Peter Jones writes:
> > Suppose God took Platonia, in all its richness, and made it physical. What would expect to
> > experience in the next moment?
> >
> > (a) nothing
> > (b) everything
> > (c) something
> >
> > (a) can't be right. Although in the vast majority of universes in the next moment your head
> > explodes or the laws of physics change such that your brain stops working (sorry), as long as
> > there is at least one copy of you still conscious, you can expect to remain conscious.
> >
> > (b) can't be right. However many copies of you there are, you only experience being one at
> > a time. Even if one of the copies is mind-melded with others, that still counts as an individual
> > with more complex experiences. Moreover, it is doubtful whether an experience of everything
> > simultaneously - every possible thought, including all the incoherent ones - is different to no
> > experience at all, much as a page covered in ink contains no more information than a blank
> > page.
> >
> > Therefore, (c) must be right. You can expect to experience something. What is it that you
> > might experience, if all possibilities are actualised? What will you experience if no measure is
> > defined, or all the possibilities have equal measure?
>
> But c breaks down into:
> c1) I experience something coherent that obeys the laws of
> physics
> and
> c2) I experience wild and crazy "harry Potter" stuff.
>
> The memory-traces corresponding to c2 are a possible
> configuration of matter, and so must exist in Platonia. But
> I only experience c1.
OK, this is a bit of a sideline, but what would you actually expect to experience in case
c2 if Platonia were actually real? That is, if there were no measure definable, does that mean
everything would be equally likely, and if so how would that translate to experience?
> > > > Whether the Block Universe model is right or not, the series of clones you
> > > > describe, set up as an experiment, would still give the experience of being
> > > > continuously conscious through time.
> > >
> > > The problem is not that there would be gaps, the problem
> > > is that they would all be conscious simultaneously.
> >
> > Sure, objectively you could say they are all conscious simultaneously, but if you
> > asked any of them, how do you think they would describe their subjective experience?
>
> That's a good question. In order to exclude the possibility
> that the clones experience flow of consciousness through
> a dynamic mechanism, we would have to permit
> them to live for only a fraction of a second. But then the answer to
> the question would have to come from a group of clones,
> since no-one clone lives long enough to utter it. So any
> kind of coherent answer would tend towards the idea that
> they have a shared consciousness.
It is still valid to ask the question with clones surviving a second, for the sake of simplicity.
I would say that each clone would have a memory of a past, a sense of persisting personal
identity, and a future to look forward to, just like you do.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Oct 26 2006 - 21:30:44 PDT