George Levy <GLevy.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> >First person observation of consciousness is the self observing the self,
>or
> >possibly part of the self observing other parts of the self.
>
>Let me add to this previous post the following, which is relevant in the
>context
>of the MWI.
>
>Any object can be viewed from the first person or from the third person
>perspective. Let me explain.
>
>If the object does not exert any contingency on the existence of the
>observer, then
>the first and third person perspectives coincide.
>
>If the object does have a contingency on the existence of the observer,
>then the
>first and third person perspectives diverge. For example, let's say that
>the object
>is a randomly detonated bomb. If the bomb is located under your seat, then
>it has
>a contingency on your continued existence and therefore your observation
>will be
>first person: you will not see the bomb explode. If on the other hand, the
>bomb is
>located far away, then your observation will be third person and you might
>see it
>explode.
But you're assuming that continuity of consciousness is real--in other
words, you're assuming that the "I" who makes an observation while the bomb
is still ticking can later observe it going off or failing to do so. Some
people believe in the reality of the first-person view, but only from the
perspective of moments; each experience is what it is, and doesn't "become"
anything else. From this perspective all you can say is that there are no
experiences of brains that were destroyed by the bomb, but that doesn't
imply any sort of "quantum immortality"--you can't say that you're
guaranteed to see the bomb failing to explode, because *you* won't see
anything other than what you're seeing right now.
And even if you do assume that consciousness really "flows" in some sense,
quantum immortality is not guaranteed--it's still possible that the flow can
simply end at some point. So just because you can never experience a
timeline where the bomb kills you, that doesn't mean you *will* experience a
timeline where it fails to kill you. Your experience may just terminate.
But if continuity of consciousness is real, there are good reasons to
believe in quantum immortality. Consider a replicator that creates a
perfect copy of you. If the subsequent lives of the "original" and the
"copy" are completely symmetrical, it's reasonable to guess that
you-before-replication have a 50% chance of becoming the original and a 50%
chance of becoming the copy.
Now consider an experiment where you step into the scanning chamber, but the
replicator malfunctions and reproduces a copy of a pattern stored in
memory--a completely different person. We don't know how continuity of
consciousness would work exactly, but it's pretty reasonable to conclude
that the chances of becoming the person in the replication chamber are tiny
(although perhaps not zero--consider a continuum of cases where the
replicator creates more and more imperfect copies of you). So the intuition
is that in a reasonable theory of consciousness, your chances of "becoming"
some future brainstate or another would be weighted somehow by their
similarity with your current brainstate.
Well, now consider a trial where the replicator creates a copy that is
physically similar to you, but with all the synapses absent so there is no
coherent activity in the brain. Would there be any more chance of
"becoming" that being than there was of becoming a totally different brain?
Probably not--perhaps even less. Finally, consider a limit case where the
replicator simply fails to reproduce anything. It's doubtful that in this
case your experience would try to "flow into" a replication chamber where no
brain activity existed, and would thus "die." But these last two cases are
basically similar to "death" in the MWI. So I think it's quite plausible
that if continuity of consciousness is real, quantum immortality is true.
>Following this reasonning we could surmise that even some of the natural
>laws
>themselves as well as the absence of white rabbits could be first person
>effects.
>Any violation to those laws and the appearance of white rabbits would imply
>the
>immediate disappearance of the observer. For example any change to the
>charge/mass
>of electrons would be "global" and result in the immediate destruction of
>the world
>as we know it. Therefore the stability of the electron could be a first
>person
>effect.
I think that's unlikely. The anthropic principle won't work any harder than
it needs to--if the stability of the electron was just a first-person
effect, we would probably see the electron's charge/mass fluctuating within
a certain "life-preserving" range. And if universes with different laws of
physics exist, observers would probably be more likely to find themselves in
universes in which their existence was less "lucky" (although we don't know
what the a priori "probability" of different sets of laws would be).
Jesse Mazer
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Received on Mon Jan 29 2001 - 20:59:32 PST