David Nyman wrote:
> 2009/7/28 Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>:
>
>> You could say, for
>> example, at any point "to go further you would need a deeper grasp of
>> x, but for now, it has this or that role or function in the overall
>> story" - or something like that. I'd be very grateful - and
>> attentive.
>>
>> I think that you have already understood that this will just lead back to an
>> unsolved mind-body problem.
>
> But might it not, nonetheless, help to improve the mind-body
> intuitions? Let's see.
>
>> Let me define two notions of first person indeterminacies.
>> There is the local one, when your current state is duplicated relatively to
>> earth, or me (say) . This is done in the first sixth steps of the UD
>> reasoning.
>> From some of your post I can suspect that there is something perhaps still
>> unclear there.
>> In the Washington/Moscow duplication, the *you* arriving in Moscow (resp.
>> Washington) provably cannot understand why he is the one arriving in Moscow
>> (Washington). It is the same question as the one you asked me: "why am I me
>> and not my brother". It is trivial, with comp. No program can predict which
>> backup, among two, will be the one being re-instantiated, relatively to its
>> most probable history/computation.
>
> Actually, I do follow the first six steps of the UD reasoning; my own
> 'beam me up, Scotty' reasoning had led me to similar conclusions. So,
> no problem with this. But I do have trouble grasping what is, I
> think, a different aspect of the observer moment, and I'll try to
> state it as clearly as I can. When I imagine an infinity of OMs, as
> it were, co-existing in some atemporal sense, I find I still can't
> satisfactorily answer the question: why am "I" experiencing JUST this
> one? I don't mean of course, why does this experience possess just
> *these* characteristics - this is always determined by the structure
> of the OM, as per the UD steps. The issue, rather, is that "I" is
> essentially a global referent that fundamentally applies only to the
> whole, and that the 'part' or 'little me' is thus nothing but the
> *viewpoint* of the whole at a given moment
>
> So under this assumption the real question is: why is the *whole* at
> this moment seemingly limited to ONLY this view rather than any - or
> indeed all - of the available co-existing alternatives? And in the
> light of an infinity of co-existing OMs, I can't answer this, because
> such a co-existing whole should presumably co-presently see (i.e.
> 'be') ALL points of view 'at once'. AFAICS, notions of measure do not
> suffice to resolve this.
>
> However I have a wacky intuition: despite the platonic criterion of
> co-existence, 1-person experience of the temporal dynamism (i.e.
> sequentiality) of the part - i.e. each OM - might reasonably persuade
> us that sequentiality should also possess, in some ineliminable sense,
> a role in the whole. Consequently, under this assumption, could the
> UD (to reify it only to this degree) be conceived for this purpose to
> be 'sequentially resolving' each 'OM-programme-step'? Indeed my
> understanding is that this dovetailed sequentiality is actually a key
> conceptual element of COMP. In this sense - and in this sense only -
> could the UD therefore be thought of as temporally instantiating that
> OM *uniquely* at each step on behalf of the whole COMP-multiverse, and
> thus bringing into focus - in effect - its *unique* point of view?
As I understand it the sequence of the states computed by the UD is unrelated to
sequence of experienced states. The sequence in which states are experienced is
determined by something inherent to the states and may be completely different
from the order of their computation. I don't know that this is a particular
problem for COMP though. Physics already has a notorious problem with time and
it is not clear that time exists at the fundamental level.
Brent
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Received on Tue Jul 28 2009 - 11:06:04 PDT