Russell Standish writes:
> 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.
My thought was that if there are twice as many copies of you running in parallel,
you are in a sense cramming twice as much experience into a given objective time
period, so maybe this "stretches out" the time period to seem twice as long. There
is admittedly no good reason to accept that this is so (that's why it's a cracked
idea, as you say!), and I would bet that it *isn't* so, but it's the only half-plausible
subjective effect I can think of due to change in measure alone.
I believe that what you mean when you say that a lower measure OM will appear
more complex is somewhat different to the scenario I had in mind: a controlled
experiment in which measure can be turned up and down leaving everything else
the same, such as having an AI running on several computers in perfect lockstep.
(I realise this is not the same as changing measure in the multiverse, which would
not lend itself so easily to experiment.) Would the AI notice anything if half the
computers were turned off then on again? I think it would be impossible for the AI
to notice that anything had changed without receiving external information. If I
were the AI the only advantage I can think of in having multiple computers running
is for backup in case some of them broke down; beyond that, I wouldn't care if there
were one copy or a million copies of me running in parallel.
Stathis Papaioannou
> 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?
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Received on Sun Aug 06 2006 - 10:01:43 PDT