Brent Meeker wrote:
>This just seems like semantic confusion to me. It makes no sense to
>ask, "Where will you feel being after the duplication.?" If you ask me
>this before the experiment the answer will be, "I don't know." or "It
>depends on which "me" you mean, since there will be two after the
>experiment." It seems to be implicit in your language that there is
>only one me - hence you ask questions about where "I" will feel
>"myself". But there will be two me's and each will feel he is in a
>different place. My consciousness, being dependent on my body, will be
>duplicated too. I will have split and I-Washington and I-Moscow will
>exist, but it makes no sense to ask which one is really me.
Of course, I agree. Both are really you. That is why you must
say, as you say, "I don't know". That is the computational undeterminacy.
The only important point (to proceed) is that with comp you survive,
and that from all your futur point of view you have a precise memory
of where you have survived. It has been either W or M.
>Perhaps when other posters (not you) write about continuity of
>consciousnes they mean that a persons consciousness cannot be
>duplicated even if their physical being is duplicated - but I believe
>you explicityl reject this view. In which case I'm not sure what
>"continuity of consciousness" means either.
You talk on Jesse Mazer's post. I will comment it.
>I note that duplication can be done for elementary particles and perhaps
>even small assemblages of elementary particles (e.g. He nuclei, small
>atoms) but it may well happen that the laws of physics (even if they
>derive from psychological or computational bases) may forbid the
>duplication of something large enough and complex enough to be
>self-conscious. Not all thought experiments are possible.
Have you heard about the no-cloning result in QM. It is not
possible to duplicate an arbitrary state of a even a single
photon. But this is irrelevant because all that stuff about
self-duplication are just preparation for the use of it with
the universal dovetailer, which produces all those
duplications in some automatic way.
I agree with you that not all thought experiments are possible
or interesting. But with the hypothesis that we are machine,
the self-duplication thought experiment is possible.
This can be made totally precise with some use of informatics
(diagonalisation, etc.), but it seems to me that it is best
not going in technics when it is not necessary.
But here you are really speculating on some physical laws
which would prevent the possibility of self-duplication.
Why?
Here, we are just at the very beginning of the proof that if
we are digital machines then physics *must* be reductible
to the law of machine's psychology, that Reality is a web
of number's dreams.
It seems that you have understand the computational undeterminacy,
but that you are not curious to see where we are lead.
Of course I will not repeat myself. Just look at the sketch
of the proof in
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m1726.html
(Or the shortest presentation in my CC&Q paper).
Most of the present discussion comes from the disagrement
between Schmidhuber and me on the way "the all
computations" version of the "everything" idea must be
used for getting some computer science explanation of the
laws of physics.
Oh I see you say to Jesse Mazer:
> [...] What possible experiment
>could decide whether "I" had become the I-in-Washington and not the
>I-in-Moscow. The very hypothesis of the thought experiment makes this
>question unaswerable.
I agree. This is because "experiment" is a third person concept.
But the *experience* is very simple and answerable from the
experiencer's point of view. And so the "unaswerability" is
something communicable, and in practice it means there is
an undeterminacy.
After the duplication you just look where you are.
Each you will get the anwer, and no more than that is needed
for going to the next step of the argument.
(Each you will understand what I mean by undeterminacy).
Note that my whole work is "pure third person" communicable.
With hypotheses it is possible to get third person propositions
*on* first person's discourses. (This was provide by the use
of the diary in my precedent post).
In case you dislike the conclusion, remember that you can
always trash away the comp hypothesis.
But unless you find a flaw it seems to me I have proved
that if we are machine the laws of physics emerges from
a statistics on possible dream/computations.
(Here a dream is just a first-person description of some
set of relative computations).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal
Received on Sat Feb 10 2001 - 06:31:55 PST