RE: Many Pasts? Not according to QM...

From: Lee Corbin <lcorbin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 5 Jun 2005 11:40:19 -0700

Stathis writes

> I believe that tomorrow I will become one of the people in the multiverse
> who believe they are me and share my memories.

What if you have just taken Midazolam, and so won't remember
any of this tomorrow? (I contend that you'll be them anyway.)

> When I think about this, I
> hope that my future selves will have good experiences, and I fear that they
> might have bad experiences. Once tomorrow comes, I no longer care about the
> other versions, because they aren't me even though they think they are me.

We have agreed that some of your innate animalistic instincts aren't
necessarily *correct*. That is, even though you may continue to feel
a certain way, it can also happen that you succumb to some reason and
logic that force you to believe otherwise. IN this case, your choices
of whom to identify with should be consistent, and the easiest way
(I think) to make them so is to identify with all duplicates close
and far, future and past, modulated only by similarity of structure.

> Looking back, also, I believe that I was only one of the possible versions
> in the multiverse, and I no longer care about bad experiences that person
> might have had in the same way that I care about bad experiences I am having
> at present or one of the versions of me might have in the future.
>
> We normally take all this for granted, but if you think about it, it is
> quite arbitrary. Why should I believe I will "become" another person who
> thinks he is me? Why should I identify with multiple versions of me in the
> future, but not the present or the past? Why should I worry about what might
> happen to my future self but not my past self? The answer is, because that
> is the way human minds have evolved. But that is the only reason.

Yes, exactly!

> It would be no logical contradiction to imagine a person whose mind functioned very
> differently; for example, a person who had no fear of the future because he
> considered the idea absurd that he could "become" someone with different
> spacetime coordinates to his present ones.

Well, I take as more inescapable the assertion that I am the same
person I was yesterday, and will be the same person tomorrow. Further,
physics seems to grab me by the throat and FORCE me to accept that
my duplicate across the room and I don't differ significantly.

> It is the failure to take into account this rather complex scheme we use to
> create individuals that leads to mistakes in the application of OM measure,
> for example in criticising the QTI.

Could you expand on that? Part of my weakness has to do with QTI.

> > To be precise let's say that tomorrow you will split into
> > the ten copies, one of which will be tortured. Then one *year* from
> > now merging is scheduled to occur. Therefore you behave differently?
> > I don't think you should. (You may *have* to because that's how we
> > are built, but you still shouldn't.)
>
> Given this information before the split occurs, it makes it more likely that
> I will experience torture: the 1/10 chance initially, then the certainty of
> merging in a year - although the merging may result in memory of the torture
> rather than the first hand experience.

But still up for grabs is how widely the concept *I* should be
taken. I've extended it so that even the duplicate across the
room is you.

> I have to disagree with you here. Why should I care about the suffering of
> some guy in another universe who thinks he is me, and whom I can never meet?
> I would be more concerned about the suffering of strangers in third world
> countries in my own universe.

Of course, if you can't affect it, that's a reason for non-concern.
But if you could, then, I contend, one intervenes to prevent one's
duplicate from suffering for entirely *selfish* reasons.

I got here this way: to be consistent, I must use all my knowledge
to arrive at a class of events and processes that I approve of, and
classes that I disapprove of. I decided that it was bad for me to
suffer. Then since by physics, I seem to be any sufficiently similar
physical process, it is bad for any of them to suffer. (That one of
me ends up being prejudiced as regards his own special skin seems to
be an unfortunate legacy of evolution, but one that doesn't support
much consistency.)

Lee
Received on Sun Jun 05 2005 - 14:39:37 PDT