Re: another puzzzle

From: rmiller <rmiller.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:52:00 -0500

At 09:12 AM 6/16/2005, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:

>You find yourself in a locked room with no windows, and no memory of how
>you got there. \

(snip)

> The other state consists of 10^100 exact copies of you, their minds
> perfectly synchronised with your mind, each copy isolated from all the
> others in a room just like yours. Whenever the light changes colour, it
> means that God is either instantaneously creating (10^100 - 1) copies, or
> instantaneously destroying all but one randomly chosen copy.

RM's two cents worth: If all the 10^100 copies have exactly the same
sensory input, exactly the same past, exactly the same environment and have
exactly the same behavior systems, then there would be no overall increase
in complexity (no additional links between nodes), but there would overall
be a multiplication of intensity (10^100). Would this result in a more
clarified perception during the time period when one is represented
(magnified?) by 10^100? It's an open switch (i.e. who knows???) However,
the increase in intensity would *not* result in greater perception; that
would involve linking additional nodes---i.e. getting more neurons or
elements of the behavior system involved---and the number of links over the
10^100 copies would remain static.

If Stathis includes the possibility of chaos into the system at the node
level (corresponding to random fluctuations among interactions at the node
level) then these differences among the 10^100 copies would amount to
10^100 specific layers of the individual all linked by the equivalence of
the similarly-configured behavior systems. If one could see this from the
perspective of (say) Hilbert space, it may look like a deck of perfectly
similar individuals with minor variations or "fuzziness." These links as
well as the fuzziness over many worlds may be what corresponds to
consciousness.
Received on Thu Jun 16 2005 - 10:56:31 PDT