This is one of those truly cracked ideas that is not wise to air in
polite company. Nevertheless, it can be fun to play around with in
this forum. I had a similarly cracked idea a few years ago about 1st
person experienced magic, which we batted around a bit at the tiome
without getting anywhere.
The trouble I have with this idea is that I can't see the connection
between OM measure and the sensation of passage of time. In contrast
to your statement of "nothing" however, a lower measure OM will appear
more complex - so we experience growth in knowledge as our measure
decreases. Increasing measure OM's will correspond to memory
"erasure", in the sense of quantum erasure.
Cheers
On Sat, Aug 05, 2006 at 10:44:49PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>
> I have asked the question before, what do I experience if my measure
> in the multiverse increases or decreases? My preferred answer, contra
> the ASSA/ QTI skeptics, is "nothing". However, the interesting observation
> that our perception of time changes with age, so that an hour seems
> subjectively much longer for a young child than for an older person, would
> seem to correlate with decreasing measure as a person grows older. One
> explanation for this could be that if there are more copies of us around
> in the multiverse, we have more subjective experience per unit time. This
> would mean that if we lived forever, the years then the centuries and millenia
> would fly past at a subjectively faster and faster rate as we age and our
> measure continuously drops.
>
> I actually believe that a psychological explanation for this phenomenon is more
> likely correct (an hour is a greater proportion of your life if you are a young child)
> but it's an interesting idea.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
>
> ----------------------------------------
> > Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2006 02:10:53 +1000
> > From: r.standish.domain.name.hidden
> > To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
> > Subject: Re: Interested in thoughts on this excerpt from Martin Rees
> >
> >
> > Someone called me to task for this posting (I forget who, and I've
> > lost the posting now). I tried to formulate the notion I expressed
> > here more precisely, and failed! So I never responded.
> >
> > What I had in mind was that future observer moment of my current one
> > will at some point have a total measure diminishing at least as fast
> > as an exponental function of OM age. This is simply a statement that
> > it becomes increasingly improbable for humans to live longer than a
> > certain age.
> >
> > Whilst individual OMs will have exponentially decreasing measure due
> > to the linear increase in complexity as a function of universe age,
> > total OM measure requires summing over all OMs of a given age (which
> > can compensate). This total OM measure is a 3rd person type of
> > quantity - equivalent to asking what is the probability of a conscious
> > organism existing at universe age t. It seems plausible that this
> > might diminish in some exponential or faster fashion after a few
> > standard deviation beyond the mean time it takes to evolve
> > consciousness, but I do not have any basis for making this claim. If
> > we assume a normal distribution of times required for evolving
> > consciousness, then the statement is true for example, but I'm wise
> > enough to know that this assumption needs further justification. The
> > distribution may be a meanless thing like a power law for example.
> >
> > So sorry if I piqued someones interest too much - but then we can leave
> > this notion as a conjecture :)
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 12:07:37AM +1000, Russell Standish wrote:
> > > Thanks for giving a digested explanation of the argument. This paper
> > > was discussed briefly on A-Void a few weeks ago, but I must admit to
> > > not following the argument too well, nor RTFA.
> > >
> > > My comment on the observer moment issue, is that in a Multiverse, the
> > > measure of older observer moments is less that younger ones. After a
> > > certain point in time, the measure probably decreases exponentially or
> > > faster, so there will be a mean observer moment age.
> > >
> > > So contra all these old OMs dominating the calculation, and giving
> > > rise to an expected value of Lambda close to zero, we should expect
> > > only a finite contribution, leading to an expected finite value of
> > > Lambda.
> > >
> > > We don't know what the mean age for an observer moment should be, but
> > > presumably one could argue anthropically that is around 10^{10}
> > > years. What does this give for an expected value of Lambda?
> > >
> > > Of course their argument does sound plausible for a single universe -
> > > is this observational evidence in favour of a Multiverse?
> > >
> > > Cheers
> >
> > --
> > *PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
> > is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
> > virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
> > email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
> > may safely ignore this attachment.
> >
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
> > Mathematics 0425 253119 (")
> > UNSW SYDNEY 2052 R.Standish.domain.name.hidden
> > Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
> > International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >
> > >
>
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--
*PS: A number of people ask me about the attachment to my email, which
is of type "application/pgp-signature". Don't worry, it is not a
virus. It is an electronic signature, that may be used to verify this
email came from me if you have PGP or GPG installed. Otherwise, you
may safely ignore this attachment.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
A/Prof Russell Standish Phone 8308 3119 (mobile)
Mathematics 0425 253119 (")
UNSW SYDNEY 2052 R.Standish.domain.name.hidden
Australia http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
International prefix +612, Interstate prefix 02
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Received on Sat Aug 05 2006 - 19:56:32 PDT