RE: Observer-Moment Measure from Universe Measure

From: Jonathan Colvin <jcolvin.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 22:51:18 -0700

Hal Finney wrote:
>To apply Wei's method, first we need to get serious about what
>is an OM.
>We need a formal model and description of a particular OM.
>Consider, for example, someone's brain when he is having a
>particular experience. He is eating chocolate ice cream while
>listening to Beethoven's 5th symphony, on his 30th birthday.
>Imagine that we could scan his brain with advanced technology
>and record his neural activity. Imagine further that with the
>aid of an advanced brain model we are able to prune out the
>unnecessary information and distill this to the essence of the
>experience. We come up with a pattern that represents that
>observer moment. Any system which instantiates that pattern
>genuinely creates an experience of that observer moment. This
>pattern is something that can be specified, recorded and
>written down in some form. It probably involves a huge volume of
>data.

Sorry for the delay in response, but eskimo started bouncing mail from my
other smtp for some unknown reason.

There's a question begging to be asked, which is (predictably I suppose, for
a qualia-denyer such as myself), what makes you think there is such a thing
as an "essence of an experience"? I'd suggest there is no such "thing" as an
observer-moment. I'm happy with using the concept as a tag of sorts when
discussing observer selection issues, but I think reifying it is likely a
mistake, and goes considerably beyond Strong AI into a full Cartesian
dualism. Is it generally accepted here on this list that a
substrate-independent thing called an "observer moment" exists?

Jonathan Colvin
Received on Wed Jun 08 2005 - 01:58:26 PDT