[I want to first note for the benefit of readers that I am Hal Finney
and no relation to Hal Ruhl - it can be confusing having two Hal's on
the list!]
Rolf Nelson writes:
> UDASSA (if I'm interpreting it right, Hal?) says:
>
> 1. The measure of programs that produce OM ("I am experiencing A, and
> I remember my previous experience as B") as its single output,
> compared to the measure of programs that produce OM ("I am not
> experiencing A, and I remember my previous experience as B") as its
> single output, is what we perceive as "the likelihood of A following
> B, rather than A not following B."
I think you mean, "the likelihood of A following B rather than not-A
following B". That's probably reasonable, although I suggested a somewhat
different approach in this (as usual) somewhat overly long posting:
http://www.nabble.com/Teleportation-thought-experiment-and-UD%2BASSA-tf3057020.html#a8498222
Imagine that we could write down a description of a person's mental
states for his whole lifetime, from birth to death. Every possible such
sequence would be a possible lifetime and would exist in the universe
of all information patterns. Some would have higher measure than others.
As usual, it is plausible that the highest-measure such lifetimes would
be those which exist as parts of universes that have reasonably simple
descriptions.
Then we can get at your question of what is the likelihood of A following
B by asking, what is the measure of all lifetimes which experience event
B followed by event A, compared to the measure of all lifetimes which
experience event B not followed by event A.
The difference from what you expressed would be, for example, if some
future civilization creates simulated OMs which remember B followed by
A, while in the "real world" B did not get followed by A. Your OM based
formulation might have those future OMs add quite a bit of measure to
B-then-A, while the lifetime based formulation would consider those
as less important, because of the discontinuity between the "original"
lifetime and the future simulation of B-then-A.
The lifetime formulation also captures the intuition many people have
that consciousness should not "jump around" as observer moments are
created in the various simulations and scenarios we imagine in our
thought experiments. That was the conclusion I reached in the posting
referenced above, that teleportation might in some sense "not work"
even though someone walks out of the machine thousands of miles away
who remembers walking into it. The measure of such a lifetime would be
substantially less than that of a similar person who never teleports.
Hal Finney
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Received on Wed Sep 19 2007 - 16:31:24 PDT