Re: Continuity Issue
I think this is a quite genuine remark. Bruno Le 04-janv.-06, à 14:49, Quentin Anciaux a écrit : Another problem is that there must be a lot more observer moment of me being very very old and sane than the total of observer moments I've experienced till I have memories, but still I experience being very very young compared to the age I should be in my "real life memories" (as it is much more longer than what I've been living till now). That means ordering is important in observer moments and ASSA must be false in this respect. http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Continuity Issue
On 05/01/2006, at 5:19 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: It is an accident of evolution that we consider our future selves to be the "same" person as we are now and try to ensure their well- being. Biological imperatives are present and at work here. It may be an accident of evolution that we have a sense of self at all. Not all life forms have self-awareness. A consciousness of death appears to be what renders a psyche active in terms of seeing things framed by past present and future. Memory may not depend entirely on a conscious mind but memory is certainly much longer in beings with a grasp of time. An insect probably has little or no experience of time because it is dubious that it has an awareness of death. Yet, insects appear to devote their entire lives to ensuring the well-being of their future selves. The selfish gene principle governs most of what goes on - we are replicators whose minds favour behaviours leading to our survival They might be made up of completely different matter to us, have only inaccurate memories of what we are experiencing now, and have only a vaquely similar sense of self It would be no logical contradiction if we believed that our life effectively ended when we went to sleep each night, and accordingly used up all our resources today with no regard for the person who will wake up in our bed tomorrow We don't think that way because people who did would have died out, but with a little effort it is possible to imagine sentient species with notions of continuity of individual identity very different from our own. How ironic - but don't we live *as though* this were true? Don't humans live in general as though there are "no tomorrows" and use up all the resources today with no regard etc. It seems with a conscious self-awareness we are at the greedy, destructive and subsequently doomed other end of the spectrum to the insect with it's clearly triumphant altruistic oblivion. In that we experience a linear time in our heads we apparently must seek and define an "end time" for our individual lives if not our entire civilization based on the respect / fear of the death event. This seems quintessentially human...other sentient beings as you say might have observer moments devoid of our egoic sense of self that seems so easily extinguishable by a death event. Kim Jones
Re: Continuity Issue
Quentin Anciaux writes: Le Mercredi 4 Janvier 2006 02:37, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : > But it isn't possible to "die young" if QTI is true! Every time you come to > a point where you might die, something will happen to save you. When you > get really old, perhaps some anti-ageing treatment, or mind uploading is > introduced just in time. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will > continue living in full physical and mental vigour: you might just slowly > deteriorate over time so that you end up spending centuries in a > near-vegetative state. The question then arises, how close to a vegetable > do you have to be before you can be pronounced dead for the purposes of > QTI? The real problem I see is that at every moments there must be branches that leads to near-vegetative state soon... but as we are still talking we haven't experienced these... Another problem is that there must be a lot more observer moment of me being very very old and sane than the total of observer moments I've experienced till I have memories, but still I experience being very very young compared to the age I should be in my "real life memories" (as it is much more longer than what I've been living till now). That means ordering is important in observer moments and ASSA must be false in this respect. That's right. First we experience being 10 years old, then 11, then 12, and so on. It never happens in any other order. And if it happens that there are twice as many copies of us in the multiverse between the ages of 11 and 12 as between the ages of 10 and 11, that doesn't mean we experience being 11 to 12 for twice as long as we experience being 10 to 11, or equivalently that we are twice as likely to find ourselves aged 11 to 12 as 10 to 11. On the other hand, I no longer see what is the meaning of "I" in this context, every next "i" (even those who fade out, go in hell) are continuity of my present "I"... but none of them would recognize being the other "i" except having be me... It leads to me that "I" is an instantaneous concept and I see this very insatisfaying... feeling I think. There are many good reasons to think of "I" as being an instantaneous concept, even if this seems at first glance to go against intuition. This is basically another formulation of the observer moment idea. It eliminates "paradoxes" of personal identity involving duplication thought experiments, and it allows us to talk about past, present, future and parallel versions of an individual precisely and unambiguously. It is an accident of evolution that we consider our future selves to be the "same" person as we are now and try to ensure their well-being. They might be made up of completely different matter to us, have only inaccurate memories of what we are experiencing now, and have only a vaquely similar sense of self. It would be no logical contradiction if we believed that our life effectively ended when we went to sleep each night, and accordingly used up all our resources today with no regard for the person who will wake up in our bed tomorrow. We don't think that way because people who did would have died out, but with a little effort it is possible to imagine sentient species with notions of continuity of individual identity very different from our own. Stathis Papaioannou _ New year, new job there's more than 100,00 jobs at SEEK http://a.ninemsn.com.au/b.aspx?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fninemsn%2Eseek%2Ecom%2Eau&_t=752315885&_r=Jan05_tagline&_m=EXT
Re: Continuity Issue
I think I can rephrase Kim's suggestion as follows. Rewards usually
reflect risks, people performing death-defying acts tend to be paid
handsomely, young males performing risky acts earn the admiration of
females (the James Dean stereotype), suicide bombers getting to spend
time with heavenly virgins and so on. Therefore, given QTI gives us
some guarantee that we won't experience death, then doesn't this
encourage QTI followers to do risky things?
The trouble with the notion of QTI suggesting we should all do risky things
is much the same as the argument I give against quantum suicide as a
way of winning the lottery in my book. Most of the avenues of survival
from risky actions are in fact at considerable cost to health, social
standing etc. Only if these costs were outweighed by the benefits
accrued by the risky action is it worth doing. In fact the decision
procedure is not all that different to if QTI were not true - if
anything it make risky actions somewhat less favourable, since QTI
guarantees that you experience negative outcomes from some failed
action rather than having death as a way out.
Cheers
On Wed, Jan 04, 2006 at 11:27:07PM +1100, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Kim Jones writes:
>
>
> > OK - so transferring this set of increasingly demented versions of me to
> >a multiverse framework where they are all existing in parallel, you are
> >saying that - as I age - I can expect a gradual fadeout to a
> >near-vegetative twilight state due to the odds favoring my ending up in
> >the highest achievable state of normality each time? This to me
> >highlights my question then - wouldn't I be better off doing a James Dean
> >or an Elvis; living fast, "dying" young and keeping up my probability
> >measure of ending up in universes where I am similarly constituted with
> >all my faculties intact? Like this I would expect to take advantage of
> >the system and be a Cassanova or a Lothario for eternity. That's what I
> >call "continuity"!
>
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Re: Continuity Issue
On 04/01/2006, at 12:37 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: But it isn't possible to "die young" if QTI is true! But there exists nonetheless a death event, even though it does not lead to a cessation of consciousness and presumably life. Death represents the branching of the histories - it must count for at least that. As Bruno says, you cannot have a 1^ point of view on it so saying someone died is merely the statement that you have lost them irrevocably Every time you come to a point where you might die, something will happen to save you. When you get really old, perhaps some anti- ageing treatment, or mind uploading is introduced just in time. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will continue living in full physical and mental vigour: you might just slowly deteriorate over time so that you end up spending centuries in a near-vegetative state. Sounds like the most fun you can have ;) But people who have already "died" (of natural causes) have *only* ever experienced near- vegetative conditions - in this universe surely, since we have not yet Nick Bostrom-ed ourselves into posthumans capable of mind- uploading. Unless posthumans capable of time travel who *have* invented Jupiter brains etc. can pluck us into their era Maybe it happens all the time! The question then arises, how close to a vegetable do you have to be before you can be pronounced dead for the purposes of QTI? How close to a vegetable would you want to be and still be alive??? If true, it might therefore be a curse, a Hell that we all suffer eventually. Maybe the Church got it right after all in the middle ages..only joking! Hell was cancelled by the church a while back. Funny thing is - heaven's still there. I thought you couldn't have the one without the other...but I digress The problem of gradually fading away can be illustrated by another example. Suppose your body is destructively scanned and then reconstituted in two separate locations, a1 and a2. Happened to me on New Years Eve after several drinks At a1, the reconstitution goes as intended, but at a2 something goes wrong and you are reconstituted in a brain dead state. I think we can say in this case that you can expect to find yourself alive at a1 with 100% certainty a moment after you undergo the scanning. "Yes Doctor" :) Next, suppose that after the destructive scanning your body is reconstituted in 10 different locations, b1 to b10. As before, at b1 the reconstitution is perfect and at b10 something goes wrong and you are reconstituted in a brain dead state. At locations b2 to b9, however, due to varying degrees of malfunction in the machinery, you are reconstituted with varying degrees of dementia: at b2 you are just a little bit more vague than usual, at b9 you are still alive but have lost all your memories and sense of identity, and in between are several variations with partial dementia. The question now is, when you undergo the scanning process, should you have an equal expectation of ending up at each of the locations b1 to b10? If you exclude b10 because you are dead there, should you not also exclude b9, where you are no longer a sentient being, let alone a particular sentient being? And does it follow from these considerations that you are are somehow more likely to find yourself at b2 than b8, for example? OK - so transferring this set of increasingly demented versions of me to a multiverse framework where they are all existing in parallel, you are saying that - as I age - I can expect a gradual fadeout to a near-vegetative twilight state due to the odds favoring my ending up in the highest achievable state of normality each time? This to me highlights my question then - wouldn't I be better off doing a James Dean or an Elvis; living fast, "dying" young and keeping up my probability measure of ending up in universes where I am similarly constituted with all my faculties intact? Like this I would expect to take advantage of the system and be a Cassanova or a Lothario for eternity. That's what I call "continuity"! Not entirely tongue-in-cheek I hope Kim Jones From: Kim Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Everything List Subject: Continuity Issue Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2006 09:00:35 +1100 In QTI is there any difference between death by normal process of ageing and death by all other means? Assuming that consciousness continues in a branch somewhere no matter what the manner of death, what kind of (logical?) continuation could one expect given that the body's usefulness in the current branch has been used up in the case of death by normal age-related processes? Doesn't QTI suggest that we should all try to die young? Yours in life and death Kim Jones _ Get FOXTEL this Summer – New low install price of only $29.95 http://a.ninemsn.com.au/b.
Re: Continuity Issue
Le Mercredi 4 Janvier 2006 02:37, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : > But it isn't possible to "die young" if QTI is true! Every time you come to > a point where you might die, something will happen to save you. When you > get really old, perhaps some anti-ageing treatment, or mind uploading is > introduced just in time. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will > continue living in full physical and mental vigour: you might just slowly > deteriorate over time so that you end up spending centuries in a > near-vegetative state. The question then arises, how close to a vegetable > do you have to be before you can be pronounced dead for the purposes of > QTI? The real problem I see is that at every moments there must be branches that leads to near-vegetative state soon... but as we are still talking we haven't experienced these... Another problem is that there must be a lot more observer moment of me being very very old and sane than the total of observer moments I've experienced till I have memories, but still I experience being very very young compared to the age I should be in my "real life memories" (as it is much more longer than what I've been living till now). That means ordering is important in observer moments and ASSA must be false in this respect. On the other hand, I no longer see what is the meaning of "I" in this context, every next "i" (even those who fade out, go in hell) are continuity of my present "I"... but none of them would recognize being the other "i" except having be me... It leads to me that "I" is an instantaneous concept and I see this very insatisfaying... feeling I think. Quentin
Re: Continuity Issue
Le 04-janv.-06, à 02:37, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit : The problem of gradually fading away can be illustrated by another example. Suppose your body is destructively scanned and then reconstituted in two separate locations, a1 and a2. At a1, the reconstitution goes as intended, but at a2 something goes wrong and you are reconstituted in a brain dead state. I think we can say in this case that you can expect to find yourself alive at a1 with 100% certainty a moment after you undergo the scanning. Next, suppose that after the destructive scanning your body is reconstituted in 10 different locations, b1 to b10. As before, at b1 the reconstitution is perfect and at b10 something goes wrong and you are reconstituted in a brain dead state. At locations b2 to b9, however, due to varying degrees of malfunction in the machinery, you are reconstituted with varying degrees of dementia: at b2 you are just a little bit more vague than usual, at b9 you are still alive but have lost all your memories and sense of identity, and in between are several variations with partial dementia. The question now is, when you undergo the scanning process, should you have an equal expectation of ending up at each of the locations b1 to b10? If you exclude b10 because you are dead there, should you not also exclude b9, where you are no longer a sentient being, let alone a particular sentient being? And does it follow from these considerations that you are are somehow more likely to find yourself at b2 than b8, for example? Interesting and hard question. I would say "intuitively" that all what matters are the infinite branches. If you fade away in such a way that some of your next observer-moments will lead to a dead end, drop it from the probability calculus. Now to ask this to a lobian machine is quite another story ... Bruno http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Re: Continuity Issue
Kim Jones writes: On 04/01/2006, at 12:37 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote: But it isn't possible to "die young" if QTI is true! But there exists nonetheless a death event, even though it does not lead to a cessation of consciousness and presumably life. Death represents the branching of the histories - it must count for at least that. As Bruno says, you cannot have a 1^ point of view on it so saying someone died is merely the statement that you have lost them irrevocably Yes, death happens, but it only happens to other people. A first person experience of death is no first person experience at all. Every time you come to a point where you might die, something will happen to save you. When you get really old, perhaps some anti- ageing treatment, or mind uploading is introduced just in time. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will continue living in full physical and mental vigour: you might just slowly deteriorate over time so that you end up spending centuries in a near-vegetative state. Sounds like the most fun you can have ;) But people who have already "died" (of natural causes) have *only* ever experienced near- vegetative conditions - in this universe surely, since we have not yet Nick Bostrom-ed ourselves into posthumans capable of mind- uploading. Unless posthumans capable of time travel who *have* invented Jupiter brains etc. can pluck us into their era I'm not sure what you mean here. People who have "already died" have only died from someone else's point of view, given that the multiverse necessitates that there will always be branches in which they *don't* die, and they can only experience one of these branches. The question then arises, how close to a vegetable do you have to be before you can be pronounced dead for the purposes of QTI? How close to a vegetable would you want to be and still be alive??? If true, it might therefore be a curse, a Hell that we all suffer eventually. Maybe the Church got it right after all in the middle ages..only joking! Hell was cancelled by the church a while back. Funny thing is - heaven's still there. I thought you couldn't have the one without the other...but I digress Yes, unfortunately the QTI does *not* necessarily lead to a life of eternal fun and happiness. If you fall from a great height, you will survive, but the multiverse will not arrange matters so that you aren't paralysed. The same goes for developing dementia as you get older. The problem of gradually fading away can be illustrated by another example. Suppose your body is destructively scanned and then reconstituted in two separate locations, a1 and a2. Happened to me on New Years Eve after several drinks At a1, the reconstitution goes as intended, but at a2 something goes wrong and you are reconstituted in a brain dead state. I think we can say in this case that you can expect to find yourself alive at a1 with 100% certainty a moment after you undergo the scanning. "Yes Doctor" :) Next, suppose that after the destructive scanning your body is reconstituted in 10 different locations, b1 to b10. As before, at b1 the reconstitution is perfect and at b10 something goes wrong and you are reconstituted in a brain dead state. At locations b2 to b9, however, due to varying degrees of malfunction in the machinery, you are reconstituted with varying degrees of dementia: at b2 you are just a little bit more vague than usual, at b9 you are still alive but have lost all your memories and sense of identity, and in between are several variations with partial dementia. The question now is, when you undergo the scanning process, should you have an equal expectation of ending up at each of the locations b1 to b10? If you exclude b10 because you are dead there, should you not also exclude b9, where you are no longer a sentient being, let alone a particular sentient being? And does it follow from these considerations that you are are somehow more likely to find yourself at b2 than b8, for example? I should point out that I don't know the answers to the above questions. Can anybody make any suggestions? OK - so transferring this set of increasingly demented versions of me to a multiverse framework where they are all existing in parallel, you are saying that - as I age - I can expect a gradual fadeout to a near-vegetative twilight state due to the odds favoring my ending up in the highest achievable state of normality each time? This to me highlights my question then - wouldn't I be better off doing a James Dean or an Elvis; living fast, "dying" young and keeping up my probability measure of ending up in universes where I am similarly constituted with all my faculties intact? Like this I would expect to take advantage of the system and be a Cassanova or a Lothario for eternity. That's what I call "continuity"! But remember where Don Giovanni finished up... No
RE: Continuity Issue
But it isn't possible to "die young" if QTI is true! Every time you come to a point where you might die, something will happen to save you. When you get really old, perhaps some anti-ageing treatment, or mind uploading is introduced just in time. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will continue living in full physical and mental vigour: you might just slowly deteriorate over time so that you end up spending centuries in a near-vegetative state. The question then arises, how close to a vegetable do you have to be before you can be pronounced dead for the purposes of QTI? The problem of gradually fading away can be illustrated by another example. Suppose your body is destructively scanned and then reconstituted in two separate locations, a1 and a2. At a1, the reconstitution goes as intended, but at a2 something goes wrong and you are reconstituted in a brain dead state. I think we can say in this case that you can expect to find yourself alive at a1 with 100% certainty a moment after you undergo the scanning. Next, suppose that after the destructive scanning your body is reconstituted in 10 different locations, b1 to b10. As before, at b1 the reconstitution is perfect and at b10 something goes wrong and you are reconstituted in a brain dead state. At locations b2 to b9, however, due to varying degrees of malfunction in the machinery, you are reconstituted with varying degrees of dementia: at b2 you are just a little bit more vague than usual, at b9 you are still alive but have lost all your memories and sense of identity, and in between are several variations with partial dementia. The question now is, when you undergo the scanning process, should you have an equal expectation of ending up at each of the locations b1 to b10? If you exclude b10 because you are dead there, should you not also exclude b9, where you are no longer a sentient being, let alone a particular sentient being? And does it follow from these considerations that you are are somehow more likely to find yourself at b2 than b8, for example? Stathis Papaioannou From: Kim Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Everything List Subject: Continuity Issue Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2006 09:00:35 +1100 In QTI is there any difference between death by normal process of ageing and death by all other means? Assuming that consciousness continues in a branch somewhere no matter what the manner of death, what kind of (logical?) continuation could one expect given that the body's usefulness in the current branch has been used up in the case of death by normal age-related processes? Doesn't QTI suggest that we should all try to die young? Yours in life and death Kim Jones _ Get FOXTEL this Summer New low install price of only $29.95 http://a.ninemsn.com.au/b.aspx?URL=http%3A%2F%2Fadsfac%2Enet%2Flink%2Easp%3Fcc%3DFXT018%2E19119%2E0%26clk%3D1%26creativeID%3D28172&_t=752582449&_m=EXT
