Re: Quantum Immortality and Information Flow

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:02:21 +0100

Le 12-déc.-05, à 19:37, George Levy a écrit :

>
>
> Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
>> In addition to the above arguments, consider the problem from the
>> point of view of the subject. If multiple copies of a person are
>> created and run in parallel for a period, what difference does this
>> make to his experience? It seems to me that there is no test or
>> experiment the person could do which would allow him to determine if
>> he is living in a period of high measure or low measure. If an OM is
>> the smallest discernible unit of conscious experience, it therefore
>> seems reasonable to treat multiple instantiations of the same OM as
>> one OM.
>
> Yes Stathis, I agree with you completely.




This is delicate and I think we should really make the disctinction
between the 3-OMs and the 1-OMs. Difference of measure of 3-OM does not
change the quality of the 1-OMs experiences, but could change the
relative probability of having some next 1-OMs.

To justify this, I point you on the UDA, or to the lobian interview.
(We are coming back on this).



>
>
> Bruno wrote:
>> And this already comes from the fact that the
>> "indistinguishabilitty/distinguishabilitty" crux is itself relative.
>> By loosing memory something distinguishable can become
>> indistinguishable, augmenting the class of (normal) self-consistent
>> extensions.
>
> Bruno, I find this question extremely difficult. Is
> indistinguishability established at the physical level or at the
> psychological level?


Psychological. Remember that with comp we take for granted some amount
of folk or Grandmother psychology (enough for saying purposefully "yes"
to the doctor). But then by the UDA, comp entails the complete
structure of the physical laws. Now the goal is to make the derivation
of the physical laws, so that we can test comp by comparing the
comp-physics with the traditional empirical physics. With such kind of
approach it is just forbidden to invoke anything physical as granted;
we can certainly not take a physical multiverse or a physically based
indistinguishability for granted.







> If we say it is established at the psychological level, then even
> mental errors ( ie.6+7=11) count in defining a whole world.



"6+7=11" is not a mental error. It is just a false proposition. I guess
you mean something like "B(6+7=11)". This is a *mental error*, where
the "mentality" has been supposed to be captured by some modal
epistemic logic "B" (a modal box). And then "6+7=11" is akin to a sort
of white rabbit or flying pig, those which, of course we need still to
justify the extreme rarity.





> This is the ultimate in relativism. I can find reasons to go either
> way. (Ultimately Undecided?)


And now this makes sense indeed and the "Ultimately Undecided" is close
to the "Forever Undecided" which will be tackle by the self-reference
logics G and G*.





>
>> Then I am open that from the 1 point of view, fusion increases
>> measure, duplication decreases measure; although from the 3 pov it is
>> the contrary.
>
> I do not agree with you on this point Bruno.
> >From the one person point of view measures remains constant just
> like the speed of light, the mass of an electron, or the number of
> points in a line 1 meter long or 1 kilometer long. (the number of
> points in a continuum is always the same no matter what the length of
> the line is). The one person always observes a continuum in the number
> of opportunities available to him no matter what his past history is.



That's true, but only for a notion of "actual 1-OMs", not necessarily
for the 3-prediction on some possible (future) 1-OMs.





> >From the third person point of view, it makes sense to consider
> ratios in measures, just like it makes sense to take ratios of line
> segments of different lengths.


OK.


Bruno


http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Tue Dec 13 2005 - 06:16:07 PST

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