>
> I just had a few thoughts about this, and I want to get them
> down before I forget.
>
> Jacques says that the ASSA predicts that we'll never be "very
> old", because the measure of observer moments goes down with
> subjective time. I'm not so sure about this.
>
> I do think that it probably predicts that we should never find
> ourselves to be extraordinary - I believe he called this the
> "Copernican Anthropic Principle", CAP. When I said that, no
> matter how old you are, you could always argue that you're not
> "very old", he replied:
>
> > We have been over this *many* times. A) "Old" is when your finite
> > brain is too old to even know how old it is.
>
> If we, while alive, are continually growing and assimilating more
> information and more capacity for information, then this state
> will never be reached.
>
> > B) In any case, "old" is
> > much older than the age that would be expected if QTI is false:
>
> This statement begs the question.
>
> > In QTI
> > one should expect one's age *relative to* the other people you see to be
> > large, certainly *****not***** less than or of order 1! If you were
> > 10,000 and everyone else was <100 at least you would have reason to supect
> > the rules might be different for you than for third parties.
>
> Here's the crux of the bisquit: the CAP.
>
> Now, it is possible to live forever and not violate the CAP. It is even
> possible that the measure of observer moments throughout an infinite
> lifetime never decreases substantially. By "substantially", let me throw
> out the possibility that it may be true that it decreases by some function
> less than exponential.
>
> For example, we live at a time where it may be possible, in the near
> future (whatever *that* means) to increase human longevity to the point
> where we are "practically" immortal (in the common use of the word).
> Then the things that would decrease our measure would be common household
> accidents and the like. If the probability of our death by accident were
> to remain constant, then our measure would still be decreasing exponentially
> (albeit with a much longer time constant than now). But that's not likely.
> As we learn and grow, our safety precautions will become more sophisticated
> (as they are becoming now), and we should expect the probability of
> accidents to continue to decrease. Hence our measure will decrease by "less
> than exponential".
>
> So I'm still not convinced that computational continuations of me at age
> 1000 are necessarily of a measure so low that I would not expect to find
> myself at that age.
This is quite true, however QTI does not depend on it.
>
>
> --
> Chris Maloney
> http://www.chrismaloney.com
>
> "Donuts are so sweet and tasty."
> -- Homer Simpson
>
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Russell Standish Director
High Performance Computing Support Unit,
University of NSW Phone 9385 6967
Sydney 2052 Fax 9385 6965
Australia R.Standish.domain.name.hidden
Room 2075, Red Centre
http://parallel.hpc.unsw.edu.au/rks
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Received on Sun Oct 17 1999 - 20:55:08 PDT