Re: Fw: Quantum accident survivor

From: David Kwinter <david.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 12:29:18 -0700

On Wednesday, November 5, 2003, at 07:56 PM, Eric Cavalcanti wrote:

> Hi,
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Kwinter" <david.domain.name.hidden>
>
>
>>> I mean the absolutely exact same David Kwinter or Eric Cavalcanti as
>> was the moment before.
>
> I agree that a moment from now there will be a number of exactly
> equal copies. Nevertheless, I am sure I will only experience being
> one of them, so this is what I mean by ' me ' - the actual experiences
> I will have. Maybe some copy of me will win the lottery every time
> I play, but that does not give me reason to spend my money on it. I
> still believe that the probability that 'I' win is 1/10^6, even if on a
> multiverse sense, the probability that at least one copy of me wins
> is 1.
> The same should be the case with death if we assume a materialistic
> position.
>
>
>>> What do you mean by *entirely equal*?
>>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>> From: "David Kwinter" <david.domain.name.hidden>
>>> To: >
>>> Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 5:19 AM
>>> Subject: Re: Quantum accident survivor
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Tuesday, November 4, 2003, at 10:47 AM, Eric Cavalcanti wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Let me stress this point: *I am, for all practical purposes,
>>>>> one and only one specific configuration of atoms in a
>>>>> specific universe. I could never say that ' I ' is ALL the
>>>>> copies, since I NEVER experience what the other copies
>>>>> experience. The other copies are just similar
>>>>> configurations of atoms in other universes, which shared
>>>>> the same history, prior to a given point in time.*
>>>
>>>
>>>> I would consider these other copies entirely equal to myself IF AND
>>>> ONLY IF they are succeeding RSSA observer-moments.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Glossary references : )
>>>>
>>>> RSSA - The Relative Self-Sampling Assumption, which says that you
>>>> should consider your next observer-moment to be randomly sampled
>>>> from among all
>>>> observer-moments which come immediately after your current
>>>> observer-moment
>>>> and belong to the same observer.
>>>>
>>> In a materialistic framework, ' I ' am a bunch of atoms. These atoms
>>> happen to constitute a system that has self-referential qualities
>>> that
>>> we call consciousness. If it happened that these atoms temporarily
>>> (like in a coma or anesthesy) or permanently (death) lose this
>>> quality,
>>> so will ' I '.
>>
>> I respectfully disagree - parallel universes are equally REAL- you
>> will
>> still be you! Quantum branches stem from the same exact atoms in the
>> versions of us that die in tons of possible accidents everyday.
>
> I believe that they do in fact exist, and that they do stem from the
> same
> atoms. But they are not 'me', in the sense that I don't see through
> their
> eyes.

I still think that's you, especially if you just died and they lived
on.. but now we're just beating a dead horse.

> That's what matters when talking about Immortality. We want to
> know if WE are immortal - i.e., if our first-person experience is
> eternal
> - not if SOME copy of us will survive.
> What QTI assumes is that ' I ' cannot be one of the dead copies - i.e.,
> that the dead copies should be excluded from the sampling pool. But
> that is a too strong assumption, which I haven't seen any
> justification for.
> Surely my next observer-moment should be alive or it would not be an
> observer. But what makes us believe that 'we' - our first-person
> individuality - must necessarily have a next observer-moment in the
> first
> place? That is the assumption that does not seem well-based.
>
> If non-observing states are prohibited, then we should never expect to
> be in a coma, or anesthesized, for instance. Whenever you would be
> submitted to a surgery, you would see that the doctor somehow failed
> to apply the anesthesy correctly, and you would have a *very* conscious
> experience.
>
> -Eric.
>


I think that in the case of anesthesia or any other unconscious state
the true or false outcome of whether we regain consciousness with the
passage of time dictates the sampling pool. The collective fates of the
parallel copies of me under anesthesia aren't stricken from the sample
because we must "necessarily have a next observer-moment" - however
this is a concept which I am uncertain about.
Received on Fri Nov 07 2003 - 14:30:45 PST