Tom Caylor writes:
> 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?
It's based on every possible event, including every possible mental state that you
or I could experience, actually occurring somewhere in the multiverse. If there is no
multiverse, or only a limited multiverse, then there is no guarantee.
> Also, if an observer moment can "consider", this must be a very special
> observer moment.
I don't understand observer moments to be anything magical. They are just arbitrarily
small units of experience. We could say there is just one non-branching reality and talk
of observer seconds: if you have one second of experience today, and your brain is
snap-frozen so that your next observer second occurs when it is thawed out in a thousand
years from now, then (technical limitations aside) you would have experienced a continuous
two seconds of consciousness despite the intervening gap. Computers do this sort of thing
all the time, time-sharing computations or spreading them across a network. From the
computations' point of view it's all seamless, unless you actually include data informing it
that it has been chopped up into pieces.
> > 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 Papaiaonnou
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Received on Fri Sep 15 2006 - 08:34:01 PDT