Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Saibal Mitra
we are
immortal, because the enseble of all possible worlds is a fixed static
entity. So,
you ''always'' find yourselve alive in one state or another. However, you
won't
experience youself evolving in the infinite far future.
If you encounter a ''branching'' in which one of the possibilities is
death, that
branch cannot be said to be nonexistent relative to you. Quantum mechanics
doesn't
imply that you can never become unconscious, otherwise you could never fall
asleep!
Of course, you can never experience being unconscious. So, what to do with
the branch
leading to (almost) certain death? The more information your brain
contains, the smaller the set of branches is in which you are alive (and
consistent with your experiences stored in your brain). The set of all
branches in which you could be alive doesn't contain any information at all.
Since death involves complete
memory loss, the branch leading to death should be replaced by the complete
set of all possibilities.
Saibal
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>
>
> Quoting nick_h_e_prince <nick_h_...@yahoo.co.uk>:
>
> >
> >
> >
> > My apologies to the group for bringing up questions which may have
> > been covererd before but I cannot find an answer to the following
> > query and I am new to the group.
> >
> > Firstly I am sure I have read that Bruno Marchal had come up with a
> > proof of the no cul de sac conjecture - does anyone have a reference
> > for this?
> >
> > I also have a question to put to anyone who has some ideas as follows:
> >
> > If the MW immortality is correct the would we not only be immortal but
> > also very alone in the end. We know that we observe others die so
> > since we always find ourselves in a branch of the multiverse where we
> > live on - the conclusion seems inescapable
> >
> > Can anyone figure a way out of such inevitable eternal loneliness
> > because I rather like to chat to my freinds!!
> >
> > Nick Prince
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Yahoo! Groups Links
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
> --
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Stathis Papaioannou
> If you encounter a ''branching'' in which one of the possibilities is
>death, that
> branch cannot be said to be nonexistent relative to you. Quantum
>mechanics
>doesn't
> imply that you can never become unconscious, otherwise you could never
>fall
>asleep!
>
This latter statement seems to come up now and again. QM or QTI do not imply
that you can never lose consciousness. The idea is that you can never
*experience* loss of consciousness. You can fall asleep, but when you wake
up, you don't remember being asleep. If you never wake up - i.e. if you die
in your sleep - then you never experience that particular branch of the MW.
In other words, you can only experience those worlds where the loss of
consciousness is temporary.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Hal Finney
> QM or QTI do not imply
> that you can never lose consciousness. The idea is that you can never
> *experience* loss of consciousness. You can fall asleep, but when you wake
> up, you don't remember being asleep. If you never wake up - i.e. if you die
> in your sleep - then you never experience that particular branch of the MW.
> In other words, you can only experience those worlds where the loss of
> consciousness is temporary.
How about impairment of consciousness? Can you experience that? Can you
experience going crazy, or having a reduced level of consciousness where
you are drugged or barely alive? That's how death is for most people,
it's not like flicking off a light. Will Quantum Immortality protect you
from spending an eternity in a near-coma? Exactly how much consciousness
does it guarantee you?
Hal Finney
Stathis Papaioannou
worlds you may experience a drawn out fizzling out, reduced to the
consciousness of an infant, then a fish, then an amoeba. I believe Max
Tegmark aknowledged this in a commentary on his original paper. If you're
really unlucky, you will experience eternal torment in the flames of hell.
And unlike the Christian Hell, you don't actually have to do something wrong
to end up in QTI hell: it all depends on the fall of the cosmic dice.
One question which comes up is, when do you stop being you? I suppose this
is an answer to your "how much consciousness is guaranteed" question: when
you lose enough consciousness that you forget who you are, that is the
cutoff where you can really be said to have lost consciousness. QTI then
guarantees that there will always be a branch of the MW where you still
maintain a sense of your identity. Still, this doesn't save you from hell.
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Jesse Mazer
I think that's too handwavey--I think that to really have a satisfying
answer to this question, you need some kind of formal theory of
consciousness that answers questions like, "If I am currently experiencing
observer-moment A, what is the probability that my next experience will of
observer-moment B vs. observer-moment C"? I think the answer should depend
both on some sort of measure of the "similarity" of A and B vs. A and C (to
deal with the 'when do you stop being you' question), and also on some
notion of the absolute probability of B vs. C (for example, if B and C are
both equally 'similar' to your current experience A, but B is experiencing
some kind of thermodynamic miracle while C is experiencing business as
usual, then C would be more likely). I elaborated on these ideas in my posts
in the "Request for a glossary of acronyms" thread at
http://tinyurl.com/5265d
Jesse
Bruno Marchal
> Alas, you are right. Immortality is not all fun and games, and in some
> worlds you may experience a drawn out fizzling out, reduced to the
> consciousness of an infant, then a fish, then an amoeba. I believe Max
> Tegmark aknowledged this in a commentary on his original paper.
If you could find the reference I would be interested. From what I
remember from a post by James Higgo who asked Max, it seems to me that
Tegmark, although he seems to accept quantum suicide (with a well
clearcut self-killing protocol), does not believe in quantum (or comp)
immortality.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Saibal Mitra
similarity should also be an absolute measure that multiplied with the
absolute measure defines a new effective absolute measure for a given
observer.
Given the absolute measure you can define effective conditional
probabilities, except in cases where branches lead to death. In these cases,
the ''conditional probability'' of there being a next experience at all
would be less than 1.
Saibal
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----- Oorspronkelijk bericht -----
Van: "Jesse Mazer" <laser...@hotmail.com>
Aan: <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Verzonden: Thursday, April 14, 2005 10:20 AM
Onderwerp: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Jesse Mazer
>
>I more or less agree with Jesse. But I would say that the measure of
>similarity should also be an absolute measure that multiplied with the
>absolute measure defines a new effective absolute measure for a given
>observer.
>
>Given the absolute measure you can define effective conditional
>probabilities, except in cases where branches lead to death. In these
>cases,
>the ''conditional probability'' of there being a next experience at all
>would be less than 1.
Would you apply the same logic to copying a mind within a single universe
that you would to the splitting of worlds in the MWI? If so, consider the
thought-experiment I suggested in my post at
http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4805.html --
>But you should no more expect to end up in a branch where you died than in
>a branch where you were never born in the first place. Consider, instead of
>a branching multiverse, a Star-Trek-style transporter/duplicator in a
>single universe, which can deconstruct you and reconstruct exact copies
>atom-by-atom in distant locations (assuming the error introduced by the
>uncertainty principle is too small to make a difference--if you don't want
>to grant that, you could also assume this is all happening within a
>deterministic computer simulation and that you are really an A.I.). To use
>Bruno Marchal's example, suppose this duplicator recreates two identical
>copies of you, one in Washington and one in Moscow. As you step into the
>chamber, if you believe continuity of consciousness is "real" in some sense
>and that it's meaningful to talk about the probabilities of different
>possible next experiences, it would probably make sense to predict from a
>first-person-point of view that you have about a 50% chance of finding
>yourself in Moscow and a 50% chance of finding yourself in Washington.
>
>On the other hand, suppose only a single reconstruction will be performed
>in Washington--then by the same logic, you would probably predict the
>probability of finding yourself in Washington is close to 100%, barring a
>freak accident. OK, so now go back to the scenario where you're supposed to
>be recreated in both Washington and Moscow, except assume that at the last
>moment there's a power failure in Moscow and the recreator machine fails to
>activate. Surely this is no different from the scenario where you were only
>supposed to be recreated in Washington--the fact that they *intended* to
>duplicate you in Moscow shouldn't make any difference, all that matters is
>that they didn't. But now look at another variation on the scenario, where
>the Moscow machine malfunctions and recreates your body missing the head. I
>don't think it makes sense to say you have a 50% chance of being "killed"
>in this scenario--your brain is where your consciousness comes from, and
>since it wasn't duplicated this is really no different from the scenario
>where the Moscow machine failed to activate entirely. In fact, any
>malfunction in the Moscow machine which leads to a duplicate that
>permanently lacks consciousness should be treated the same way as a
>scenario where I was only supposed to be recreated in Washington, in terms
>of the subjective probabilities. Extending this to the idea of natural
>duplication due to different branches of a splitting multiverse, the
>probability should always be 100% that my next experience is one of a
>universe where I have not been killed.
So if the machine accidentally creates a copy of me missing a head, do you
agree that doesn't lessen the probability that I will continue to have
conscious experiences, that in this case I could be confident I'd end up as
the other copy that was created with head intact? If so, is this any
different from a situation where someone is shooting at me, and there is a
branch of the multiverse where my head gets blown off and another where the
bullet misses?
Jesse
Hal Finney
> Would you apply the same logic to copying a mind within a single universe
> that you would to the splitting of worlds in the MWI? If so, consider the
> thought-experiment I suggested in my post at
> http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4805.html --
Generally, I don't think the same logic applies to copying a mind in a
single universe than to splitting of worlds in the MWI. Copying a mind
will double its measure, while splitting one leaves it alone. That is a
significant practical and philosophical difference.
Practically, copying a mind leaves it with half as many resources per
new-mind, while splitting it leaves it with the same number of resources
per mind. This means that you might take very different practical
actions if you knew that your mind was going to be copied than if you
were about to split a coin.
Philosophically, the measure of the observer-moments associated with a
copied mind are twice as great as the measure of the observer-moments
associated with a split one. Obviously 2 is not equal to 1. This puts
the burden of proof on those who would claim that this difference is
philosophically irrelevant in considering issues of consciousness.
Hal Finney
Saibal Mitra
the reverse of a suicide experiment in which the measure decreases. If you
consider a doubling in which one of the copies doesn't survive then the
measure stays the same, while in suicide experiment it decreases.
Both the suicide and copying thought experiments have convinced me that the
notion of a conditional probability is fundamentally flawed. It can be
defined under ''normal'' circumstances but it will break down precisely when
considering copying or suicide.
Saibal
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----- Oorspronkelijk bericht -----
Van: ""Hal Finney"" <h...@finney.org>
Aan: <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Verzonden: Saturday, April 16, 2005 12:27 AM
Onderwerp: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Stathis Papaioannou
Are you suggesting that the "splitting" in the MWI is different to
duplication? The only difference I can see between duplicating a person via
a Star Trek teleporter and the MWI splitting is that in the latter case, the
whole universe is duplicated. If you could put the whole universe into God's
teleporter, wouldn't that be the same as the MWI splitting?
--Stathis Papaioannou
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Jesse Mazer
>To: everyth...@eskimo.com
>Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
>Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 15:27:25 -0700 (PDT)
>
>Jesse Mazer writes:
> > Would you apply the same logic to copying a mind within a single
>universe
> > that you would to the splitting of worlds in the MWI? If so, consider
>the
> > thought-experiment I suggested in my post at
> > http://www.escribe.com/science/theory/m4805.html --
>
>Generally, I don't think the same logic applies to copying a mind in a
>single universe than to splitting of worlds in the MWI. Copying a mind
>will double its measure, while splitting one leaves it alone. That is a
>significant practical and philosophical difference.
Doubles its measure relative to who? If I am copied while my friend is not,
perhaps it makes sense that my measure is doubled relative to his. But what
if our entire planet, or entire local region of the universe, was copied?
The relative measure of any two people would not be changed, it seems.
Perhaps you could say that the measure of observer-moments that take place
after the the copying is higher than the measure of observer-moments that
take place before it, but I'm not sure that'd be true either, it really
depends on what your theory is about how measure should be assigned to
different observer-moments. Part of the problem is you seem to be assuming
measure can somehow be derived from the number of physical copies in a
single universe, whereas I lean more towards the view that a TOE would
ultimately be stated simply in terms of observer-moments and the measure on
each, with the appearance of a "physical universe" just being a consequence
of the particular types of observer-moments that have higher measure. So it
seems that it partly depends whether one believes the third-person
perspective or the first-person perspective is more fundamental. (Although
even if you take the first-person perspective as more basic, you'd need more
of a fleshed-out theory of how the appearance of an objective physical
universe comes about to say for sure whether copying a mind in a single
universe is the same or different from many-worlds splitting.)
Jesse
Hal Finney
> >single universe than to splitting of worlds in the MWI. Copying a mind
> >will double its measure, while splitting one leaves it alone. That is a
> >significant practical and philosophical difference.
>
> Doubles its measure relative to who? If I am copied while my friend is not,
> perhaps it makes sense that my measure is doubled relative to his. But what
> if our entire planet, or entire local region of the universe, was copied?
> The relative measure of any two people would not be changed, it seems.
Copying this much would eliminate most of the practical problems, in
terms of how many wives or how much money you would end up with. But it
is important to understand that this is an extremely IMpractical thought
experiment. To the extent that we are focusing on practical issues
we ought to try to stick to at least somewhat plausible experiments.
Copying a person will perhaps be feasible someday, especially if he is an
AI or uploaded person who runs as a computer program. Such people will
have to deal with the practical as well as philosophical considerations
around potential duplication every day. Copying an entire galaxy seems
physically infeasible and is not something that our descendants are
likely to have to deal with.
> Perhaps you could say that the measure of observer-moments that take place
> after the the copying is higher than the measure of observer-moments that
> take place before it, but I'm not sure that'd be true either, it really
> depends on what your theory is about how measure should be assigned to
> different observer-moments.
Yes, I would say this. It is a standard prediction of the MWI (to the
extent that the MWI is standard!). Measure has a certain definition
in this flavor of QM, such that when a universe splits its measure is
reduced in each of the branches. Activities which take place within a
universe (neglecting irrelevant splits) do not get their measured reduced.
We use a similar concept of measure in the AUH (all universe hypothesis).
Schmidhuber defines the inverse exponential of the length of the
computer program to generate a universe as its measure. If we think
of a universe splitting a la the MWI within the framework of the AUH,
the new universe(s) require more information to specify them, namely
the outcome of the coin flip or whatever it was that caused the split.
This additional information reduces the measure of the universes by
making their information description longer. If there is no split and
simply a duplication of some subset, this could happen in a deterministic
universe and there would be no change in the measure. The result is that
universe splitting reduces measure while subset duplication does not.
> Part of the problem is you seem to be assuming
> measure can somehow be derived from the number of physical copies in a
> single universe, whereas I lean more towards the view that a TOE would
> ultimately be stated simply in terms of observer-moments and the measure on
> each, with the appearance of a "physical universe" just being a consequence
> of the particular types of observer-moments that have higher measure. So it
> seems that it partly depends whether one believes the third-person
> perspective or the first-person perspective is more fundamental. (Although
> even if you take the first-person perspective as more basic, you'd need more
> of a fleshed-out theory of how the appearance of an objective physical
> universe comes about to say for sure whether copying a mind in a single
> universe is the same or different from many-worlds splitting.)
I would say that the first person view is consistent with Schmidhuber's
approach as well as the MWI. Both of these models define a measure
over observer moments that can in principle be calculated precisely.
This then determines what we are likely to see and experience.
Hal Finney
Bruno Marchal
Le 16-avr.-05, à 02:45, Saibal Mitra a écrit :
> Both the suicide and copying thought experiments have convinced me
> that the
> notion of a conditional probability is fundamentally flawed. It can be
> defined under ''normal'' circumstances but it will break down
> precisely when
> considering copying or suicide.
This is a quite remarkable remark. I can related it to the COMBINATORS
thread.
In a nutshell: in the *empirical* FOREST there are no kestrels (no
eliminators at all),
nor Mockingbird, warblers or any duplicators. Quantum information
behaves
like incompressible fluid. Universes differentiate, they never
multiplies.
Deutsch is right on that point. I use Hardegree (ref in my thesis(*))
He did show that
quantum logic can be seen as a conditional probability logic.
We will come back on this (it's necessarily a little bit technical). I
am finishing a
technical paper on that. The COMBINATORS can help to simplify
considerably
the mathematical conjectures of my thesis.
Bruno
(*) Hardegree, G. M. (1976). The Conditional in Quantum Logic. In
Suppes, P., editor, Logic and Probability in Quantum Mechanics,
volume 78 of Synthese Library, pages 55-72. D. Reidel Publishing
Company, Dordrecht-Holland.
Ben Goertzel
-----Original Message-----
From: Bruno Marchal [mailto:mar...@ulb.ac.be]
Sent: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 4:20 AM
To: Saibal Mitra
Cc: everyth...@eskimo.com
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Stathis Papaioannou
..and despite reading the last paragraph several times slowly, I'm afraid I
don't understand it. Are you saying there may never be a "next moment" at
the point where you are facing near-certain death? It seems to me that all
that is required is an observer moment in which (a) you believe that you are
you, however this may be defined (it's problematic even in "normal" life
what constitutes continuity of identity), and (b) you remember facing the
said episode of near-certain death (ncd), and it will seem to you that you
have miraculously escaped, even if there is no actual physical connection
between the pre-ncd and the post-ncd observer moment. Or, another way to
escape is as you have suggested in a more recent post, that there is an
observer moment somewhere in the multiverse in which the ncd episode has
been somehow deleted from your memory. Perhaps the latter is more likely, in
which case you can look forward to never, or extremely rarely, facing ncd in
your life.
It all gets very muddled. If we try to ruthlessly dispense with every
derivative, ill-defined, superfluous concept and assumption in an effort to
simplify the discussion, the one thing we are left with is the individual
observer-moments. We then try to sort these observer-moments into sets which
constitute lives, identities, birth, death, amnesia, mind duplication, mind
melding, multiple world branchings, and essentially every possible variation
on these and other themes. No wonder it's confusing! And who is to judge
where a particular individual's identity/life/body/memory begins and ends
when even the most detailed, passed by committee of philosophers set of
rules fails, as it inevitably will?
The radical solution is to accept that only the observer-moments are real,
and how we sort them then is seen for what it is: essentially arbitrary, a
matter of convention. You can dismiss the question of immortality, quantum
or otherwise, by observing that the only non-problematic definition of an
individual is identification with a single observer-moment, so that no
individual can ever "really" live for longer than a moment. Certainly, this
goes against intuition, because I feel that I was alive a few minutes ago as
well as ten years ago, but *of course* I feel that; this is simply reporting
on my current thought processes, like saying I feel hungry or tired, and
beyond this cannot be taken as a falsifiable statement about the state of
affairs in the real world unless recourse is taken to some arbitrary
definition of personal identity, such as would satisfy a court, for example.
Let me put it a different way. Situation (a) life as usual: I die every
moment and a peson is reborn every moment complete with (most) memories and
other attributes of the individual who has just died. Situation (b) I am
killed instantly, painlessly, with an axe every moment, and a person is
reconstituted the next moment complete with (most) memories and other
attributes of the individual who has just died, such that he experiences no
discontinuity. Aside from the blood and mess in (b), is there a difference?
Should I worry more about (b) than (a)? This is of course a commonplace
thought experiment on this list, but I draw from it a slightly different
conclusion: we all die all the time; death doesn't really matter, otherwise
we should all be in a constant panic.
Russell Standish
identify observer moments as the fundamental concept, and those who
regard relationships between observer moments with equal ontological
status.
With my TIME postulate, I say that a conscious observer necessarily
experiences a sequence of related observer moments (or even a
continuum of them). To argue that observer moments are independent of
each other is to argue the negation of TIME. With TIME, the measure of
each observer moment is relative to the predecessor state, or the RSSA
is the appropriate principle to use. With not-TIME, each observer
moment has an absolute measure, the ASSA.
On this postulate (which admittedly still fails rigourous statement,
and is not as intuitive as one would like axioms to be), hinges the
whole QTI debate, and many other things besides. With TIME, one has
the RSSA and the possibility of QTI. With not-TIME, one has the
ASSA,and Jacques Mallah's doomsday argument against QTI is valid. See
the great "RSSA vs ASSA debate" on the everything list a few years ago.
Now I claim that TIME is implied by computationalism. Time is needed
for machines to pass from one state to another, ie to actually compute
something. Bruno apparently disagrees, but I haven't heard his
disagreement yet.
Cheers
On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 11:47:30PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
> ...and despite reading the last paragraph several times slowly, I'm afraid
--
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Bruno Marchal
Le 04-mai-05, à 01:53, Russell Standish a écrit :
> On this list, we seem to have two fairly clear camps: those who
> identify observer moments as the fundamental concept, and those who
> regard relationships between observer moments with equal ontological
> status.
OK. As you know I take the relationship into account.
>
> With my TIME postulate, I say that a conscious observer necessarily
> experiences a sequence of related observer moments (or even a
> continuum of them).
With my COMP postulate I say the same. The purely mathematically state
transition function plays the role of your TIME. We do experience a
continuum of observer moments simultaneously (provably with comp) but
just because we are related to a continuum of execution in the
"mathematical" execution of the UD.
> To argue that observer moments are independent of
> each other is to argue the negation of TIME. With TIME, the measure of
> each observer moment is relative to the predecessor state, or the RSSA
> is the appropriate principle to use. With not-TIME, each observer
> moment has an absolute measure, the ASSA.
OK. You know I "belong" to the RSSA.
>
> On this postulate (which admittedly still fails rigourous statement,
> and is not as intuitive as one would like axioms to be), hinges the
> whole QTI debate, and many other things besides. With TIME, one has
> the RSSA and the possibility of QTI. With not-TIME, one has the
> ASSA,and Jacques Mallah's doomsday argument against QTI is valid. See
> the great "RSSA vs ASSA debate" on the everything list a few years
> ago.
>
> Now I claim that TIME is implied by computationalism.
The "illusion" of time (and even of different sort of time like
1-person subjective duration to local 3-person parameter-time) is
implied by comp.
> Time is needed
> for machines to pass from one state to another, ie to actually compute
> something.
I guess our divergence relies on the word "actually". If you need such
a "concrete time" then you need even a "universe". Such actuality is an
indexical. The only time I need is contained in arithmetical truth, in
which I can embed all the block-space of all computational histories.
> Bruno apparently disagrees, but I haven't heard his
> disagreement yet.
I am not sure I understand your TIME. Is it physical or mathematical?
Cheers,
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Russell Standish
on. Like you, I don't need a concrete universe, with concrete time
etc. It was largely your thesis that convinced me of that. Perhaps you
confuse me with Schmidhuber too much !
I wouldn't say that time is illusionary. Illusionary means that
something either not real, or is not what it seems.
I'd prefer to say that time (psychological) is an emergent property of
the 1st person description. (Emergent wrt the 3rd person). If you want
to know what I mean by emergence, please read my paper "On complexity
and emergence" - its fairly short.
By way of analogy, I remember from high school physics that
centrifugal force was called "imaginary". At the time I thought this
was bizarre - the force is real enough, its really a question of
reference frames. In the rotating reference frame, centrifugal force
is real, balancing centripetal force to make the orbiting body
motionless. In the non-rotating reference frame the centripetal force
causes the body to orbit (constant acceleration). Emergence has
something to do with reference frames...
Of course psychological time differs from coordinate time, which is a
3rd person concept, and quite possibly emergent as well (wrt a deeper
description of reality)
The correlation of psychological and coordinate time is interesting,
and I don't feel I understand it fully, but is probably not worth
delving into in this email.
Cheers
On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 09:14:13AM +0200, Bruno Marchal wrote:
>
> Le 04-mai-05, ? 01:53, Russell Standish a ?crit :
--
Stathis Papaioannou
>On this list, we seem to have two fairly clear camps: those who
>identify observer moments as the fundamental concept, and those who
>regard relationships between observer moments with equal ontological
>status.
>
>With my TIME postulate, I say that a conscious observer necessarily
>experiences a sequence of related observer moments (or even a
>continuum of them). To argue that observer moments are independent of
>each other is to argue the negation of TIME. With TIME, the measure of
>each observer moment is relative to the predecessor state, or the RSSA
>is the appropriate principle to use. With not-TIME, each observer
>moment has an absolute measure, the ASSA.
>
>On this postulate (which admittedly still fails rigourous statement,
>and is not as intuitive as one would like axioms to be), hinges the
>whole QTI debate, and many other things besides. With TIME, one has
>the RSSA and the possibility of QTI. With not-TIME, one has the
>ASSA,and Jacques Mallah's doomsday argument against QTI is valid. See
>the great "RSSA vs ASSA debate" on the everything list a few years ago.
>
>Now I claim that TIME is implied by computationalism. Time is needed
>for machines to pass from one state to another, ie to actually compute
>something. Bruno apparently disagrees, but I haven't heard his
>disagreement yet.
I don't see how you could get anywhere if you disregard the relationship
between observer moments. It is this relationship which allows grouping of
different observer moments to give the effect of a continuous stream of
consciousness. The human brain is a machine which produces just such a
sequence of observer moments, which bear a temporal relationship with each
other consistent with your TIME postulate. But I would still say that these
related observer moments are independent of each other in that they are not
necessarily physically or causally connected. I base this on real life
experience (the fact that I feel I am the same person as I was 10 years ago
even though I am now made up of different atoms, in an only approximately
similar configuration, giving rise to only approximately similar memories
and other mental properties), and on thought experiments where continuity of
identity persists despite disruption of the physical and causal link between
the earlier and the later set of observer moments (teleportation etc.).
Another question: what are the implications for the TIME postulate raised by
certain mental illnesses, such as cerebral lesions leading to total loss of
short term memory, so that each observer moment does indeed seem to be
unrelated to the previous ones from the patient's point of view? Or, in
psychotic illnesses the patient can display what is known as "formal thought
disorder", which in the most extreme cases can present as total
fragmentation of all cognitive processes, so that the patient speaks
gibberish ("word salad" is actually the technical term), cannot reason at
all, appears unable to learn from the past or anticipate the future, and
reacts to internal stimuli which seem to vary randomly from moment to
moment. In both these cases, the normal subjective sense of time is severely
disrupted, but the patient is still fully conscious, and often bewildered
and distressed.
--Stathis Papaioannou
_________________________________________________________________
REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings
http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
Hal Finney
probably there is no unique "next" or "previous" relationship among
observer-moments.
The case of non-unique "next" observer-moments is uncontroversial, as it
relates to the universe splitting predicted by the MWI or the analogous
effect in more general multiverse theories. Non-unique "previous"
observer-moments can probably happen as well due to the finite precision
of memory. Any time information is forgotten we would have mental states
merge. This requires a general multiverse theory, or at least a model
of mental states that span MWI branches; the conventional MWI does not
merge branches which have diverged through irreversible measurements.
In this view, then, we can chain observer-moments together to form
observer-paths, or more simply, observers. But the chains are non-unique;
obervers can intersect (share observer-moments and then diverge), or
even braid together in interesting ways. That means that there is no
unique sense in which you are a particular observer, at any moment;
rather, you can be thought of as any of the observers who share your
current observer-moment.
Hal Finney
Russell Standish
>
> I don't see how you could get anywhere if you disregard the relationship
> between observer moments. It is this relationship which allows grouping of
> different observer moments to give the effect of a continuous stream of
> consciousness. The human brain is a machine which produces just such a
> sequence of observer moments, which bear a temporal relationship with each
> other consistent with your TIME postulate. But I would still say that these
> related observer moments are independent of each other in that they are not
> necessarily physically or causally connected. I base this on real life
> experience (the fact that I feel I am the same person as I was 10 years ago
> even though I am now made up of different atoms, in an only approximately
> similar configuration, giving rise to only approximately similar memories
> and other mental properties), and on thought experiments where continuity
> of identity persists despite disruption of the physical and causal link
> between the earlier and the later set of observer moments (teleportation
> etc.).
>
Causality is very much a 1st person emergent phenomenon, governed as
it were by conditional probabilities that evolve according to the
Schroedinger equation. The latter equation is a consequence of 1st
person emergent concepts, such as TIME.
> Another question: what are the implications for the TIME postulate raised
> by certain mental illnesses, such as cerebral lesions leading to total loss
> of short term memory, so that each observer moment does indeed seem to be
> unrelated to the previous ones from the patient's point of view? Or, in
> psychotic illnesses the patient can display what is known as "formal
> thought disorder", which in the most extreme cases can present as total
> fragmentation of all cognitive processes, so that the patient speaks
> gibberish ("word salad" is actually the technical term), cannot reason at
> all, appears unable to learn from the past or anticipate the future, and
> reacts to internal stimuli which seem to vary randomly from moment to
> moment. In both these cases, the normal subjective sense of time is
> severely disrupted, but the patient is still fully conscious, and often
> bewildered and distressed.
>
These cases are very interesting to examine. The difficulty would be in
establishing whether a sufficiently mentally ill person is in fact
conscious. Since consciousness is a 1st person phenomenon, we only
infer consciousness in others by means of a mental model of the mind
based on our own consciousness. When the other individual departs too
much from our mental model, we would be tempted to discount the other
person as being conscious. Certainly, I would regard a reasonably
ordered version of TIME as a prerequisite for consciousness, but that
includes things like Cantor sets just as much as more conventional
notions of continuous time.
Cheers
> --Stathis Papaioannou
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings
> http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
--
George Levy
transitions between observer moments is representing "Time." I have also
been talking about observer moments in the past but I have always
skirted around the issue of defining them.
The concept of observer moment is not clear. For example, you could
compare each observer moment to the node of a graph and the transitions
from one observer moment to the links of the graph. However, it is well
known that a graph can be transformed by changing each node into a
polygon. Each link then becomes a node. In this new format, you could
view "Time" as being represented by the nodes. We are left with two
representations of consciousness: the first is a feeling of becoming
(the first representation in which the links represent time) and the
second is a feeling of being (the second representation in which the
nodes represent time).
Ultimately observer-moments are the stuff that makes up the plenitude.
They are more fundamental than any physical object and more basic than
time and space. If we are to assume some fundamental entity, I think
that observer-moments qualify.
George
Stathis Papaioannou
Descartes came up with "I think, therefore I am" when he asked himself if
there was anything in the world that was safe from extreme scepticism.
Modest though his conclusion sounds, it can be argued that he went too far
in assuming that a thought implies a thinker. If he had stopped at "I
think", then that would really have been the one thing that was beyond all
doubt: the observer-moment.
--Stathis Papaioannou
_________________________________________________________________
MSN Messenger v7. Download now: http://messenger.ninemsn.com.au/
Saibal Mitra
----- Oorspronkelijk bericht -----Van: Ben GoertzelAan: Bruno Marchal ; Saibal MitraVerzonden: Tuesday, May 03, 2005 02:11 PMOnderwerp: RE: Many worlds theory of immortality
Saibal Mitra
>
>
> With my TIME postulate, I say that a conscious observer necessarily
> experiences a sequence of related observer moments (or even a
> continuum of them). To argue that observer moments are independent of
> each other is to argue the negation of TIME. With TIME, the measure of
> each observer moment is relative to the predecessor state, or the RSSA
> is the appropriate principle to use. With not-TIME, each observer
> moment has an absolute measure, the ASSA
>
>
one
completely specifies the state of an observer at a given time, then this
already contains a notion of time as experienced by the observer. So, I
would say that the notion of an abserver moment is more like that of a
tangent space in General Relativity than that of a single space-time point.
Saibal
aet.radal ssg
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou"
To: r.sta...@unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Date: Wed, 04 May 2005 22:40:46 +1000
> snip<
> I don't see how you could get anywhere if you disregard the
> relationship between observer moments. It is this relationship
> which allows grouping of different observer moments to give the
> effect of a continuous stream of consciousness. The human brain is
> a machine which produces just such a sequence of observer moments,
> which bear a temporal relationship with each other consistent with
> your TIME postulate. But I would still say that these related
> observer moments are independent of each other in that they are not
> necessarily physically or causally connected. I base this on real
> life experience (the fact that I feel I am the same person as I was
> 10 years ago even though I am now made up of different atoms, in an
> only approximately similar configuration, giving rise to only
> approximately similar memories and other mental properties),
I would question whether you really "feel" that you are the same person you were 10 years ago. 10 years ago you were 10 years younger. Do you "feel" like you are that age now? 10 years ago there were things that you had no knowledge of, that you do now. Just as you are made up of different atoms, etc now, you also have different experiences, and expanded knowledge base, etc. In other words, you are not the same person and you really don't "feel" like you're the same person. However, you are the sentient human entity that was born however many years ago and have accumulated the sum total of knowledge, experience, etc, that you have so far. That said, the observer moments that you have are connected because they're your observer moments and are compared against your base of past experience, etc. They are casually connected if they are moments that are observed in the first place. You're at bat in a ball game and the pitcher throws the ball and you swing and miss and the ball hits you. Each moment in that sequence is related casually and temporally with the other. The moments can be recalled separately but there is still a casual link.
>and on
> thought experiments where continuity of identity persists despite
> disruption of the physical and causal link between the earlier and
> the later set of observer moments (teleportation etc.).
We don't have teleportation yet, especially the demat/remat type (which IMHO is impossible), so I don't see how invoking that is reasonable. Taking a chance to interpret your intent otherwise, I would say that disruption of so-called physical and casual links can happen anytime consciousness is lost, ie sleep, blow to the head, anesthesia, etc. It doesn't support your argument about observer moments being separate in any case.
>
> Another question: what are the implications for the TIME postulate
> raised by certain mental illnesses, such as cerebral lesions
> leading to total loss of short term memory, so that each observer
> moment does indeed seem to be unrelated to the previous ones from
> the patient's point of view?
The implication is obvious: the "machine" is broken. Therefore the conclusions based on the information that it gathers and processes is defective.
>Or, in psychotic illnesses the patient
> can display what is known as "formal thought disorder", which in
> the most extreme cases can present as total fragmentation of all
> cognitive processes, so that the patient speaks gibberish ("word
> salad" is actually the technical term), cannot reason at all,
> appears unable to learn from the past or anticipate the future, and
> reacts to internal stimuli which seem to vary randomly from moment
> to moment. In both these cases, the normal subjective sense of time
> is severely disrupted, but the patient is still fully conscious,
> and often bewildered and distressed.
Exactly. Broken. No more capable of accurate determination of what is casual, temporal or anything else than a computer is capable of accurate functioning after its been damaged by a virus or some other disruptive event. I had a pocket calculator get wet once and all I could get out of it when I attempted calculations were wrong numbers and sometimes abstract partial digital displays. I no more considered what I was getting from the calculator as valid than I do the perceptions of a patient with "formal thought disorder". The point is their perceptions are wrong, not just different, they're inaccurate and can be demonstrated to be so. It's not good science to base ideas of temporal reality, and other related issues, on someone who's mentally deficient.
>
> --Stathis Papaioannou
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
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Stathis Papaioannou
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou"
To: r.sta...@unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Date: Wed, 04 May 2005 22:40:46 +1000
> snip<
> I don't see how you could get anywhere if you disregard the
> relationship between observer moments. It is this relationship
> which allows grouping of different observer moments to give the
> effect of a continuous stream of consciousness. The human brain is
> a machine which produces just such a sequence of observer moments,
> which bear a temporal relationship with each other consistent with
> your TIME postulate. But I would still say that these related
> observer moments are independent of each other in that they are not
> necessarily physically or causally connected. I base this on real
> life experience (the fact that I feel I am the same person as I wa!
s
> 10 years ago even though I am now made up of different atoms, in an
> only approximately similar configuration, giving rise to only
> approximately similar memories and other mental properties),
I would question whether you really "feel" that you are the same person you were 10 years ago. 10 years ago you were 10 years younger. Do you "feel" like you are that age now? 10 years ago there were things that you had no knowledge of, that you do now. Just as you are made up of different atoms, etc now, you also have different experiences, and expanded knowledge base, etc. In other words, you are not the same person and you really don't "feel" like you're the same person. However, you are the sentient human entity that was born however many years ago and have accumulated the sum total of knowledge, experience, etc, that you have so far. That said, the observer moments that you have are connected because they're your observer moments and are compared against your base of past experience, etc. They are casually connected if they are moments that are observed in the first place. You're at bat in a ball game and the pitcher throws the ball and you swing and miss and th! e ball hits you. Each moment in that sequence is related casually and temporally with the other. The moments can be recalled separately but there is still a casual link.
John Collins
This was an interesting post. You're right in that, until quite
recently, we've understood the world only as well as we've needed to, in
order to survive. But if you believe, as some people on this list do, that
instantaneous 'observer moments' are the only fundamentally real objects in
the universe, (and that the reasoning, 'I think therefore I am' runs
primarily in that direction) then it is the logical struture of our
thopughts that is at each moment retrospectively generating a history in
which there evolved a creature intelligient enough to think them. From this
perspective, there is then a difference when someone becomes too mentally
disfunctional to survive by themselves; then their incoherent patterns of
thought will have to go one better and retrospectively generate a history in
which a successful species evolved, of which they are a defective variant
(we might all belong in this category, and keep each other sane..)
But really, here we have to be more specific about what constitutes an
observer moment, and what does not. Do dogs, worms, viruses have observer
moments, or did they just coevolve in the history we might claim to have
created by thinking and being? I would suggest that they are as real as we
are, and that human consciousness is only distinguished from the animal sort
in matters of quantity and capacity, and believe that the sorts of thoughts
thatcan be taken as the fundamental objects of the universe are those that
appear in the context of an organism successful response to its surrounding
environment. This could be seen as a compromise between taking thoughts as
fundamental, and a more old-fashioned 'physicalist' perspective, but I would
see it more as observer moments being associated with the observer and
his/her/its environment. After all, the distinction between these is pretty
vague: Does the apple I just ate count as me or my environment? What if I
made myself sick? What if I cut off my appendage? Don't worry; I will do
neither of these things.
Yours Sincerely,
Chris Collins.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispa...@hotmail.com>
To: <aet.ra...@post.com>; <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 2:02 PM
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
> Dear aet.radal ssg,
>
> I think you missed my point about the amnesic and psychotic patients,
which
> is not that they are clear thinkers, but that they are conscious despite a
> disability which impairs their perception of time. Your post raises an
> interesting question in that you seem to assume that normally functioning
> human minds have a correct model of reality, as opposed to the "broken"
> minds of the mentally ill. This is really very far from the truth. Human
> brains evolved in a specific environment, often identified as the African
> savannah, so the model of the world constructed by the human mind need
only
> match "reality" to the extent that this promoted survival in that
> environment. As a result, we humans are only able to directly perceive and
> grasp a tiny, tiny slice of physical reality. Furthermore, although we are
> proud of our thinking abilities, the theories about physical reality that
> humans have come up with over the centuries have in general been
> ridiculously bad. I have spent the last ten years treating patients with
> schizophrenia, and I can assure you that however bizarre the delusional
> beliefs these people come up with, there are multiple historical examples
of
> apparently "sane" people holding even more bizarre beliefs, and often
> insisting on pain of death or torture that everyone else agree with them.
>
> You might point out that despite the above, science has made great
progress.
> This is true, but it has taken the cumulative efforts of millions of
people
> over thousands of years to get to our current level of knowledge, which in
> any case is still very far from complete in any field. Scientific progress
> of our species as a whole is mirrored in the efforts of a psychotic
patient
> who gradually develops insight into his illness, recognising that there is
a
> difference between real voices and auditory hallucinations, and learning
to
> reason through delusional beliefs despite the visceral conviction that
"they
> really are out to get me".
>
> --Stathis Papaioannou
Stephen Paul King
I would like to thank you for pointing this out, even thought it should
be obvious to anyone that has any thoughts about consciousness. Any model
that we propose must consider a very wide range of consciousness, including
the insanities, and maybe, just maybe, it might make some predictions about
what the upper and lower bounds on consciousness. Additionally, maybe we
could require, of a theory of consciousness, some explanation of qualia...
Maybe I am asking for too much. ;-)
Stephen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispa...@hotmail.com>
To: <aet.ra...@post.com>; <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 9:02 AM
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
>>Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
>>Date: Sat, 07 May 2005 10:44:25 -0500
>>
>
John M
Stephen Paul King
----- Original Message -----From: John MSent: Monday, May 09, 2005 5:29 PMSubject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Russell Standish
> Dear aet.radal ssg,
>
> I think you missed my point about the amnesic and psychotic patients, which
> is not that they are clear thinkers, but that they are conscious despite a
As I said before, I think this is a valuable contribution, but not
something I know how to deal with at this point in time. Presently,
these psychotic patients account for only a fraction of conscious
observers (assuming they are conscious as you say they are). Quantum
Mechanics only requires that most observers have their own time like
domain, not that all of them do. I'm still not convinced that TIME
isn't a necessary property of observerhood, as opposed to a likely
contingent one, but there the debate stagnates, as I'm not an expert
in psychiatry.
I did want to throw one more po thought. Even though standard QM is
based on continuous time, nowhere does TIME require time to be experienced
continuously. It could just as easily be the Cantor set, say. Might not
the time experienced by these psychotic people be a fractal set like
that, or are you saying they have absolutely no sense of time at all?
Cheers
Stathis Papaioannou
I happen to be a believer in the observer-moment as fundamental, and the
only thing one can be sure of from the first person perspective. "I think,
therefore I am" is taking it too far in deducing the existence of an
observer; "I think, therefore there is a thought" is all that I can be
absolutely certain of. Having said that, however, I don't actually believe
that my thoughts are all independent of each other. The simplest and most
likely explanation is that my thoughts are generated by my brain in the
usual manner. The point is that this is not *logically* necessary, and if we
are talking about consciousness persisting over billions or trillions of
years, the "usual manner" won't be the most practical.
Your second point is something I have often thought about. I am pretty sure
that dogs experience observer-moments, but I am not sure that worms do; if
they do, then maybe our present day computers are not far off from being
conscious, unless there is some non-computational aspect of biological
nervous systems that has so far remained obscure. I would class viruses as
being on a par with inanimate objects as far as conscious experience is
concerned, but who knows, maybe inanimate objects have a rich but utterly
alien subjective life from which we are as completely excluded as if we were
in separate universes.
--Stathis Papaioannou
Stathis Papaioannou
To be fair, I should elaborate on my earlier post about amnesics and
psychotics. If I consider the actual cases I have seen, arguably they do
have *some* sense of the passage of time. Taking the first example, people
with severe Korsakoff Syndrome (due to chronic alcohol abuse) appear to be
completely incapable of laying down new memories. If you enter their room to
perform some uncomfortable medical procedure and they become annoyed with
you, all you have to do is step outside for a moment, then step back inside,
and they are all smiles again, so you can have another go at the procedure,
and repeat this as many times as you want. While you are actually in their
sight, however, they do recognise that you are the same person from moment
to moment, and they do make the connection between the needle you are
sticking into them and the subsequent pain, causing them to become annoyed
at you. So they do have a sense of time, even if only for a few seconds.
The second example, the disorganised schizophrenic, is somewhat more
complex. There is a continuum from mild to extreme disorganisation, and at
the extreme end, it can be very difficult to get any sense of what the
person is thinking, although it is quite easy to get a sense of what they
are feeling and it would be very difficult to maintain a belief that they
are not actually conscious (you really have to see this for yourself to
understand it). Usually, even the most unwell of these patients give some
indirect indication that they maintain some sense of time. For example, if
you hold out a glass of water, they will reach for it and drink from it,
which suggests that they may have a theory about the future, and how they
might influence it to their advantage. Occasionally, however - and I have to
confess I have not actually tried the experiment - there are patients who
seem incapable of even as simple (one could say near-reflexive) a task as
grabbing a glass of water. With treatment, almost all these people improve,
and it is interesting to ask them what was happening during these periods.
Firstly, it is interesting that they actually have any recollection. It is
as if the CPU was defective, but the data was still written to the hard
drive, to be analysed later. They might explain that everything seemed
fragmented, so that although they could see and hear things, the visual
stimuli did not form recognisable objects and the auditory stimuli did not
form recognisable words or other sounds. Furthermore, the various perceptual
data seemed to run into each other spatially, so that it was not possible to
distinguish background from foreground, significant from insignificant.
Catatonic patients, on the other hand, may (later, when better) describe a
state of total inertia, being stuck in the present moment, unable to move
either physically or mentally, unable to even imagine a possibility of
change from the present state, aware of everything going on around them as a
kind of extended simultaneity.
--Stathis Papaioannou
><< attach3 >>
Lee Corbin
> Dear Stathis,
> This was an interesting post. You're right in that, until quite
> recently, we've understood the world only as well as we've needed to, in
> order to survive. But if you believe, as some people on this list do, that
> instantaneous 'observer moments' are the only fundamentally real objects in
> the universe, (and that the reasoning, 'I think therefore I am' runs
> primarily in that direction) then it is the logical structure of our
> thoughts that is at each moment retrospectively generating a history in
> which there evolved a creature intelligent enough to think them.
It is indeed a question of which one suspects to be more
fundamental: observer moments? or what I'll call "atoms
and processes".
An important aspect of this is the age-old desire for
*certainty*. But beginning with several developments
in 20th century mathematics, perhaps culminating in
Morris Kline's excellent book "The Loss of Certainty",
this goal becoming more and more deprecated with the
passing of each decade.
In fact, the XX century saw many axiom-based philosophic
schemes which, it seems to me, were little more than
manifestations of "math-envy". And such schemes and such
thinkers are in less repute than ever these days. (Yet it
sounds as though a number of people on this list are
impressed with the *certainty* with which one can regard
his or her 1st person experiences, and believe that this
is one of its chief advantages.)
Instead, the best theories appear to be those based upon
ideas similar to those of Popper, with "Pan-Critical
Rationalism" being the highest and best form. From these
we affirm that our best theories are those whose origins
---however dubious---have, vitally, withstood powerful
and well-directed criticism, and the test of time.
Among these honored theories are, of course, all our best
scientific theories including heliocentrism, the theory of
evolution, GR and QM. Also these last centuries deployed ideas
that were (or should be) the death of vitalism, from Kohler in
1828, through Urey in 1952 to Watson and Crick in 1953. These
laid what seem to be an irrefutable basis for the main contentions
of materialism, to wit, that even the most complex phenomena we
know of, including the workings of the human brain, ultimately
reduce to the laws of chemistry and physics (i.e. QM).
It is difficult to overstate how successful QM has been. Accuracies
of fifteen decimal places are routine! No one could have anticipated
such unprecedented success. Thus we at this time have very little
reason to doubt the contention that brain behavior ontologically
reduces to QM.
To me, regarding "observer-moments" as fundamental smacks of
solipsism. It strikes me as entirely useless. The different
observer-moments of different (or even the same) entities are
not at all comparable, and we have no means (except
introspective ones) to study the phenomena.
Why not instead adopt the scientific model? That is, that
we are three-dimensional creatures ensconced in a world
governed by the laws of physics, or, what I'll call the
"atoms and processes" model. About observer-moments, I would
say what LaPlace answered to Napoleon about a deity:
"I have no need of that hypothesis".
To be sure, we all have our 1st person experiences, but they're
inaccessible to anyone else. Moreover, their very existence
is hardly problematical: would you really believe some aliens
who landed here and enjoined us in conversation, and then claimed
to have none?
As Eugene Leitl is reported to have said, "Experience is just
what the system looks like from the inside".
Jack earlier wrote
> [Lee wrote]
> > It wouldn't
> > make sense on evolutionary grounds for typical mammals
> > such as ourselves to be unable to report internal
> > impressions, plans, feelings, and anticipations.
>
> This it seems to me is a black box approach. Shades of Skinner's
> behaviorism? Not terribly useful or satisfying IMHO. One could
> take the same approach to any biological system or process:
> pronounce it adaptive (at least sufficiently till now) and
> leave it at that. "Next problem!".
I would say that it's not quite fair to label the materialist
approach "behaviorist", because the behaviorists were notorious
for limiting their inquiries to areas outside the brain. The
brain is a material device, and of course demands explanations.
First-person accounts, on the contrary, while irreplaceable in
psychiatry, have never been of much use in scientific theories,
and efforts to so use them were generally abandoned along about
1890, and for very good reason.
Lee Corbin
Jeanne Houston
new field of "neurotheology" which investigates what goes on in the brain
during ecstatic states, etc. One suggestion that intrigued me was that it
may be possible that in such a state, and I believe that schizophrenics were
also mentioned, that the brain is malfunctioning in such a way as to allow
it to perceive states of reality other than that which the normal brain
would perceive. In other words, the "antenna" (brain) is picking-up signals
that are usually beyond the scope of the normal brain. I wondered if anyone
could comment on this, and if there was any reason to even entertain the
thought that perhaps some people have passed through a crack in the division
between our universe or dimension, into perhaps another? I read this
several years ago and wish that I could recall the details of the article,
but I don't have it anymore.
Jeanne
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispa...@hotmail.com>
To: <r.sta...@unsw.edu.au>
Cc: <aet.ra...@post.com>; <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Sent: Monday, May 09, 2005 11:19 PM
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Bruno Marchal
Le 10-mai-05, à 06:33, Lee Corbin a écrit :
> Why not instead adopt the scientific model? That is, that
> we are three-dimensional creatures ensconced in a world
> governed by the laws of physics, or, what I'll call the
> "atoms and processes" model.
Because we don't need that hypothesis.
That's nice because that hypothesis entails three big unsolved problems:
- what is matter (particles, processes, ...) and where does matter
come from ?
- what is mind ?
- how are they related ?
No doubt that physics gives an admirable compact description of our
neighborhood. But it puts the data "mind" under the rug. What could be
an admirable methodological simplification is now accepted like a
religion. I would not call it a scientific model.
Of course in scientific communication, we cannot use first person
evidences, but it is a category error to derive from that sound
interdiction that we cannot make third person scientific theories
*about* first person phenomena.
> About observer-moments, I would
> say what LaPlace answered to Napoleon about a deity:
> "I have no need of that hypothesis".
But you cannot say they does not exist. You would be lying to yourself.
You are living just one of them right now.
Of course when I say I don't need the hypothesis of "the laws of
physics" I am anticipating the successful derivation of QM from
arithmetical observer moment. It seems to me I got enough to at least
be doubting we need in principle the laws of physics, and the
comp-physics I did derived from the computationalist hypothesis,
although it cannot yet be considered as a real competitor of QM right
now, it is in advance, right now, by putting light on the three
questions above, as I will try to make clear without technics asap (on
both list).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
aet.radal ssg
Dear Stathis:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou"
To: aet.ra...@post.com, everyth...@eskimo.com
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Date: Mon, 09 May 2005 23:02:18 +1000
>
> Dear aet.radal ssg,
>
> I think you missed my point about the amnesic and psychotic
> patients, which is not that they are clear thinkers, but that they
> are conscious despite a disability which impairs their perception
> of time.
OK, let me take what you just said there, "conscious despite a disability which impairs their perception of time". A person can be conscious and have any number of disabilities that impair their perception of reality. Doesn't mean that their perception is accurate, valid, or even mildly interesting. The word "impair" should have been a clue.
>Your post raises an interesting question in that you seem
> to assume that normally functioning human minds have a correct
> model of reality, as opposed to the "broken" minds of the mentally
> ill. This is really very far from the truth.
If the mentally ill had a correct perception of reality, they wouldn't be mentally ill. Hello? Simultaneously, not all sane people have a "correct model of reality" (whatever that means) but they usually know what they're doing on a basic level and function without taking medication to keep them tuned into reality and not the psycho channel. It doesn't mean that they can't be motivated by wrong ideas or misconceptions or even manipulated by somebody smater or with political power, but we're talking apples and oranges now.
> Human brains evolved
> in a specific environment, often identified as the African
> savannah, so the model of the world constructed by the human mind
> need only match "reality" to the extent that this promoted survival
> in that environment.
And if their perception of that reality environment hadn't been correct, they wouldn't have survived. Simultaneously, other creatures, in that same environment, developed other ways other perceiving it. The point you're missing is that the environment is the same. If I take an array of sophisticated measuring and recording devices into that environment, I should be able to detect all of the aspects that most of the non-insect creatures do, and in some cases, a lot of the insect perceptions. However, if I introduce a paranoid schizophrenic into the equation, I will probably not detect the hallucinations that he will see, though I may be able to identify possible external causes.
>As a result, we humans are only able to
> directly perceive and grasp a tiny, tiny slice of physical reality.
Which doesn't make the hallucinations of the mentally ill or those with cognitive disabilities, any more valid.
> Furthermore, although we are proud of our thinking abilities, the
> theories about physical reality that humans have come up with over
> the centuries have in general been ridiculously bad.
I think part of the problem here is the use of the term "reality" when something else would be better. Since you failed to give any examples of what you meant by "theories about physical reality" I will assume that you mean the matters dealing with the nature of the Earth and its place in the solar system, etc. If not, please be specific. In any case, much of those errors in perception had to do with physical limitations in the ability to conduct accurate observations, further crippled by various philosophical dogma.
>I have spent the last ten years treating patients with schizophrenia, and I can
> assure you that however bizarre the delusional beliefs these people
> come up with, there are multiple historical examples of apparently
> "sane" people holding even more bizarre beliefs, and often
> insisting on pain of death or torture that everyone else agree with
> them.
Hallucinations aren't the same as religious or philosophical dogmatic beliefs and usually don't operate the same way, no matter how destructive or misguided the latter might be. I think I detect a straw man here.
It still doesn't make your case that the inability to perceive time accurately is a valid condition on which to postulate ideas about temporal moments not being physically connected. I've done plenty of research in the area of consciousness - links between schizophrenia, psychedelic drug states and self-induced drug-free altered states, the psychology of creativity, comparisons between possible schizophrenic perceptions of parallel worlds and other possible perceptions through various altered states, etc. I'm building, and hope to test this summer, a technological platform through which some schizophrenics might be able, under clinical supervision, to learn to tune out many of their hallucinations. So I know my way around these issues and I'm just saying that you haven't made your case.
>
> You might point out that despite the above, science has made great
> progress.
Actually, I didn't and don't have to.
>This is true, but it has taken the cumulative efforts of
> millions of people over thousands of years to get to our current
> level of knowledge, which in any case is still very far from
> complete in any field. Scientific progress of our species a s a
> whole is mirrored in the efforts of a psychotic patient who
> gradually develops insight into his illness, recognising that there
> is a difference between real voices and auditory hallucinations,
> and learning to reason through delusional beliefs despite the
> visceral conviction that "they really are out to get me".
You just made my point for me. There's a difference between hallucination and objective reality. People with mental illness have a problem with objective reality. Whether they are conscious or not is irrelevent because even if they are conscious, they still can't observe and process objective reality accurately. People with temporal perception disorders, etc. are not what we should be basing our concepts of time in physical objective reality, on. If you do, you really aren't interested in discovering anything new about objective reality. You really just want to "hear" yourself talk, because nothing else worthwhile is coming from it. Chatter. Just my observation.
> --Stathis Papaioannou
>
> > From: "aet.radal ssg"
> > To: everyth...@eskimo.com
> > Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
> > Date: Sat, 07 May 2005 10:44:25 -0500
> >
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> REALESTATE: biggest buy/rent/share listings http://ninemsn.realestate.com.au
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aet.radal ssg
Dear Jeanne:
Message -----
From: "Jeanne Houston"
To: "Stathis Papaioannou" , r.sta...@unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 07:19:01 -0400
I didn't read the article but I am aware of the conceptual basis for this idea. To answer your question, it is possible that altered states, including those caused by mental illness, can allow the brain to pick-up information from elsewhere. However, the differentiation must be made between such elsewhere (or elsewhen) awarenesses and true hallucinations (the same goes for dreams. Some people postulate that some dreams could be awarenesses of other realities but then use lucid dreaming as an example. Right idea, wrong type of dream). Many of the hallucinations common to schizophrenics are based on outside stimuli triggering a preconvieved viewpoint which is then externalized as a hallucination. For example, such a patient may be on his way to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled and see a billboard for an auto body repair shop that features a close-up shot of a man cowering in fear that says "Watch Out! The Morons are Out There!" (a true advertisement). This billboard could stimulate a reaction in the patient based upon the apprehension that the doctor may not know what he's doing and prescribed the wrong medication. This reaction could manifest itself as a merely a thought, "Yeah. And I bet my shrink's a moron too!" or it could extend into the outside world if the patient looks back at the sign. Suddenly the sign could have its own response to this sudden thought that the patient's psychiatrist is a moron and could read something like "Yes! Your shrink's a moron and he's out to get you!"
This is based on research done by Janssen Pharmaceutica http://www.npr.org/programs/atc/features/2002/aug/schizophrenia/ in the development of a simulator of the schizophrenic experience. The simulator was created with the input of actual patients to make it as realistic as possible, and I have used it before, as part of my research. In this case, the hallucinations of the schizophrenic are based on internal apprehensions and are not observations of some parallel reality. The tendency should be resisted to simply assume that just because someone is perceiving something that we aren't, that what they're are perceiving is somehow linked to some interdimensional knowledge or higher reality. If one wants to take that tact, then they must also engage in the very real hard work of substantiating exactly what the nature of these perceptions are and if they have any kind of objective basis. To do that takes a considerable amount of work. Otherwise the question goes unanswered and any consideration of what is or isn't going on is simply unbridled speculation.
Hope that helps.
>
> I once read an article in, I believe, Time Magazine, about the relatively
> new field of "neurotheology" which investigates what goes on in the brain
> during ecstatic states, etc. One suggestion that intrigued me was that it
> may be possible that in such a state, and I believe that schizophrenics were
> also mentioned, that the brain is malfunctioning in such a way as to allow
> it to perceive states of reality other than that which the normal brain
> would perceive. In other words, the "antenna" (brain) is picking-up signals
> that are usually beyond the scope of the normal brain. I wondered if anyone
> could comment on this, and if there was any reason to even entertain the
> thought that perhaps some people have passed through a crack in the division
> between our universe or dimension, into perhaps another? I read this
> several years ago and wish that I could recall the details of the article,
> but I don't have it anymore.
>
> Jeanne
George Levy
Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
I happen to be a believer in the observer-moment as fundamental, and the only thing one can be sure of from the first person perspective. "I think, therefore I am" is taking it too far in deducing the existence of an observer; "I think, therefore there is a thought" is all that I can be absolutely certain of.
I also believe that the observer moment is fundamental, but I don't think there is anything wrong with "I think therefore I am" as long as this statement is taken as a definition of "being" rather than as an explanation: Look at it as "I think, this means 'I am.' "
I you accept that the observer-moment is fundamental, and nothing else is, then "being" cannot be defined using any physical substrate since, at this point of the argument, physics has not been defined yet. You are left only with a definition of "being:" To be is to think. To paraphrase Erdos, "To be is to do math." ;-)
George
Hal Finney
> Why not instead adopt the scientific model? That is, that
> we are three-dimensional creatures ensconced in a world
> governed by the laws of physics, or, what I'll call the
> say what LaPlace answered to Napoleon about a deity:
> "I have no need of that hypothesis".
Observer moments are more than a hypothesis, they are our raw experiences
of the world. It is more the world that is the hypothesis to explain
the observer moments, than vice versa. "I think, therefore I am... an
observer moment," as Descartes meant to say.
However, given the strong evidence we have for the world's existence and
the explanatory power it gives for our experience, I don't think there
is a problem with treating it as fundamental. This leads to a model of
world -> observers -> observer-moments. A world maintains and holds
one or more observers, which can themselves be thought of as composed
of multiple observer moments.
A key point is that the mapping is not just one-to-many. It is
many-to-many. That is, an observer moment is shared among multiple
observers; and an observer exists in multiple worlds.
To explain the first point, observers merge whenever information is
forgotten. And they diverge whenever information is learned. This means
that each observer-moment is a nexus of intersection of many observers.
The observer moment has multiple pasts and multiple futures.
To explain the second point, observers exist in any world which is
consistent with their observations. The amount of information in
an observer is much less than the amount of information in a world
(at least, for observers and worlds like our own). So there are many
worlds which are consistent with the information in an observer, and
the observer can be thought of as occupying all of those worlds.
In this sense, the mapping above might be better expressed as world <->
observers <-> observer-moments. It is many-to-many in both directions.
I see both views - worlds as primary, or observers and observer-moments as
primary - as playing an important role in understanding our relationship
to the multiverse. In terms of choosing actions or making predictions,
we need methods for making quantitative estimates of what is likely
to happen. This requires us to take into consideration the set of
worlds which our observer-moments span, and the set of possible future
observer-moments which we care about.
To calculate, we need a measure over observer-moments. Then we can have a
greater expectation of experiencing observer moments with higher measures.
So how do we do this calculation?
I start by calculating the measure of universes. Using an arbitrary,
simple, universal computer, I would calculate the minimum program size
for creating a given universe. (Yes, I know this is non-computable, but
we can approximate it and use that for our estimates.) The program size
gives the measure of that universe, and then that measure should lead
us to a measure for the observers and observer-moments in that universe.
This step of going from universe-measure to observer-measure seems a bit
problematic to me and I don't have a completely satisfactory solution,
but I won't go into the details of the problems right now.
Anyway, once you have the measure for an observer moment in a given
universe, you can sum the measures over all universes that generate that
particular observer moment, to get the measure of the observer moment.
Then, with a measure over observer-moments, you can take your current
observer moment, look at ones that you identify with in the future, and
consider the measure of those observer moments in helping you to choose
what actions to take. This is how one should behave in a multiverse.
This approach seems to require acknowledgement of the fundamental
importance both of worlds and observer-moments. We use worlds to
calculate measure; we use observer-moments to constrain the set of worlds
that we occupy, now and in the future. A world-only approach would seem
to pin us to a single world and not recognize that we span all worlds
which contain identical observer-moments; an observer-only approach does
not seem to give us grounds to estimate measure a priori (although I
think Bruno may have a method which is supposed to do that). We have
to use both concepts to get a complete picture of what is going on.
Hal Finney
Stathis Papaioannou
thing. The problem is that when something "goes wrong", either in a brain or
in another machine, in the vast majority of cases it will result in some
sort of dysfunction. If you took to your computer with a hammer, there is a
*tiny* chance that you will somehow improve it, or give it some new ability,
but most likely you will damage it. Having said that, the process of
evolution works in exactly this way: random errors occur, and that tiny
proportion which results in survival advantage is selected for. I have heard
of a much older theory about schizophrenia, that the kind of weird/lateral
thinking that occurs in subclinical cases (who are perhaps carriers of the
SZ gene or genes) may be responsible for the great intellectual innovations
in human history, which is why this devastating disease has not died out.
--Stathis Papaioannou
>From: "Jeanne Houston" <jeanne....@sympatico.ca>
>To: "Stathis Papaioannou"
><stathispa...@hotmail.com>,<r.sta...@unsw.edu.au>
>CC: <aet.ra...@post.com>,<everyth...@eskimo.com>
>Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
>Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 07:19:01 -0400
>
_________________________________________________________________
Russell Standish
> I once read an article in, I believe, Time Magazine, about the relatively
> new field of "neurotheology" which investigates what goes on in the brain
> during ecstatic states, etc. One suggestion that intrigued me was that it
> may be possible that in such a state, and I believe that schizophrenics were
> also mentioned, that the brain is malfunctioning in such a way as to allow
> it to perceive states of reality other than that which the normal brain
> would perceive. In other words, the "antenna" (brain) is picking-up signals
> that are usually beyond the scope of the normal brain. I wondered if anyone
> could comment on this, and if there was any reason to even entertain the
> thought that perhaps some people have passed through a crack in the division
> between our universe or dimension, into perhaps another? I read this
> several years ago and wish that I could recall the details of the article,
> but I don't have it anymore.
>
> Jeanne
My own comment is that there are pure 1st person phenomena, and there
are 1st person phenomena shared with other conscious beings. The first
variety should not be accorded with any real significance, beyond that
of a dream, or whatever. The latter shared type is the basis of
objective science. With my TIME and PROJECTION postulates, or with
COMP, there are 1st person phenomena shared by _all_ conscious
beings. This last type we can truly label objective.
Stathis Papaioannou
Stathis Papaioannou
>Le 10-mai-05, à 06:33, Lee Corbin a écrit :
>
>
>>Why not instead adopt the scientific model? That is, that
>>we are three-dimensional creatures ensconced in a world
>>governed by the laws of physics, or, what I'll call the
>>"atoms and processes" model.
>
>Because we don't need that hypothesis.
>That's nice because that hypothesis entails three big unsolved problems:
> - what is matter (particles, processes, ...) and where does matter come
>from ?
>- what is mind ?
>- how are they related ?
>No doubt that physics gives an admirable compact description of our
>neighborhood. But it puts the data "mind" under the rug. What could be an
>admirable methodological simplification is now accepted like a religion. I
>would not call it a scientific model.
>Of course in scientific communication, we cannot use first person
>evidences, but it is a category error to derive from that sound
>interdiction that we cannot make third person scientific theories *about*
>first person phenomena.
OK, it would be wonderful if your above three questions could be answered by
appealing only to maths or logic (and I hope to understand your thesis one
day, Bruno). However, does there *have* to be some deeper explanation? For
example, is it logically impossible that the universe consists, say, of tiny
billiard balls which follow the rules of Newtonian mechanics, with
consciousness being an emergent phenomenon when these billiard balls are in
a particular configuration?
>>About observer-moments, I would
>>say what LaPlace answered to Napoleon about a deity:
>>"I have no need of that hypothesis".
>
>But you cannot say they does not exist. You would be lying to yourself. You
>are living just one of them right now.
>Of course when I say I don't need the hypothesis of "the laws of physics" I
>am anticipating the successful derivation of QM from arithmetical observer
>moment. It seems to me I got enough to at least be doubting we need in
>principle the laws of physics, and the comp-physics I did derived from the
>computationalist hypothesis, although it cannot yet be considered as a real
>competitor of QM right now, it is in advance, right now, by putting light
>on the three questions above, as I will try to make clear without technics
>asap (on both list).
>
>Bruno
>
>http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
I agree with Bruno about observer-moments. Lee, I'll PayPal you $50 if you
can convince me that you can doubt that you are experiencing an
observer-moment!
--Stathis Papaioannou
Lee Corbin
> Lee Corbin writes:
> > Why not instead adopt the scientific model? That is, that
> > we are three-dimensional creatures ensconced in a world
> > governed by the laws of physics, or, what I'll call the
> > "atoms and processes" model. About observer-moments, I would
> > say what LaPlace answered to Napoleon about a deity:
> > "I have no need of that hypothesis".
>
> Observer moments are more than a hypothesis, they are our raw experiences
> of the world. It is more the world that is the hypothesis to explain
> the observer moments, than vice versa. "I think, therefore I am... an
> observer moment," as Descartes meant to say.
Yes, I had overstated my case. Thanks for the correction. Still,
on a certain literal level, I meant what I said: as an *hypothesis*,
I have no need of observer-moments (any more, say, that I would
require the existence of telephones as part of a scientific
*hypothesis*). But I regret implying that I thought they did not
exist.
> However, given the strong evidence we have for the world's existence and
> the explanatory power it gives for our experience, I don't think there
> is a problem with treating it as fundamental. This leads to a model of
> world -> observers -> observer-moments.
Yes, thank you. This is exactly the ontology I had in mind. As another
example, laws-of-physics -> atoms-and-minerals -> telephone-sets.
I have no need of an hypothesis that begins with either observers,
observer-moments, or consciousness.
> A key point is that the mapping is not just one-to-many. It is
> many-to-many. That is, an observer moment is shared among multiple
> observers; and an observer exists in multiple worlds.
Certainly. This is the usual point of view from the MWI.
You continue:
> [i] observers merge whenever information is forgotten. And they
> diverge whenever information is learned.
> [ii] observers exist in any world which is consistent with their
> observations.
Basically, yes. But your second point, which I've labeled (ii),
I think has to be modified in this direction: while it's true
that I am "in" any universe where I'm observing exactly the
same sights, sounds, and tactile sensations (regardless of their
actual histories), it's necessary that it be *me* there, and
not Joe Schmoe. This is accomplished by introducing a second
axis that is calibrated by how similar are the internal reactions
of the entity to mine.
Now the set of my observations lies on a continuum (e.g.,
if the colors I'm seeing become too garish or the shapes I'm
seeing become too unfamiliar, then it's less an observer-moment
that *I'm* having and more one that someone else is having).
Likewise, the set of my internal reactions to my observations
lie on a continuum. Sure, there are Lee Corbins with tails
who are seeing exactly what I'm seeing and typing exactly what
I'm typing, but some of them are a lot angrier and more upset
than I am at having been corrected, and so the coefficient of
personal identity falls off along this axis too with distance.
> I see both views - worlds as primary, or observers and observer-moments as
> primary - as playing an important role in understanding our relationship
> to the multiverse.
Please explain why observers and observer-moments should sometimes
be regarded as primary. They're completely derivative in my ontology.
Of course, it's extremely common for derivative entities, like marks
on a whiteboard exhibiting mathematical relationships, or telephone-sets,
or DNA, to be important along the road of making further predictions
and affording further explanations. But still, all those things,
(like "observers" and "observer-moments" for me) don't feel
fundamental. Not as fundamental, for example, as the Standard Model.
You then outline a nice program for making computations based
upon observer-moments.
> ...
> This approach seems to require acknowledgement of the fundamental
> importance both of worlds and observer-moments. We use worlds to
> calculate measure; we use observer-moments to constrain the set of worlds
> that we occupy, now and in the future. A world-only approach would seem
> to pin us to a single world and not recognize that we span all worlds
> which contain identical observer-moments;
Well, I was taking "world-only" to include all our best theories
of physics, in particular QM. And the MWI interpretation of QM
of course leads us to observer-moments. It didn't occur to me to
restrict "world" to just one spacetime.
Lee
Lee Corbin
> [Lee wrote]
> > About observer-moments, I would say what LaPlace answered to
> > Napoleon about a deity: "I have no need of that hypothesis".
>
> [Bruno responded]
> > But you cannot say they does not exist. You would be lying to yourself. You
> > are living just one of them right now.
> > Of course when I say I don't need the hypothesis of "the laws of physics" I
> > am anticipating the successful derivation of QM from arithmetical observer
> > moment. It seems to me I got enough to at least be doubting we need in
> > principle the laws of physics, and the comp-physics I did derived from the
> > computationalist hypothesis, although it cannot yet be considered as a real
> > competitor of QM right now, it is in advance, right now, by putting light
> > on the three questions above, as I will try to make clear without technics
> > asap (on both list).
Yes, I apologized in an earlier email for appearing to claim
that I believed observer-moments not to exist. After all,
LaPlace was somewhat strongly implying that he didn't believe
in God, or at least it would be reasonable to wonder about his
belief.
Bruno, I certainly wish you the absolute best of luck in
deriving a law of physics from comp! Getting a version
of string theory that afforded predictions would be as
nothing in comparison from starting from incompleteness
(in math) and deriving physics and observers.
Stathis makes a generous offer:
> I agree with Bruno about observer-moments. Lee, I'll PayPal
> you $50 if you can convince me that you can doubt that you
> are experiencing an observer-moment!
You don't know how tempting it is for me to try! Once, many
years ago having become exasperated with two friends one night
who were questioning whether consciousness is indeed necessary
for sentient creatures, I slowly allowed an expression of
extreme shock and incredulity to come over my features. Then I
blurted out to them that indeed it was becoming perfectly clear
to me that I WAS NOT CONSCIOUS, that I simply couldn't relate
to their narratives of all this "internal" stuff. I think that
I half-fooled them, at least for a little while!
No. You and Bruno are perfectly right. I'd be lying if I claimed
not to have any consciousness or observer-moments. But thanks
for the offer anyway!
Lee
Stathis Papaioannou
may be possible to access other universes through dreams or hallucinations
is that it is not really any more credible than speculation that people can
contact the dead, or have been kidnapped by aliens, or any other of the
millions of weird things that so many seem to believe despite the total lack
of supporting evidence. However, this response is completely wrong if MWI is
correct. If I dream tonight that a big green monster has eaten the Sydney
Opera House, then definitely, in some branch of the MW, a big green monster
will eat the Sydney Opera House. Of course, this unfortunate event will
occur even if I *don't* dream it, but I'm not saying that my dream caused
it, only that I saw it happening. It might also be argued that I didn't
really "receive" this information from another branch, but that it was just
a coincidence that my dream matched the reality in the other branch. But
seers don't see things by putting two and two together; they just, well,
*see* them. And if I really could, godlike, enter at random another branch
of the MW and return to this branch to report what I saw, how would the
information provided be any different from my dream? The only difference I
can think of is that with the direct method I would be more likely to visit
a branch with greater measure, but I can probably achieve the same thing by
trying not to think about green monsters when I go to sleep tonight.
--Stathis Papaioannou
>I once read an article in, I believe, Time Magazine, about the relatively
>new field of "neurotheology" which investigates what goes on in the brain
>during ecstatic states, etc. One suggestion that intrigued me was that it
>may be possible that in such a state, and I believe that schizophrenics
>were
>also mentioned, that the brain is malfunctioning in such a way as to allow
>it to perceive states of reality other than that which the normal brain
>would perceive. In other words, the "antenna" (brain) is picking-up
>signals
>that are usually beyond the scope of the normal brain. I wondered if
>anyone
>could comment on this, and if there was any reason to even entertain the
>thought that perhaps some people have passed through a crack in the
>division
>between our universe or dimension, into perhaps another? I read this
>several years ago and wish that I could recall the details of the article,
>but I don't have it anymore.
>
>Jeanne
_________________________________________________________________
aet.radal ssg
Dear Stathis:
Your interpretation of my "anger" says more about you than me. I didn't flame you or call you or mentally ill people names. My only point is that if you want to seriously investigate complex concepts scientifically, then it helps to have the most accurate methods available. Even considering that a person with an illness that prevents them from having temporal awareness (or knowing the difference between one moment to the next) could have some significance on understanding the nature of time is folly for the simple reason it is time that being effected in their case, its their brain's ability to percieve it. Their condition is having know objective effect on time at all. It would be diiferent if you put such a person in a room with a bunch of measuring devices and then detected that temporal anomalies were recorded of some kind, but that doesn't happen. Their perceptions are completely subjective, ie inconsequential, unless you're studying their condition. But, if the purpose of your research is time, like mine is, data based on the perceptions of such an individual is useless, unless, like I suggested, you really just want to jabber about this and that idea, with no criteria for trying to seriously understand the subject at hand.
If these comments upset so much that you think I'm angry, that's on you. I'm simply pointing out what should have been painfully obvious at the onset - you don't make measurement with broken instruments.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou"
To: aet.ra...@post.com, everyth...@eskimo.com
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 17:10:30 +1000
>
> Dear aet.radal.ssg,
>
> You make a few interesting points which under normal circumstances
> I would be happy to continue discussing with you, but the primary
> motivation for your posts seems to be anger that I have raised the
> topic of mental illness. I am sorry if I have upset you, and I hope
> that if you do have the opportunity to work with the mentally ill
> in future you will treat them with compassion.
>
> --Stathis Papaioannou
>
> > From: "aet.radal ssg"
> > To: everyth...@eskimo.com
> > Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
> > Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 09:41:27 -0500
> >
>
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This ties in with the subject header of this series of posts, which is a
rare occurence: Many Wolrds Immortality, according to which there will be
some branch of the multiverse in which I hit enough crows and pigeons on the
way down to form a lifesaving mushy matress (mattress?), is a special case
of a 'many-worlds-absurdity theorem' in which in some branch of the
multiverse I will look down and find my leg be a peg and my ass a giraffe.
But these will only happen if there are infinitely many, rather than just
many, worlds. If you believe in some finite or countable discrete structure
underlying physics, then you could ultimately identify definite events in
which the universe branches off into a finite number of different cases
(which would grow exponentially in time, but would after any given time be
finite).
-Chris Collins
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispa...@hotmail.com>
To: <jeanne....@sympatico.ca>; <r.sta...@unsw.edu.au>
Cc: <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2005 2:25 PM
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Bruno Marchal
little bit incompatible with the one by Stathis would be: if QM is
correct no information can travel from one universe to another. So such
an hallucination can only be such a coincidence or a triviality
(whatever I think, there is a universe where ... but that lead to the
measure problem, and the fact that we cannot really *stay* in a "Harry
Potter" universe).
But what if QM is almost correct but *slightly* incorrect? Then, as
Weinberg has shown in the case where the SWE (Schroedinger Wave
Equation) is changed to be slightly non linear, it becomes possible to
travel or communicate between universes.
It is quite speculative because it makes also the second principle of
thermodynamic wrong in a large part of the multiverse, but it is not
inconsistent. I vaguely remember having read that some cosmologist
believes that they have some case for the slight non linearity of the
SWE. So ...
And what happens with comp? I would just say: open problem. Better
staying agnostic until more information and results are provided.
Of course the real problem of Jeanne's question is that we cannot give
much 3-person weight to "rare" first person narration. We can give
1-weight, but it's probably better to stay mute on this in a 3-list.
Bruno
Le 12-mai-05, à 15:25, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Jesse Mazer
Dear Stathis:
Your interpretation of my "anger" says more about you than me. I didn't flame you or call you or mentally ill people names. My only point is that if you want to seriously investigate complex concepts scientifically, then it helps to have the most accurate methods available. Even considering that a person with an illness that prevents them from having temporal awareness (or knowing the difference between one moment to the next) could have some significance on understanding the nature of time is folly for the simple reason it is time that being effected in their case, its their brain's ability to percieve it. Their condition is having know objective effect on time at all. It would be diiferent if you put such a person in a room with a bunch of measuring devices and then detected that temporal anomalies were recorded of some kind, but that doesn't happen. Their perceptions are completely subjective, ie inconsequential, unless you're studying their condition. But, if the! purpose of your research is time, like mine is, data based on the perceptions of such an individual is useless, unless, like I suggested, you really just want to jabber about this and that idea, with no criteria for trying to seriously understand the subject at hand.
If these comments upset so much that you think I'm angry, that's on you. I'm simply pointing out what should have been painfully obvious at the onset - you don't make measurement with broken instruments.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou"
To: aet.ra...@post.com, everyth...@eskimo.com
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 17:10:30 +1000
>
> Dear aet.radal.ssg,
>
> You make a few interesting points which under normal circumstances
> I would be happy to continue discussing with you, but the primary
> motivation for your posts seems to be anger that I have raised the
> topic of mental illness. I am sorry if I have upset you, and I hope
> that if you do have the opportunity to work with the mentally ill
> in future you will treat them with compassion.
>
> --Stathis Papaioannou
>
> > From: "aet.radal ssg"
> > To: everyth...@eskimo.com
> > Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
> > Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 09:4!
1:27 -0500
> >
>
--
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Russell Standish
???
Could I please request that people post only plain text emails to the
everything list, or at very least include a plain text translation?
This is a sending option available on all HTML email clients I've come
across. It's a real bugger trying to read HTML formatted emails. My
brain's HTML module is obviously defective.
Russell Standish
> Generally, unasked-for attempts at armchair psychology to explain the
> motivations of another poster on an internet forum, like the comment that
> someone "just wants to hear themself talk", are justly considered flames
> and tend to have the effect of derailing productive discussion. I actually
> agree with your other comments about it being implausible that the mentally
> ill have some sort of superior insight into reality, but hey, this list is
> all about rambling speculations about half-formed ideas that probably won't
> pan out to anything, you could just as easily level the same accusation
> against anyone here.
>
> Jesse
>
Furthermore, some people in this are taking quite seriously the
proposition that reality is a whole is derived from the properties of
consciousness. Therefore if some consciousnesses do not experience
time like we experience it, this expands the possible forms time can
have, or may even reduce the TIME (or equivalent) proposition to a
probabilistic rule. The discussion is very relevant.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to establish consciousness in
other beings - dogs probably are conscious, but insects
probably are not for example. So alas, I really have been unable to
assimilate what this case of mentally ill means for the general theory.
Stathis Papaioannou
illness and would claim that there is anything positive about the
experience. While sometimes the mentally ill themselves claim that they have
a superior insight into reality, that's just because they lack insight into
the fact that they are unwell. However, what mental illness, or any other
disease, does provide is a natural experiment that helps us understand the
normal function of the affected organ or system. For just this reason, in
medical research, one of the most common experimental tools is to
deliberately cause lesions in an experimental animal and observe the
resulting effects.
--Stathis Papaioannou
>From: "Jesse Mazer" <laser...@hotmail.com>
>To: aet.ra...@post.com, everyth...@eskimo.com
>Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
>Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 14:48:17 -0400
>
>Generally, unasked-for attempts at armchair psychology to explain the
>motivations of another poster on an internet forum, like the comment that
>someone "just wants to hear themself talk", are justly considered flames
>and tend to have the effect of derailing productive discussion. I actually
>agree with your other comments about it being implausible that the mentally
>ill have some sort of superior insight into reality, but hey, this list is
>all about rambling speculations about half-formed ideas that probably won't
>pan out to anything, you could just as easily level the same accusation
>against anyone here.
>
>Jesse
>
><< message3.txt >>
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Jesse Mazer
>
>I doubt that there are many people who have known someone with a mental
>illness and would claim that there is anything positive about the
>experience. While sometimes the mentally ill themselves claim that they
>have a superior insight into reality, that's just because they lack insight
>into the fact that they are unwell. However, what mental illness, or any
>other disease, does provide is a natural experiment that helps us
>understand the normal function of the affected organ or system. For just
>this reason, in medical research, one of the most common experimental tools
>is to deliberately cause lesions in an experimental animal and observe the
>resulting effects.
Yes, I'd agree with that--and besides intentionally causing lesions in
animals, accidental brain injury in people can give insight into the normal
function of the corresponding brain areas in uninjured people, and sometimes
other types of mental illnesses can provide the same kind of insight.
By the way, on the subject of what mental illnesses tell us about the way
our brains percieve time, here's a very interesting article by Oliver Sacks
on the possibility that our brain strings together a series of "snapshots",
in much the same way that movies work, rather than integrating sensory
information in a more continous way:
http://afr.com/articles/2004/01/22/1074732537267.html
This article was originally from the New York Review of Books, and you can
also read some letters by other scientists written in response at
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17030
Jesse
Saibal Mitra
persons. I don't know if some of you have seen the film 'A Beautiful mind'
about the life of mathematician Nash. In the film Nash was closely
acquainted to persons that didn't realy exist. Only much later when he was
treated for his condition did he realize that some of his close friends
didn't really exist.
One could argue that the persons that Nash was seeing in fact did exist (in
our universe), precisely because Nash's brain was simulating them.
Saibal
Van: "Stathis Papaioannou" <stathispa...@hotmail.com>
Aan: <jeanne....@sympatico.ca>; <r.sta...@unsw.edu.au>
CC: <everyth...@eskimo.com>
Defeat Spammers by launching DDoS attacks on Spam-Websites: http://www.hillscapital.com/antispam/
Stathis Papaioannou
that a representation is a rather poor simulation, one that doesn't talk
back to you, like a film? Is there a sharp dividing line between the two, or
is it a continuum?
--Stathis Papaioannou
_________________________________________________________________
Bruno Marchal
Le 12-mai-05, à 05:53, Lee Corbin a écrit :
> Bruno, I certainly wish you the absolute best of luck in
> deriving a law of physics from comp! Getting a version
> of string theory that afforded predictions would be as
> nothing in comparison from starting from incompleteness
> (in math) and deriving physics and observers.
Many thanks, Lee. I have actually derived a "quantum logic". I hope it
is the good one, in von Neumann sense, which means that all the
probabilities should be capable of being derived from that quantum
logic (which you can seen as the logic of the yes-no experiments, or of
the "projections", or of the "probability one"/probability zero.). It
is just a question of solving mathematical problems now.
A rumor has circulated in Brussels that a (quite good) mathematical
logician, M. Boffa, did solve one of the conjectures in my thesis. I
contacted him and he confirms he has made some progress and that he
would send me the solution by mail, but he dies before. I still don't
know if the math are really hard, but the main (Solovay) technics
clearly can't work. Some Dutch and Georgian logicians seems also to
have try without success. A belgian student in math did find an error
in my thesis, which has enriched the matter, because I have evacuated
too early one of the most "natural" candidate for the arithmetical
quantum logic. In any case the subject is rich, and I would say, that
even if the comp-physics is different from the empircial physics, the
comparison should be interesting: it would isolate the non-comp part of
physics, and provides the first rational reason to believe in ...
materialism.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
aet.radal ssg
Why am I not surprised that I disagree with this response?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stathis Papaioannou"
To: jeanne....@sympatico.ca, r.sta...@unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: Many worlds theory of immortality
Date: Thu, 12 May 2005 23:25:28 +1000
>
> The obvious and sensible-sounding response to Jeanne's question
> whether it may be possible to access other universes through dreams
> or hallucinations is that it is not really any more credible than
> speculation that people can contact the dead, or have been
> kidnapped by aliens, or any other of the millions of weird things
> that so many seem to believe despite the total lack of supporting
> evidence.
Actually, if a person believes they are perceiving a parallel reality a number of questions must be asked first. 1. Is this supposed to be a branch off of our world or is it a world that is distantly related or not related at all? 2. Having identified what type of world, then as much information should be gathered about it as possible to create a database that can be analyzed for evidence from which determinations can be made as to whether the person really is perceiving a parallel world of some kind of just has mental issues. The easiest case would be one where the person in question claims to have awareness of some other world with different technology. If they can't describe it any more than on a superficial level, then the probability is high that its all just some kind of dellusion. However, if they can, especially to the point of it being reproduced here, and especially if they can describe a number of devices or technologies which don't exist here but can be produced here, then I would say that it warrants a much closer look.
The greater the detail a person can obtain from their perceptions, the easier it is to map out a description of the other world. If the detail is great enough, then it might be possible to at least decide that even if it can't be conclusive as to whether or not the information is derived from parallel world perception or a highly detailed hallucination, a better understanding can be had of what it is the person is experiencing. For example, 30 years ago a person walks into a psychiatrist's office and talks about how he keeps having visions of the world and it's all weird. After a number of sessions, the psychiatrist learns that the patient has perceptions of the world where the Soviet Union doesn't exist anymore, there's a major conflict in the Mid East with Iraq, and the World Trade Center doesn't exist anymore. Not enough detail. Could be just wild imagination based on obvious scenarios. However, if the patient starts naming names like George W. Bush, Osama bin Laden, Putin, etc. then the psychiatrist can begin to construct that database and see if any of these people really exist. The more data, the better. Eventually extrapolations can be made as to whether the patient is seeing the future of the world that they're in or perhaps a parallel world.
This is an oversimplification of how the process really works, but one that points a direction for how these kinds of questions are actually investigated. BTW, 30 years ago, almost all science fiction written about the near future, had the Soviet Union still in existence. Anyone saying that they had perceptions of a future where it no loner existed, without the use of nuclear war, would truely have been seen as crazy. Yet, they would have been correct.
>However, this response is completely wrong if MWI is
> correct. If I dream tonight that a big green monster has eaten the
> Sydney Opera House, then definitely, in some branch of the MW, a
> big green monster will eat the Sydney Opera House.
Actually, MWI doesn't mean that just because you think (or dream something) that it happens somewhere. The big green monster that eats the Sydney Opera House could just be some bad vegamite you had. Just like the hallucinations of mentally ill people, or for that matter, drug users, aren't valid observations of reality.
>Of course, this
> unfortunate event will occur even if I *don't* dream it,
The event will only happen if it's a valid perception of another world. Could be other things. Those other things always have to be taken into consideration.
>but I'm not saying that my dream caused it, only that I saw it happening.
Dreams rarely, if ever, have a causal effect just in and of themselves. Causality usually results from taking action because of the dream.
> It might also be argued that I didn't really "receive" this
> information from another branch, but that it was just a coincidence
> that my dream matched the reality in the other branch.
Of course if it happens in another branch you won't have any other form of confirmation of it besides another dream, which is not all that helpful. There exits a criteria for trying to determine whether a dream should even be considered a possible parallel universe dream.
>But seers don't see things by putting two and two together; they just, well,
> *see* them. And if I really could, godlike, enter at random another
> branch of the MW and return to this branch to report what I saw,
> how would the information provided be any different from my dream?
You would hopefully have information that you wouldn't normally have here, of sufficient detail that it would exceed what you could get from a dream. Besides, if you physically went to another universe I would hope that you would bring back physical evidence, like a videotape.
> The only difference I can think of is that with the direct method I
> would be more likely to visit a branch with greater measure, but I
> can probably achieve the same thing by trying not to think about
> green monsters when I go to sleep tonight.
"Greater measure"? "Green Monsters"?
>
> ; --Stathis Papaioannou
>
> > I once read an article in, I believe, Time Magazine, about the relatively
> > new field of "neurotheology" which investigates what goes on in the brain
> > during ecstatic states, etc. One suggestion that intrigued me was that it
> > may be possible that in such a state, and I believe that schizophrenics were
> > also mentioned, that the brain is malfunctioning in such a way as to allow
> > it to perceive states of reality other than that which the normal brain
> > would perceive. In other words, the "antenna" (brain) is picking-up signals
> > that are usually beyond the scope of the normal brain. I wondered if anyone
> > could comment on this, and if there was any reason to even entertain the
> > thought that perhaps some people have passed through a crack in the division
> > between our universe or dime nsion, into perhaps another? I read this
> > several years ago and wish that I could recall the details of the article,
> > but I don't have it anymore.
> >
> > Jeanne
>
> _________________________________________________________________
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