Re: adult vs. child

From: Michael Rosefield <rosyatrandom.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:27:02 +0000

I agree. They are both pointers to the same abstract computation.

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- Did you ever hear of "The Seattle Seven"?
- Mmm.
- That was me... and six other guys.


2009/2/10 Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>

>
> Bruno Marchal wrote:
> >
> > On 10 Feb 2009, at 18:44, Brent Meeker wrote:
> >
> >> Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> >>> 2009/2/10 Jack Mallah <jackmallah.domain.name.hidden>:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>> This sort of talk about "random sampling" and "luck" is misleading
> >>>> and is exactly why I broke down the roles of effective probability
> >>>> into the four categories I did in the paper.
> >>>>
> >>>> If you are considering future versions of yourself, in the MWI
> >>>> sense, there is no randomness involved. Depending on how you
> >>>> define "you", "you" will either be all of them, or "you" are just
> >>>> an observer-moment and can consider them to be "other people".
> >>>> Regardless of definitions, this case calls for the use of Caring
> >>>> Measure for decision making.
> >>>>
> >>> It seems that the disagreement may be one about personal identity. It
> >>> is not clear to me from your paper whether you accept what Derek
> >>> Parfit calls the "reductionist" theory of personal identity. Consider
> >>> the following experiment:
> >>>
> >>> There are two consecutive periods of consciousness, A and B, in which
> >>> you are an observer in a virtual reality program. A is your
> >>> experiences between 5:00 PM and 5:01 PM while B is your experiences
> >>> between 5:01 PM and 5:02 PM, subjective time. A is being implemented
> >>> in parallel on two computers MA1 and MA2, so that there are actually
> >>> two qualitatively identical streams of consciousness which we can
> >>> call
> >>> A1 and A2. At the end of the subjective minute, data is saved to disk
> >>> and both MA1 and MA2 are switched off. An external operator picks
> >>> up a
> >>> copy of the saved data, walks over to a third computer MB, loads the
> >>> data and starts up the program. After another subjective minute MB is
> >>> switched off and the experiment ends.
> >>>
> >>> As the observer you know all this information, and you look at the
> >>> clock and see that it is 5:00 PM. What can you conclude from this and
> >>> what should you expect? To me, it seems that you must conclude that
> >>> you are currently either A1 or A2, and that in one minute you will be
> >>> B, with 100% certainty. Would you say something else?
> >>>
> >> I might say that while there are two computations, there is only one
> >> "stream of consciousness".
> >
> >
> > You are right, but I think that Stathis is right too. When Stathis
> > talks about two identical stream of consciousness, he make perhaps
> > just a little abuse of language, which seems to me quite justifiable.
> > Just give a mirror to the observer so that A *can* (but does not) look
> > in the mirror to see if he is implemented by MA1 or by MA2. Knowing
> > the protocol the observer can predict that IF he look at the mirror
> > the stream of consciousness will bifurcate into A1 and A2.
>
> I don't follow that. If A1 looks in the "mirror" and sees A2, then, ex
> hypothesi, A2 looks in the "mirror" and sees A1 and the two streams of
> consciousness remain identical. If consciousness is computation,
> independent of
> physical implementation, then computations that differ only in their
> physical
> realizations are identical and cannot be counted as more than one.
>
> Brent
>
> >Accepting
> > the Y = II rule, that is bifurcation of "future" = differentiation of
> > the whole story) makes the Stathis "abuse of language" an acceptable
> > way to describe the picture. So Stathis get the correct expectation,
> > despite the first person ambiguity in "two identical stream of
> > consciousness".
> > If two infinitely computations *never* differentiate, should we count
> > them as one? I am not sure but I think we should still differentiate
> > them. UD generates infinitely often such infinitely similar streams.
> > That should play a role for the relative (to observer-moment) measure
> > pertaining on the computations. OK?
> >
> > Bruno
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > >
> >
>
>
> >
>

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Received on Tue Feb 10 2009 - 16:27:18 PST

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