Re: When is this?

From: Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 17:25:40 -0700

Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> 2009/6/16 David Nyman <david.nyman.domain.name.hidden>:
>> Forgive me in advance if this has been covered adequately before in
>> the list, but the following occurs to me with respect to 'Bostrom'
>> style assessments of where I should expect my 'current' OM to be
>> situated with respect to the total population of OMs in which I exist.
>>
>> Presumably, I should expect that my current awareness of my 'life-
>> stage' will be characteristic of those OMs with the highest
>> 'measure' (a concept upon which I think I have at least a vague grasp
>> in this context). Ostensibly, taking into account the various points
>> at which I die off, one would expect that the highest such measure
>> would be characteristic of a later life-stage rather than an earlier,
>> taken across all branches in which I exist. Indeed, I don't recall
>> ever having been any older!
>>
>> However, assuming the co-existence of all OMs (i.e. where 'time
>> doesn't actually 'unfold'), should I expect ever to find myself
>> conscious of an OM of lower measure? What does this say about my
>> ostensibly conscious past experiences (i.e. those putatively
>> representing OMs of lower measure)? Should I conclude that 'from here
>> on' in terms of life-stage my survivors are on average becoming rarer
>> and that consequently on the basis of measure I shouldn't expect to
>> experience getting any older? In this case, does it further imply
>> that the experience of quantum immortality would make sense only in
>> terms of some sort of 'real' time-line along which I could expect to
>> actually experience an extended 'tail' of surviving conscious moments
>> regardless of their measure?
>
> It depends on how you do the sampling. If you consider yourself an
> undifferentiated soul, contemplating what sort of OM you are going to
> become, then you will most likely find yourself an OM of high measure.
> But this is not how the sampling happens. What happens is that you are
> *already* an OM - obviously, if you are able to think about these
> things at all. Specifically, you are a human OM of a particular age in
> the 21st century on Earth. When you contemplate your future, finding
> yourself a five year old child, or a Chinese peasant, or an insect
> creature on a planet orbiting Sirius are not options that are open to
> you, *given* where you are now, even though these OM's may be of high
> measure. The only OM's you can experience are those in which your
> present OM is in the subjective past.

I thought there was no choice - you experience *all* "your" OMs, because that
what OMs are, they're very short (infinitesimal) duration experiences. So each
one is an experience which in part may be remember some other OMs as being in
the past. Every OM is a now and "you" are in it. I put "you" in scare quotes
because from this viewpoint "you" is just some subset of OMs.

Brent

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Received on Mon Jun 15 2009 - 17:25:40 PDT

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