I have the tree of subjective experience trails branching out in the direction of time’s arrow as a working hypothesis for thinking about personal identity. I’m using it as a way to seemingly consistently model various uploading and teleporting thought experiments that otherwise seem to lead to incongruities when you start getting into things like Moravec Transfer. I feel like I really should get deeper into analyzing the part where the tree hypothesis assumes no fundamental connections wrt. subjective self from present states toward future states, and the interpretation that assumes a continuity of self consistent with everyday intuitions seems to assume one. (That would be a thing that gets cut if someone breaks your original body apart and replaces it with a perfect replica in the span of a nanosecond, but stays intact during normal waking hours. Jury’s out on what happens when you fall asleep or flatline during a therapeutic coma.)
Don’t know enough physics to have an opinion on MWI versus collapse. Don’t know even more physics to have an opinion on timelessness. The motivating problems for me are more of the Reasons and Persons sort of stuff.
My answer to why I’m nevertheless experiencing the things happening right now is the somewhat unsatisfactory “because someone has to”. It feels like a continuous stream of experience because that someone is always operating on memory-carrying brain state that encodes the previous experiences.
I have the tree of subjective experience trails branching out in the direction of time’s arrow as a working hypothesis for thinking about personal identity. I’m using it as a way to seemingly consistently model various uploading and teleporting thought experiments that otherwise seem to lead to incongruities when you start getting into things like Moravec Transfer. I feel like I really should get deeper into analyzing the part where the tree hypothesis assumes no fundamental connections wrt. subjective self from present states toward future states, and the interpretation that assumes a continuity of self consistent with everyday intuitions seems to assume one. (That would be a thing that gets cut if someone breaks your original body apart and replaces it with a perfect replica in the span of a nanosecond, but stays intact during normal waking hours. Jury’s out on what happens when you fall asleep or flatline during a therapeutic coma.)
Don’t know enough physics to have an opinion on MWI versus collapse. Don’t know even more physics to have an opinion on timelessness. The motivating problems for me are more of the Reasons and Persons sort of stuff.
My answer to why I’m nevertheless experiencing the things happening right now is the somewhat unsatisfactory “because someone has to”. It feels like a continuous stream of experience because that someone is always operating on memory-carrying brain state that encodes the previous experiences.