Re: more torture

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2005 16:16:21 +0200

Le 13-juin-05, à 21:06, Jesse Mazer a écrit :

> Hal Finney wrote:
>>
>> Jesse Mazer writes:
>> > If you impose the condition I discussed earlier that absolute
>> probabilities
>> > don't change over time, or in terms of my analogy, that the water
>> levels in
>> > each tank don't change because the total inflow rate to each tank
>> always
>> > matches the total outflow rate, then I don't think it's possible to
>> make
>> > sense of the notion that the observer-moments in that torture-free
>> minute
>> > would have 10^100 times greater absolute measure. If there's 10^100
>> times
>> > more water in the tanks corresponding to OMs during that minute,
>> where does
>> > all this water go after the tank corresponding to the last OM in
>> this
>> > minute, and where is it flowing in from to the tank corresponding
>> to the
>> > first OM in this minute?
>>
>> I would propose to implement the effect by duplicating the guy 10^100
>> times
>> during that minute, then terminating all the duplicates after that
>> time.
>>
>> What happens in your model when someone dies in some fraction of the
>> multiverse? His absolute measure decreases, but where does the
>> now-excess
>> "water" go?
>
> In my model, death only exists from a third-person perspective, but
> from a first-person perspective I'm subscribing to the QTI, so
> consciousness will always continue in some form (even if my memories
> don't last or I am reduced to an amoeba-level consciousness)--the
> "water molecules" are never created or destroyed.


I agree. This is even related with my "NO KESTRELS, NO STARLINGS" rough
summary of physics (see the end of my first combinators post "the
chemistry of combinators:
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m5913.html
I intend to come back on this.



> For what would happen when an observer is duplicated from a
> third-person perspective, it might help to consider the example I
> discussed on the '"Last-minute" vs. "anticipatory" quantum
> immortality' thread at
> http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4841.html , where a person is
> initially duplicated before a presidential election, and then
> depending on the results of the election, one duplicate is later
> copied 999 times. All else being equal, I'd speculate that the initial
> 2-split would "anticipate" the later 999-split, so that 999 out of
> 1000 "water molecules" of the first observer would split off into the
> copy that is later going to be split 999 times, so before this second
> split, OMs of this copy would have 999 times the absolute measure of
> the copy that isn't going to be split again.


I essentially agree. Stathis should not agree, or I have misunderstood
Stathis on its last posts. Correct me perhaps.



> I'm not absolutely sure that this would be a consequence of the idea
> about finding a unique self-consistent set of absolute and conditional
> probabilities based only on a "similarity matrix" and the condition of
> absolute probabilities not changing with time, but it seems intuitive
> to me that it would.

I agree except question of vocabulary. It's not important (at this
stage).


> At some point I'm going to try to test this idea with mathematica or
> something, creating a finite set of OMs and deciding what the possible
> successors to each one are in order to construct something like a
> "similarity matrix", then finding the unique vector of absolute
> probabilities that, when multiplied by this matrix, gives a unit
> vector (the procedure I discussed in my last post to you at
> http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m6855.html ). Hopefully the
> absolute probabilities would indeed tend to "anticipate" future splits
> in the way I'm describing.

Nice test. I'm curious to see the result. Not sure there is a unique
vector. Not sure it is important that there is one. I may be wrong.

>
> So if this anticipatory idea works, then any copy that's very unlikely
> to survive long from a third-person perspective is going to undergoe
> fewer future splits from a multiverse perspective (there will always
> be few branches where this copy survives though), so your conditional
> probability of becoming such a copy would be low, meaning that not
> much of your "water" would flow into that copy, and it will have a
> smaller absolute measure than copies that are likely to survive in
> more branches.

Let us see ...

Bruno

http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Tue Jun 14 2005 - 10:17:42 PDT

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