Re: Russell's book

From: Tom Caylor <Daddycaylor.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:14:27 -0700

Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> Tom Caylor writes:
>
> > After many life-expectancy-spans worth of narrow escapes, after
> > thousands or millions of years, wouldn't the probability be pretty high
> > for my personality/memory etc. to change so much that I wouldn't
> > recognize myself, or that I could be more like another person than my
> > original self, and so for all practical purposes wouldn't I be another
> > person? How do I know this hasn't happened already? If it has, what
> > difference does it make? Isn't it true that the only realities that
> > matter are the ones that make any difference to my reality? (almost a
> > tautology)
>
> The only guarantee fom QTI is that you will experience a "next moment":
> that there exists an observer moment in the universe which considers your
> present moment to be its predecessor.

And this "guarantee" of a next "experience" is based on what?

Also, if an observer moment can "consider", this must be a very special
observer moment.

> This leads to difficulties with partial
> memory loss, which are not unique to QTI but might actually occur in real life.
> For example, if you are in a car crash and end up in a vegetative state, this
> is usually taken as being effectively the same as ending up dead. If you wake
> up after the accident mentally intact except you have forgotten what you had
> for breakfast that morning then you have survived in much the same way you
> would have if you had never had the accident. If you consider that the world
> splits and there are only these two outcomes, or if you consider a teleportation
> experiment in which you are reconstituted in these two states at separate
> receiving stations, the conclusion seems straightforward enough: you will survive
> the ordeal having lost only your memory of what you had for breakfast.
>
> Now, consider a situation where there are 10 possible outcomes, or 10 possible
> teleportation destinations, ranging from #1 vegetative state (or headless corpse)
> to #10 intact except for memory of breakfast. In this scheme, #8 might be intact
> except you have forgotten 10% of what you have done in the past year, while
> #3 might be you have forgotten everything except what you learned before the
> age of two years. What is your expectation of survival in this situation?
>
> Stathis Papaioannou
> _________________________________________________________________
> Be one of the first to try Windows Live Mail.
> http://ideas.live.com/programpage.aspx?versionId=5d21c51a-b161-4314-9b0e-4911fb2b2e6d


--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list.domain.name.hidden
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list-unsubscribe.domain.name.hidden
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
Received on Thu Sep 14 2006 - 12:15:29 PDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Feb 16 2018 - 13:20:12 PST