then be a real test of the  
hypothesis that consciousness could be separated from the  
physical brain. If the duplicates are essentially separate  
conscious beings, unaware of the thoughts and happenings of  
the other, then consciousness is tied to a particular physical  
brain (or brain substitute).


Not at all, but it might look like that at that stage, but what  
you say does not follow from computationalism. The same  
consciousness present at both place before the door is open  
*only* differentiated when they get the different bit of  
information W or M.


However, if consciousness is actually an abstract computation  
that is tied to a physical brain only in a statistical sense,  
then we should expect that the single consciousness could  
inhabit several bodies simultaneously.


It is irrelevant to decide how many consciousness or first  
person there is. We need only to listen to  
those  which have differentiated to extract the  
statistics.


The point that I am trying to make here is that a person's  
consciousness at any moment can consist of many independent  
threads. From this I speculate that some of these separate  
threads could actually be associated with separate physical  
bodies. In other words, it is conceivable that a duplication  
experiment would not result in two separate consciousnesses, but  
a single consciousness in separate bodies. If this is so, the  
fact that the separate bodies receive different inputs does not  
necessarily mean that they differentiate into separate conscious  
beings, any more than the fact that I receive different inputs  
from moment to moment means that I dissociate into multiple  
consciousnesses.


It seems that the only reason that one might expect that the  
different inputs experienced by the separate duplicates would  
lead to a differentiation of the consciousnesses -- i.e., two  
separate and distinct conscious beings -- is that one is  
implicitly making the physicalist assumption that a single  
consciousness is necessarily associated with a single body, such  
that separate physical bodies necessarily have separate  
consciousnesses.


I suggest that for step 3 to go through, you need to demonstrate  
that computationalism requires that a single consciousness  
cannot inhabit two or more separate physical bodies: without  
such a demonstration you cannot conclude that W is not a  
possible outcome that the duplicated person could experience.  
You must demonstrate that different inputs lead to a  
differentiation of the consciousnesses in the duplication case,  
while not so differentiating the consciousness of a single  
person. The required demonstration must be based on the  
assumptions of computationalism alone, you cannot rely on  
physics that is not yet in evidence.


In other words, start from your basic assumptions:
(1) The "yes doctor" hypothesis;
(2) The Church-Turing thesis; and
(3) Arithmetical realism;


(3) is redundant. There is no (2) without (3).


Yes there is. Arithmetical realism, as you use the term, is  
different from the ability to calculate.


No. I define arithmetical realism by the belief in elementary  
arithmetic.

Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[smitra]

On 04-08-2016 03:05, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/3/2016 4:30 PM, smitra wrote:

On 04-08-2016 01:16, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/3/2016 4:09 PM, smitra wrote:


On 04-08-2016 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:


Only if you wake up and find out winning the lottery was a
mistake,
which seems less likely than waking up a winner. Waking up as one
of
the many copies who didn't win is not one of the options - those
copies are not continuations of the you who won the lottery.


I'm imagining waking up after a night of heavy drinking with
memories gradually returning. Now, you can, of course, condition
everything on the person who will find that he won the lottery. But
making that a hard part of my identity doesn't make sense to me,
otherwise you could not be the same person and forget about it, or
consider being the same person who participated in the lottery who
then went on to win it.

Now,while this boils down to an arbitrary definition of personal
identity, we should be consistent about this; you can be the same
person as the won who had not yet won it, and you could imagine
being a person who did not win it, then you'll likely end up waking
up as a copy in another branch who did not win it.


 That seems to invoke a dualism, such that there's only one real 
"you"

who may be in different branches at different times.  I'd say that if
"you" wake up as a copy in another branch where "you" didn't win, 
it's

because "you" didn't win.  It's the same as saying the man who sees
Moscow didn't "wake up" as the man who sees Washington.

 Brent


We can turn this into a reverse Bruno-like problem. If your memory is 
temporarily cleared then copies of different branches merge.


You mean there are branches of the world in which your memory of
yesterday, when the lottery was drawn, is erased (and we're supposing
there is no physics, so there is no physical evidence of yesterday?).
Then the threads of consciousness constituting Saibal before yesterday
AND suffering amnesia about yesterday will merge with each other, but
NOT with the threads of Saibal that do remember yesterday.

The branches will of course be different, but you without a memory of 
having won in the branch where you did win is the same you as the you 
in another branch were you did not win where you also have forgotten 
about not winning.


The question is then if it is advisable to go through this procedure 
if you have won.


You're supposing there's a "procedure" for erasing memory of
yesterday?  How could there be, there's no physics?  So there are some
Saibals that forgot yesterday, and whether or not "they" won, but the
forgetting wasn't a "procedure" because that would imply a physical
world context in which whether on not Saibal won would be evident in
the physical world and beyond mere "forgetting".  The forgetting would
just have to be a result of the computation.



I've written in the past about an elaborate procedure involving an AI 
that resets its memory, but I now think that this is not necessary.  It 
seems to me that every moment we experience is a new measurement of our 
state that is equivalent to forgetting everything and then just 
reloading all the information. Predictions of outcomes of experiments 
should not depend on making this assumption. Put differently, at any one 
time you could imagine yourself as being sampled randomly from the set 
of all observer moments.


Saibal

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Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[smitra]

On 04-08-2016 05:48, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/3/2016 6:59 PM, smitra wrote:


Actually, there will objective evidence as to whether or not you
have
won the lottery. There will be a winning number and you will have
a
ticket that will have this number on it or not, regardless of
whether
you forget anything or not. The idea that branches in the MWI can

recombine after the relevant quantum measurement has been
irreversibly
recorded is nonsense.


There is no recombination of branches here, it's just that you
become identical to another version of you located in another
branch. Then, upon a new measurement, you'll spit over the different
branches again. If somehow you would not be identical to another
copy of you located on a branch where the outcome of the lottery is
different, then that means that you actually did not forget the
outcome as the information about the outcome is still present in
your memory (the algorithm that defines you).


 And then you'll become Bruno, and then you'll become John Clark, and
then you'll become Sherlock Holmes and then you'll become a unicorn
and each of them infinitely many times...  That's the trouble with
"everything thing happens" .



Yes, but this is not a problem, this is just an artifact of introducing 
an unphysical "you". All that really exists are algorithms and they can 
be identified by the particular computational state that refers to them 
uniquely. So, your statement reduces to the fact that I, Bruno, and many 
other persons exist, which is not all that shocking.


Saibal

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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Bruno Marchal]

On 04 Aug 2016, at 03:16, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 8/3/2016 5:55 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:



On 3 August 2016 at 16:02, Brent Meeker  wrote:


On 8/2/2016 10:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:



On Wednesday, 3 August 2016, Brent Meeker   
wrote:



On 8/2/2016 3:29 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:



On Wednesday, 3 August 2016, Brent Meeker   
wrote:



On 8/2/2016 6:15 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
It's not that it can't, but rather that it doesn't, and if it  
does then that would require some extra physical explanation, a  
radio link between brains or something.


That's what I mean by illegitimately appealing to physics while  
claiming that physics must be derived from computation of  
consciousness.


 Whatever theory we propose must be consistent with observation.


But, "if it does then that would require some extra physical  
explanation, a radio link between brains or something." Is not an  
observation, it's an assumption that all information transfer must  
be physical.


There is no convincing evidence for telepathic communication, so a  
theory that predicts it should occur would have to explain why we  
don't observe it.


Yes, and physical theories of consciousness do that quite well.   
But computationalist theories of consciousness can't invoke the  
physics they're trying to derive.


Bruno, I believe, proposes that his theory accounts for the  
universe that we observe.


ISTM his argument is of the form:

1) Consciousness is instantiated by certain computation.
2) All possible computation is realized by a UDA that exists because  
arithmetic is true.
3) Then the conscious thoughts that constitute our experience of a  
physical world are among those instantiated by the UDA and the  
physical world need not be anything more than threads of those  
computations that exhibit the consistent patterns which we explain  
as an external reality.



Not correct. By the (step 7) global FPI on the (sigma-1) arithmetic,  
we have to extract physics from the statistics on *all* computations  
(universal number in activity).


That is the key, making mechanism testable. It is not a theory of  
mine, it is a problem in a well accepted theory. It works on machines  
+ oracles too.






The problem I have with this is that "arithmetic is true" doesn't  
make anything, much less a UDA, exist.


UDA is my Argument.

Use UD for the Universal Dovetailer program, and UD* for its  
execution, in a physical universe (step 7), or in the sigma_1  
arithmetic (step 8).


Step 8 is not the proof that arithmetic generate and run UD* (which is  
an easy exercise in introductory book in the domain), but is the  
explanation why assuming the physical cannot help in the mind-body  
problem once we assume digital mechanism.


I only show that with digital mechanism, we can take the mind-body  
problem back from under the rug.


 It is not yet solved, although the math solves apparently the  
propositional part of the problem, we could say. UDA is not a theory,  
it is the enunciation of a problem, which we tend to abstract from  
since we have given the theological science to the politics, roughly  
speaking.


We would have evidence that the logic of the observable is boolean,  
and not quantum, then classical computationalism would be in trouble.






  And the conclusion (3) just brings in Everett's measure problem  
amplified to the nth degree.


Exactly. But the math shows already that the "explosion of 1p- 
realities" is pretty well confined.





It explains too much as "existing" and doesn't assign probabilities  
to anything.  So far as I can tell Bruno is just relying on 1-3 as a  
"proof" that the physics we observe MUST BE derived from the UDA.


Yes, but that was a lightening in my young time. The work is what has  
been done by Gödel, Löb, Solovay, ... and also Post, Turing, Church,  
and many others, and which has made possible to see the shape of the  
(neopythagorean) solution (that has been 30 years of work). UDA is the  
enunciation of the problem, and AUDA is the translation of the problem  
in the language of the Löbian numbers, and what they can already  
answer, or more aptly what we can already listen.


I am just serious on the mind-body problem, in the mechanist frame.

Only devoted super-bigot christian fundamentalist atheists have a  
problem, and perhaps even only those molesting the children in secret  
(that is the difference between the temple and the church, the church  
molests the kids publicly, the temple molest the kids secretly).


Then it is obvious that when you see how hard it is for people to get  
that the danger of cannabis are lies (despite they are only 75 years  
old, and are rather gross), you can imagine that about the 'Glass of  
Milk', it will take time to recover from the 1500 years of lies, and  
superstition, wishful thinking, etc.
As things are going, it looks like we try to prepare 

Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

[smitra]

On 04-08-2016 04:13, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 4/08/2016 11:59 am, smitra wrote:

On 04-08-2016 01:51, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 4/08/2016 9:30 am, smitra wrote:

On 04-08-2016 01:16, Brent Meeker wrote:

On 8/3/2016 4:09 PM, smitra wrote:


On 04-08-2016 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:


Only if you wake up and find out winning the lottery was a
mistake,
which seems less likely than waking up a winner. Waking up as one
of
the many copies who didn't win is not one of the options - those
copies are not continuations of the you who won the lottery.


I'm imagining waking up after a night of heavy drinking with
memories gradually returning. Now, you can, of course, condition
everything on the person who will find that he won the lottery. 
But

making that a hard part of my identity doesn't make sense to me,
otherwise you could not be the same person and forget about it, or
consider being the same person who participated in the lottery who
then went on to win it.

Now,while this boils down to an arbitrary definition of personal
identity, we should be consistent about this; you can be the same
person as the won who had not yet won it, and you could imagine
being a person who did not win it, then you'll likely end up 
waking

up as a copy in another branch who did not win it.


 That seems to invoke a dualism, such that there's only one real 
"you"
who may be in different branches at different times.  I'd say that 
if
"you" wake up as a copy in another branch where "you" didn't win, 
it's

because "you" didn't win.  It's the same as saying the man who sees
Moscow didn't "wake up" as the man who sees Washington.

 Brent


We can turn this into a reverse Bruno-like problem. If your memory 
is temporarily cleared then copies of different branches merge. The 
branches will of course be different, but you without a memory of 
having won in the branch where you did win is the same you as the 
you in another branch were you did not win where you also have 
forgotten about not winning.


Actually, there will objective evidence as to whether or not you have
won the lottery. There will be a winning number and you will have a
ticket that will have this number on it or not, regardless of whether
you forget anything or not. The idea that branches in the MWI can
recombine after the relevant quantum measurement has been 
irreversibly

recorded is nonsense.


There is no recombination of branches here, it's just that you become 
identical to another version of you located in another branch. Then, 
upon a new measurement, you'll spit over the different branches again. 
If somehow you would not be identical to another copy of you located 
on a branch where the outcome of the lottery is different, then that 
means that you actually did not forget the outcome as the information 
about the outcome is still present in your memory (the algorithm that 
defines you).


Forgetting does not involve  complete reversal of a particular brain
state, so there will always be traces of the facts that you once knew,
but have recently forgotten -- the memories might come flooding back.
I don't think the subconscious mind is as simple as you seem to
presume. While you were forgetting, the other branches of the wave
funtion have evolved away in different diretions, so it is extremely
unlikey that there will be another copy identical to you
post-forgetting state. If you do another measurement, there is another
branching -- you never go back to an earlier state. Decoherence is
irreversible.

It doesn't matter, because the moment you have forgotten it,  the parts 
of your brain that do contain the information about the lottery are 
external to you. Otherwise, you would not have forgotten it.  That 
decoherence is irreversible in practice is irrelevant here.


Saibal

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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Platonist Guitar Cowboy]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2016 at 5:15 PM, Bruno Marchal  wrote:

>
> On 03 Aug 2016, at 21:01, Brent Meeker wrote:
>
>
>>
>> On 8/3/2016 7:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> On 02 Aug 2016, at 20:52, Brent Meeker wrote:
>>>
>>>

 On 8/2/2016 6:15 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

> It's not that it can't, but rather that it doesn't, and if it does
> then that would require some extra physical explanation, a radio link
> between brains or something.
>

 That's what I mean by illegitimately appealing to physics while
 claiming that physics must be derived from computation of consciousness.

>>>
>>> Are you OK with Clark's answer to question 1?
>>> What about question 2?
>>>
>>
>> I've given up following your exchanges with Clark.  They seem to be about
>> semantics.
>>
>
> It is enough to interpret "gibberish" by "I have no more argument".
>
>
You can't fault people for not reading "gibberish" which you continue to
entertain daily, as worthy of replies and full attention of the list for
years. If they are gibberish why the years of daily replies in my inbox?

Exchanges of friendship? I'm not sure friends talk to each other that way
for years, where it remains unclear from both sides if there even is a real
difference in between all the vain orgies of righteous hair splitting. To
prove people stature and erudition? Regardless of the content, the guy
entertaining gibberish, telling people to interpret it as "I have no
argument" for him to consequently "have the real argument" doesn't paint
the best picture. Blatant assumption of superiority in a context of
supposedly rational exchange. Decidedly un-mystical and dogmatic from both
of you. Both are using each other and the list for more self-promotion than
discussion and should count themselves lucky to have each other, as both
obviously fulfill each others' need.

You could thank each other for providing yourselves with raison d'etre.
That would be funny: a photo of you both having a beer instead of all the
disguised rancour.

For those that hope for some political or theological reference/orientation
that comp may provide, look right here: this is merely human same old.
Establishing and keeping a medieval pecking order, enforcing it with old
tactics, fetishizing status and names => THIS is the theory of personal
identity and the "scientific reasoning" it has always produced that Bruno
points toward. Somebody indeed bring us a teleportation device.

If anything the broader tendency here tarnishes possible points from any
side as closer to advertising, forcing opinions with linguistic games etc.
Welcome to the internet. PGC

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Step 4? (Re: QUESTION 2 (Re: Holiday Exercise

[Bruno Marchal]

On 03 Aug 2016, at 19:20, John Clark wrote:

On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 2:56 PM, Bruno Marchal   
wrote:


​> ​The question is not about duplication.

​OK.​

​> ​Do you agree that if today, someone is "sure" that tomorrow  
(or any precise time later) he will be uncertain of an outcome of a  
certain experience, then he can say, today, that he is uncertain  
about that future outcome.


​Sure, he can say whatever he wants because being sure ​and being  
correct are two entirely different things.


​> ​For example, if I promise myself to buy a lottery ticket next  
week. I am pretty sure now that next week I will​ ​be unsure  
winning something


​I've been known to break promises to myself before. If I didn't  
buy the ticket I'd absolutely certain I won't win the lottery next  
week, if I do buy the ticket I'd be almost certain I won't win next  
week. I'll have to wait till next week to find out if in addition to  
being certain I was also correct. And because you said right at the  
start that people duplicating machines ​are not involved this time  
personal pronouns can be used without ​ambiguity. ​


​> ​or not with that ticket, so I consider myself to be uncertain  
right now about winning or not the lottery next week.​ ​So I  
repeat, the principle questioned here says that if at t_0​ ​P("I  
will be uncertain of the outcome of some experience at t_1") =  
1​ ​then​ ​The outcome of the experience at t_1 is uncertain  
at t_0.


​You can be certain and wrong, and uncertain and correct. I will  
say that if I don't know fact X tomorow but I do know fact X now  
then sometime between today and tomorrow part of my memory must have  
been be erased. It's called "forgetting". But I haven't forgotten  
you said " The question is not about duplication" and that means "I"  
duplicating Machines are not involved, and that is the only reason  
it wasn't gibberish when you said "I will be uncertain of the...".



OK.

So, you are OK that the guy in Helsinki write P("drinking coffee") =  
1. (Question 1).


I notice also that you did not mention that the coffee should taste  
exactly the same, and I could have just propose a hot drink, we would  
still have P("drinking hot drink") = 1. All right?


And you agree (question 2) that if am pretty sure that tomorrow I will  
make an experience with a random/uncertain result (lottery, quantum  
lottery, whatever), I can say that I am already uncertain today about  
the result of that experience, assuming I keep my promise to myself to  
do the experience of course (buying the lottery ticket, measuring that  
spin, etc.).


Good!

Now, I will prove, assuming computationalism (alias digital mechanist  
hypothesis in cognitive science), that there is a first person  
indeterminacy in some still modified step 3 protocol. Then I will  
explain that the modification does not change the uncertainty, and  
thus proved step 3.



Now, the guy in Helsinki is told that we have put a painting by Van  
Gogh in one of the reconstitution box, and a painting by Monet in the  
other reconstitution box. The key point here, is that we don't tell  
you which reconstitution box contains which painting. After the  
reconstitutions, the doors will remain close for some short time,  
which I call delta-t_1, so that t_0 is when the guy is in Helsinki,  
and delta-t_2 is the interval of time when the reconstitutions are  
done, simultaneously (say) in Washington and in Moscow.


The guy in Helsinki reasons like this: by the question 1 principle,  
P("seeing a painting") = 1, given that there will be a painting in  
both reconstitution boxes. Now, by Digital Mechanism, both copies will  
see different paintings, given that they have been reconstituted in  
different boxes containing different paintings. But the difference  
between the paintings differentiates the first persn experience of  
each copies, and they know that. Both will see a specific painting,  
like a Monet, or a Van Gogh, and both will conclude that by seiing the  
painting, they have already differentiate, so that the city behind the  
door is already determined. But as we have not told the guy in  
Helsinki where the paintings have been placed, the differentiation is  
not enough for them to deduce with certainty what city is behind the  
door. The guy in Helsinki I just prove that P("being uncertain about  
which city is behind the door") = 1, in the same sense of the question  
one principle (if X occurs at both places then P(X) = 1).


The guy in Helsinki expect (with P=1, modulo assumption and default  
hyp) to get a cup of coffee, to see a painting, and to live an  
interval of time where he will be aware that the differentiation has  
occurred, despite not knowing which city is behind the doors. By the  
principle of the question 2, he is already uncertain about the outcome  
of the opening of the door tomorrow. The delta-t_2 interval of  
uncertainty is lifted to the day before.


Now, obviously, 

Re: Holiday Exercise

[Brent Meeker]

On 8/4/2016 2:51 AM, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 4/08/2016 6:00 pm, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 4/08/2016 5:52 pm, Russell Standish wrote:

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 04:27:21PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 3/08/2016 12:01 pm, Russell Standish wrote:
However, we are being asked to consider two conscious states where 
the
conscious state differs by at least one bit - the W/M bit. 
Clearly, by the YD

assumption, both states are survivor states from the original
conscious state, but are not the same consciousness because of the
single bit difference.

By that reasoning, no consciousness survives through time.

Not at all! Both conscious states survive through time by assumption 
(YD).


Methinks you are unnecessarily assuming transitivity again.


No, I was just referring to the continuation of a single 
consciousness through time. We get different input data all the time 
but we do not differentiate according to that data.


I could perhaps expand on that response. On duplication, two identical 
consciousnesses are created, and by the identity of indiscernibles, 
they form just a single consciousness. Then data is input. It seems to 
me that there is no reason why this should lead the initial 
consciousness to differentiate, or split into two. In normal life we 
get inputs from many sources simultaneously -- we see complex scenes, 
smell the air, feel impacts on our body, and hear many sounds from the 
environment. None of this leads our consciousness to disintegrate. 
Indeed, our evolutionary experience has made us adept at coping with 
these multifarious inputs and sorting through them very efficiently to 
concentrate on what is most important, while keeping other inputs at 
an appropriate level in our minds.


I have previously mentioned our ability to multitask in complex ways: 
while I am driving my car, I am aware of the car, the road, other 
traffic and so on; while, at the same time, I can be talking to my 
wife; thinking about what to cook for dinner; and reflecting on 
philosophical issues that are important to me. And this is by no means 
an exhaustive list of our ability to multitask -- to run many separate 
conscious modules within the one unified consciousness.


Given that this experience is common to us all, it is not in the least 
bit difficult to think that the adding of yet another stream of inputs 
via a separate body will not change the basic structure of our 
consciousness -- we will just take this additional data and process in 
the way we already process multiple data inputs and streams of 
consciousness. This would seem, indeed, to be the default 
understanding of the consequences of person duplication. One would 
have to add some further constraints in order for it to be clear that 
the separate bodies would necessarily have differentiated conscious 
streams. No such additional constraints are currently in evidence.


Not empirically proven constraints, but current physics strongly 
suggests that the duplicates would almost immediately, in the 
decoherence time for a brain, differentiate; i.e. the consciousness is 
not separate from the physics.  It's only "not in evidence" if your 
trying to derive the physics from the consciousness.


Brent




Bruce



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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Bruno Marchal]

On 03 Aug 2016, at 21:01, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 8/3/2016 7:26 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:


On 02 Aug 2016, at 20:52, Brent Meeker wrote:




On 8/2/2016 6:15 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
It's not that it can't, but rather that it doesn't, and if it  
does then that would require some extra physical explanation, a  
radio link between brains or something.


That's what I mean by illegitimately appealing to physics while  
claiming that physics must be derived from computation of  
consciousness.


Are you OK with Clark's answer to question 1?
What about question 2?


I've given up following your exchanges with Clark.  They seem to be  
about semantics.


It is enough to interpret "gibberish" by "I have no more argument".





 I don't see any problem with your arguments there,


OK.



except recognizing that it is an assumption that duplicated brains  
will have separate consciousness.



I don't use the term consciousness, except in the replies of those who  
does.



I need only that the duplicated memories (diaries) get the notice or  
the imprint of the memory of seeing Moscow (respectively Washington).


And that follows trivially from the digital mechanist assumption DM,  
or from P=1 (conditioned by DM and the default hypotheses). "P=1"  
itself will be shwon to belong to G* minus G. It needs an act of faith.


It is not relevant, at this stage, to identify or not "I see Moscow"  
in the first person sense, with "I am conscious that I see Moscow".


To get the reversal, the differentiation of the first person diaries  
is quite enough. OK?






That's probably true, based on a physicalist model.  Whether it is  
probable on a computationalist model is less clear.


You survive intact, with your eyes intact, and the first person  
discourse is defined by the memory of the outcome of the first person  
self-localization. They do both see different cities. Assuming DM, it  
is plain obvious that the first person discourse (and consciousness)  
differentiate. If each copy repeat the experience 10 times, the many  
first person discourses available will differentiate into 2^10  
discourses, from the guy with the (conscious) first person experience  
WW to the guy with the first person conscious first person  
experience MM, and the 1022 (conscious) first person  
experience in between.


It is irrelevant if we talk about an emulation of all this in  
arithmetic or in some physical reality. We need only to assume some  
stable relative number relations, like, notably, physicists measures  
and extrapolate through physical assumption usually expressed in  
mathematical formula.


I use physics like Turing made its machine looking physical, unlike  
Church Lamdda calculus, or Robinson Arithmetic.










You argument is not valid, here. We can make local assumption, and  
then eliminate them later, which is done in this case in step 7  
(with or without step 8).


You can't make a "local" assumption in step 3, use it to argue for  
step 7 and then use truth of step 7 as evidence for the assumption  
in step 3.  That's circular



I don't do that at all.

I assume a physical reality, to make things easier. I do not assume it  
to be primary, and the contradiction that we will obtain is only with  
the idea that such a physical reality is primary and that it is the  
selector of the (conscious) histories.


There is no problem at all with physics. I would not have taken so  
much time to show that DM is empirically testable if I did not believe  
in a physical reality, and in its importance for searching truth.


The problem is only with physicalism (and with weak materialism).

Let us discuss step seven when everybody agree on step 3.

Oh! I see other post by you. I comment them here.


No, because the physical assumption is eliminated at step 7.


But I don't think that step is correct.  As I've argued several  
times I don't think there can be consciousness without a physical  
context.


And as I replied, you are correct. But that is non relevant for the  
understanding of the reversal imposed by DM..



The point is that the physical context does not need to be primary for  
having consciousness.


The physical context is, so to speak, one half historico-geographical,  
and one half theological, where theological means, here, the unknown  
first person result of the infinitely many universal numbers which  
competes (in elementary arithmetic) to bring your most probable  
continuations.
It is the many computations interpretation of arithmetic made by the  
universal numbers in arithmetic. That is testable, and the MWI of QM  
confirmed, intuitively, and formally.


You need to understand that the models (the intended realities/meaning  
in the logician sense of model) of Robinson arithmetic realize or  
emulate all computations. That is the part I have been asked to  
suppress in my french thesis as that is too much well known, and  
trivial, once we assume the 

Re: Holiday Exercise

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 4 August 2016 at 11:16, Brent Meeker  wrote:

>
>
> On 8/3/2016 5:55 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
>
> On 3 August 2016 at 16:02, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On 8/2/2016 10:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>> On Wednesday, 3 August 2016, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 8/2/2016 3:29 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wednesday, 3 August 2016, Brent Meeker  wrote:
>>>


 On 8/2/2016 6:15 AM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

> It's not that it can't, but rather that it doesn't, and if it does
> then that would require some extra physical explanation, a radio link
> between brains or something.
>

 That's what I mean by illegitimately appealing to physics while
 claiming that physics must be derived from computation of consciousness.

>>>
>>>  Whatever theory we propose must be consistent with observation.
>>>
>>>
>>> But, "if it does then* that would require some extra physical
>>> explanation*, a radio link between brains or something." Is not an
>>> observation, it's an assumption that all information transfer must be
>>> physical.
>>>
>>
>> There is no convincing evidence for telepathic communication, so a
>> theory that predicts it should occur would have to explain why we don't
>> observe it.
>>
>>
>> Yes, and physical theories of consciousness do that quite well.  But
>> computationalist theories of consciousness can't invoke the physics they're
>> trying to derive.
>>
>
> Bruno, I believe, proposes that his theory accounts for the universe that
> we observe.
>
>
> ISTM his argument is of the form:
>
> 1) Consciousness is instantiated by certain computation.
> 2) All possible computation is realized by a UDA that exists because
> arithmetic is true.
> 3) Then the conscious thoughts that constitute our experience of a
> physical world are among those instantiated by the UDA and the physical
> world need not be anything more than threads of those computations that
> exhibit the consistent patterns which we explain as an external reality.
>
> The problem I have with this is that "arithmetic is true" doesn't make
> anything, much less a UDA, exist.  And the conclusion (3) just brings in
> Everett's measure problem amplified to the nth degree.  It explains too
> much as "existing" and doesn't assign probabilities to anything.  So far as
> I can tell Bruno is just relying on 1-3 as a "proof" that the physics we
> observe MUST BE derived from the UDA.
>

The problem with (3) is a general problem with multiverses.  A single,
infinite universe is an example of a multiverse theory, since there will be
infinite copies of everything and every possible variation of everything,
including your brain and your mind. We live in an orderly world with
consistent physical laws. It seems to me that you are suggesting that if
everything possible existed then we would not live in such an orderly
world, and we would not be able to have coherent thoughts. So the fact that
we do have coherent thoughts implies that multiverses cannot exist, and we
must live in a finite universe. That seems a lot to conclude from the mere
fact that you are able to think.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou

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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Bruce Kellett]

On 4/08/2016 6:00 pm, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 4/08/2016 5:52 pm, Russell Standish wrote:

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 04:27:21PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 3/08/2016 12:01 pm, Russell Standish wrote:

However, we are being asked to consider two conscious states where the
conscious state differs by at least one bit - the W/M bit. Clearly, 
by the YD

assumption, both states are survivor states from the original
conscious state, but are not the same consciousness because of the
single bit difference.

By that reasoning, no consciousness survives through time.

Not at all! Both conscious states survive through time by assumption 
(YD).


Methinks you are unnecessarily assuming transitivity again.


No, I was just referring to the continuation of a single consciousness 
through time. We get different input data all the time but we do not 
differentiate according to that data.


I could perhaps expand on that response. On duplication, two identical 
consciousnesses are created, and by the identity of indiscernibles, they 
form just a single consciousness. Then data is input. It seems to me 
that there is no reason why this should lead the initial consciousness 
to differentiate, or split into two. In normal life we get inputs from 
many sources simultaneously -- we see complex scenes, smell the air, 
feel impacts on our body, and hear many sounds from the environment. 
None of this leads our consciousness to disintegrate. Indeed, our 
evolutionary experience has made us adept at coping with these 
multifarious inputs and sorting through them very efficiently to 
concentrate on what is most important, while keeping other inputs at an 
appropriate level in our minds.


I have previously mentioned our ability to multitask in complex ways: 
while I am driving my car, I am aware of the car, the road, other 
traffic and so on; while, at the same time, I can be talking to my wife; 
thinking about what to cook for dinner; and reflecting on philosophical 
issues that are important to me. And this is by no means an exhaustive 
list of our ability to multitask -- to run many separate conscious 
modules within the one unified consciousness.


Given that this experience is common to us all, it is not in the least 
bit difficult to think that the adding of yet another stream of inputs 
via a separate body will not change the basic structure of our 
consciousness -- we will just take this additional data and process in 
the way we already process multiple data inputs and streams of 
consciousness. This would seem, indeed, to be the default understanding 
of the consequences of person duplication. One would have to add some 
further constraints in order for it to be clear that the separate bodies 
would necessarily have differentiated conscious streams. No such 
additional constraints are currently in evidence.


Bruce

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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Bruce Kellett]

On 4/08/2016 5:52 pm, Russell Standish wrote:

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 04:27:21PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:

On 3/08/2016 12:01 pm, Russell Standish wrote:

However, we are being asked to consider two conscious states where the
conscious state differs by at least one bit - the W/M bit. Clearly, by the YD
assumption, both states are survivor states from the original
conscious state, but are not the same consciousness because of the
single bit difference.

By that reasoning, no consciousness survives through time.


Not at all! Both conscious states survive through time by assumption (YD).

Methinks you are unnecessarily assuming transitivity again.


No, I was just referring to the continuation of a single consciousness 
through time. We get different input data all the time but we do not 
differentiate according to that data.


Bruce

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Re: Holiday Exercise

[Russell Standish]

On Wed, Aug 03, 2016 at 04:27:21PM +1000, Bruce Kellett wrote:
> On 3/08/2016 12:01 pm, Russell Standish wrote:
> >
> >However, we are being asked to consider two conscious states where the
> >conscious state differs by at least one bit - the W/M bit. Clearly, by the YD
> >assumption, both states are survivor states from the original
> >conscious state, but are not the same consciousness because of the
> >single bit difference.
> 
> By that reasoning, no consciousness survives through time.
> 

Not at all! Both conscious states survive through time by assumption (YD).

Methinks you are unnecessarily assuming transitivity again.

-- 


Dr Russell StandishPhone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Senior Research Fellowhpco...@hpcoders.com.au
Economics, Kingston University http://www.hpcoders.com.au


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R: Re: If you win the lottery, don't expect to live the rest of your life as a millionaire

['scerir' via Everything List]

>Messaggio originale
>Da: "Bruce Kellett" 
>Data: 04/08/2016 4.13
>A: 
>Ogg: Re: If you win the lottery, dont expect to live the rest of your 
life as a millionaire
>
>On 4/08/2016 11:59 am, smitra wrote:
>> On 04-08-2016 01:51, Bruce Kellett wrote:
>>> On 4/08/2016 9:30 am, smitra wrote:
 On 04-08-2016 01:16, Brent Meeker wrote:
> On 8/3/2016 4:09 PM, smitra wrote:
>
>> On 04-08-2016 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>>
>>> Only if you wake up and find out winning the lottery was a
>>> mistake,
>>> which seems less likely than waking up a winner. Waking up as one
>>> of
>>> the many copies who didn't win is not one of the options - those
>>> copies are not continuations of the you who won the lottery.
>>
>> I'm imagining waking up after a night of heavy drinking with
>> memories gradually returning. Now, you can, of course, condition
>> everything on the person who will find that he won the lottery. But
>> making that a hard part of my identity doesn't make sense to me,
>> otherwise you could not be the same person and forget about it, or
>> consider being the same person who participated in the lottery who
>> then went on to win it.
>>
>> Now,while this boils down to an arbitrary definition of personal
>> identity, we should be consistent about this; you can be the same
>> person as the won who had not yet won it, and you could imagine
>> being a person who did not win it, then you'll likely end up waking
>> up as a copy in another branch who did not win it.
>
>  That seems to invoke a dualism, such that there's only one real "you"
> who may be in different branches at different times.  I'd say that if
> "you" wake up as a copy in another branch where "you" didn't win, it's
> because "you" didn't win.  It's the same as saying the man who sees
> Moscow didn't "wake up" as the man who sees Washington.
>
>  Brent

 We can turn this into a reverse Bruno-like problem. If your memory 
 is temporarily cleared then copies of different branches merge. The 
 branches will of course be different, but you without a memory of 
 having won in the branch where you did win is the same you as the 
 you in another branch were you did not win where you also have 
 forgotten about not winning.
>>>
>>> Actually, there will objective evidence as to whether or not you have
>>> won the lottery. There will be a winning number and you will have a
>>> ticket that will have this number on it or not, regardless of whether
>>> you forget anything or not. The idea that branches in the MWI can
>>> recombine after the relevant quantum measurement has been irreversibly
>>> recorded is nonsense.
>>
>> There is no recombination of branches here, it's just that you become 
>> identical to another version of you located in another branch. Then, 
>> upon a new measurement, you'll spit over the different branches again. 
>> If somehow you would not be identical to another copy of you located 
>> on a branch where the outcome of the lottery is different, then that 
>> means that you actually did not forget the outcome as the information 
>> about the outcome is still present in your memory (the algorithm that 
>> defines you).
>
>Forgetting does not involve  complete reversal of a particular brain 
>state, so there will always be traces of the facts that you once knew, 
>but have recently forgotten -- the memories might come flooding back. I 
>don't think the subconscious mind is as simple as you seem to presume. 
>While you were forgetting, the other branches of the wave funtion have 
>evolved away in different diretions, so it is extremely unlikey that 
>there will be another copy identical to you post-forgetting state. If 
>you do another measurement, there is another branching -- you never go 
>back to an earlier state. Decoherence is irreversible.
>
>Bruce

But, are there differences between "Many Minds I." and "Many Worlds I."?
It seems so.
http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/Many_Minds.pdf
http://www.ibiblio.org/weidai/Many_Minds_Replies.pdf

Each interpretation has problems (preferred basis, decoherence, recoherence,
Born rule, etc.). I think here we are somehow mixing the two interpretation 


s.

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