Russell Standish writes:
> OMs are defined by some information. Very clearly more than 1 bit is
> involved, but it is presumably finite.
>
> Let us say that within this OM I am aware of two apples - 1 red and 1
> green. The information describing one of these apples is the
> "component" I was referring to.
>
> As for other OMs sharing that component, this comes down to the usual
> suspect arguments against solipsism. I don't feel like rehashing those
> at the moment :)
That's a quite different notion of OM to what I have in mind when I see the term
used. I think of an OM as just the smallest possible unit of subjective experience.
If you see the same red apple as I see, I don't think of that as "sharing" a
component of an OM. I don't even think of it as sharing a component of an OM
if I experience the same red apple a second apart: they are distinct OMs which
happen to belong to an ordered set constituting my stream of consciousness.
The main utility of the concept from my point of view is that it removes ambiguity
when personal identity becomes problematic, such as in duplication experiments.
If you and I participate in a teleportation experiment and the signals accidentally
get mixed so that the person emerging at the receiving station has 67% of my
memories and 73% of your memories there is no obvious answer to the question
of who has survived, who should have access to whose bank account, and so on.
However, there is no ambiguity if we simply describe the streams of OMs before
and after the experiment; the "after" OM may be confused, but it is still a perfectly
well defined OM.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Sun Oct 15 2006 - 06:53:27 PDT