Quentin Anciaux writes:
>Le Mercredi 4 Janvier 2006 02:37, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
> > But it isn't possible to "die young" if QTI is true! Every time you come
>to
> > a point where you might die, something will happen to save you. When you
> > get really old, perhaps some anti-ageing treatment, or mind uploading is
> > introduced just in time. Of course, there is no guarantee that you will
> > continue living in full physical and mental vigour: you might just
>slowly
> > deteriorate over time so that you end up spending centuries in a
> > near-vegetative state. The question then arises, how close to a
>vegetable
> > do you have to be before you can be pronounced dead for the purposes of
> > QTI?
>
>The real problem I see is that at every moments there must be branches that
>leads to near-vegetative state soon... but as we are still talking we
>haven't
>experienced these...
>
>Another problem is that there must be a lot more observer moment of me
>being
>very very old and sane than the total of observer moments I've experienced
>till I have memories, but still I experience being very very young compared
>to the age I should be in my "real life memories" (as it is much more
>longer
>than what I've been living till now).
>
>That means ordering is important in observer moments and ASSA must be false
>in
>this respect.
That's right. First we experience being 10 years old, then 11, then 12, and
so on. It never happens in any other order. And if it happens that there are
twice as many copies of us in the multiverse between the ages of 11 and 12
as between the ages of 10 and 11, that doesn't mean we experience being 11
to 12 for twice as long as we experience being 10 to 11, or equivalently
that we are twice as likely to find ourselves aged 11 to 12 as 10 to 11.
>On the other hand, I no longer see what is the meaning of "I" in this
>context,
>every next "i" (even those who fade out, go in hell) are continuity of my
>present "I"... but none of them would recognize being the other "i" except
>having be me... It leads to me that "I" is an instantaneous concept and I
>see
>this very insatisfaying... feeling I think.
There are many good reasons to think of "I" as being an instantaneous
concept, even if this seems at first glance to go against intuition. This is
basically another formulation of the observer moment idea. It eliminates
"paradoxes" of personal identity involving duplication thought experiments,
and it allows us to talk about past, present, future and parallel versions
of an individual precisely and unambiguously. It is an accident of evolution
that we consider our future selves to be the "same" person as we are now and
try to ensure their well-being. They might be made up of completely
different matter to us, have only inaccurate memories of what we are
experiencing now, and have only a vaquely similar sense of self. It would be
no logical contradiction if we believed that our life effectively ended when
we went to sleep each night, and accordingly used up all our resources today
with no regard for the person who will wake up in our bed tomorrow. We don't
think that way because people who did would have died out, but with a little
effort it is possible to imagine sentient species with notions of continuity
of individual identity very different from our own.
Stathis Papaioannou
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Received on Thu Jan 05 2006 - 01:22:22 PST