If copy=original, I am randomly selected from all my copies, including those which are in simulations.
If copy is not equal to original, some kind of soul exists. This opens new ways to immortality.
If we ignore copies, but accept MWI, there are still branches where superintelligent AI will appear tomorrow and will save me from all possible bad things and upload my mind into more durable carrier.
“If copy=original, I am randomly selected from all my copies, including those which are in simulations.”
How can you be sure you are randomly selected, instead of actually experiencing being all the copies at the same time? (which would result in instantaneous insanity and possibly short-circuit (brain death) but would be more rational nonetheless).
“If copy is not equal to original, some kind of soul exists. This opens new ways to immortality.”
No need to call it soul. Could be simply the electrical current between neurons. Even if you have 2 exactly equal copies, each one will have a separate electrical current. I think it’s less far fetched to assume this than anything else.
(But even then, again, can you really have 2 exact copies in a complex universe? No system is isolate. The slightest change in the environment is enough to make one copy slightly different.)
But even if you could have 2 exact copies… Imagine this: in a weird universe, a mother has twins. Now, normally, twins are only like 95% (just guessing) equal. But imagine these 2 twins turned out 100% equal to the atomic level. Would they be the same person? Would one twin, after dying, somehow continue living in the head of the surviving twin? That’s really far fetched.
“If we ignore copies, but accept MWI, there are still branches where superintelligent AI will appear tomorrow and will save me from all possible bad things and upload my mind into more durable carrier.”
As there will be branches where something bad happens instead. How can you be sure you will end up in the good branches?
Also, it’s not just about the limits of the carrier (brain), but of consciousness itself. Imagine I sped up your thoughts by 1000x for 1 second. You would go insane. Even in a brain 1000x more potent. (Or if you could handle it, maybe it would no longer be “you”. Can you imagine “you” thinking 1000 times as fast and still be “you”? I can’t.)
You can speed up, copy, do all things to matter and software. But maybe consciousness is different, because it has something that matter and software don’t have: experience/awareness.
Also, how can a person be experiencing all the copies at the same time?? That person would be seeing a million different sights at the same time, thinking a million different thoughts at the same time, etc. (At least in MWI each copy is going through different things, right?)
The draft is still unpublished. But there are two types of copies, same person, and same observer-moment (OM). Here I meant OM-copies. As they are the same, there is no million different views. They all see the same thing.
The idea is that “a OM copy” is not a physical thing which has location, but information, like a number. Number 7 doesn’t have location in the physical world. It is present in each place, where 7 objects are presented. But the properties of 7, like that it is odd, are non-local.
This also comes down to our previous discussion on your other paper: it seems impossible to undo past experiences (i.e. by breaking chains of experience or some other way). Nothing will ever change the fact that you experienced x. This just seems as intuitively undeniable to me as a triangle having 3 sides. You can break past chains of information (like erasing history books) but not past chains of experience. Another indication that they might be different.
I think that could only work if you had 2 causal universes (either 2 Hubble volumes or 2 separate universes) exactly equal to each other. Only then could you have 2 persons exactly equal, having the exact same chain of experiences. But we never observe 2 complex macroscopic systems that are exactly equal to the microscopic level. The universe is too complex and chaotic for that. So, the bigger the system, the less likely to happen it becomes. Unless our universe was infinite, which seems impossible since it has been born and it will die. But maybe an infinite amount of universes including many copies of each other? Seems impossible for the same reason (universes end up dying).
(And then, even if you have 2 (or even a billion) exactly equal persons experiencing the exact same chain of experiences in exactly equal causal worlds, we can see that the causal effect is the exact same in all of them, so if one dies, all the others will die too.)
Now, in MWI it could never work, since we know that the “mes” in all different branches are experiencing different things (if each branch corresponds to a different possibility, then the mes in each branch necessarily have to be experiencing different things).
Anyway, even before all of this, I don’t believe in any kind of computationalism, because information by itself has no experience. The number 7 has no experience. Consciousness must be something more complex. Information seems to be an interpretation of the physical world by a consciousness entity.
If copy=original, I am randomly selected from all my copies, including those which are in simulations.
If copy is not equal to original, some kind of soul exists. This opens new ways to immortality.
If we ignore copies, but accept MWI, there are still branches where superintelligent AI will appear tomorrow and will save me from all possible bad things and upload my mind into more durable carrier.
“If copy=original, I am randomly selected from all my copies, including those which are in simulations.”
How can you be sure you are randomly selected, instead of actually experiencing being all the copies at the same time? (which would result in instantaneous insanity and possibly short-circuit (brain death) but would be more rational nonetheless).
“If copy is not equal to original, some kind of soul exists. This opens new ways to immortality.”
No need to call it soul. Could be simply the electrical current between neurons. Even if you have 2 exactly equal copies, each one will have a separate electrical current. I think it’s less far fetched to assume this than anything else.
(But even then, again, can you really have 2 exact copies in a complex universe? No system is isolate. The slightest change in the environment is enough to make one copy slightly different.)
But even if you could have 2 exact copies… Imagine this: in a weird universe, a mother has twins. Now, normally, twins are only like 95% (just guessing) equal. But imagine these 2 twins turned out 100% equal to the atomic level. Would they be the same person? Would one twin, after dying, somehow continue living in the head of the surviving twin? That’s really far fetched.
“If we ignore copies, but accept MWI, there are still branches where superintelligent AI will appear tomorrow and will save me from all possible bad things and upload my mind into more durable carrier.”
As there will be branches where something bad happens instead. How can you be sure you will end up in the good branches?
Also, it’s not just about the limits of the carrier (brain), but of consciousness itself. Imagine I sped up your thoughts by 1000x for 1 second. You would go insane. Even in a brain 1000x more potent. (Or if you could handle it, maybe it would no longer be “you”. Can you imagine “you” thinking 1000 times as fast and still be “you”? I can’t.)
You can speed up, copy, do all things to matter and software. But maybe consciousness is different, because it has something that matter and software don’t have: experience/awareness.
The copy problem is notoriously difficult, I wrote a 100 page draft on it. But check the other thread there I discuss the suggestion “actually experiencing being all the copies at the same time” in comments here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X7vdn4ANkdNwoSyxB/simulation-arguments?commentId=9WNTqJFhvZ5dk3uxg#AbGqrjXmH7acGrzDZ
Got a link for the 100 page draft?
Also, how can a person be experiencing all the copies at the same time?? That person would be seeing a million different sights at the same time, thinking a million different thoughts at the same time, etc. (At least in MWI each copy is going through different things, right?)
The draft is still unpublished. But there are two types of copies, same person, and same observer-moment (OM). Here I meant OM-copies. As they are the same, there is no million different views. They all see the same thing.
The idea is that “a OM copy” is not a physical thing which has location, but information, like a number. Number 7 doesn’t have location in the physical world. It is present in each place, where 7 objects are presented. But the properties of 7, like that it is odd, are non-local.
This also comes down to our previous discussion on your other paper: it seems impossible to undo past experiences (i.e. by breaking chains of experience or some other way). Nothing will ever change the fact that you experienced x. This just seems as intuitively undeniable to me as a triangle having 3 sides. You can break past chains of information (like erasing history books) but not past chains of experience. Another indication that they might be different.
I think that could only work if you had 2 causal universes (either 2 Hubble volumes or 2 separate universes) exactly equal to each other. Only then could you have 2 persons exactly equal, having the exact same chain of experiences. But we never observe 2 complex macroscopic systems that are exactly equal to the microscopic level. The universe is too complex and chaotic for that. So, the bigger the system, the less likely to happen it becomes. Unless our universe was infinite, which seems impossible since it has been born and it will die. But maybe an infinite amount of universes including many copies of each other? Seems impossible for the same reason (universes end up dying).
(And then, even if you have 2 (or even a billion) exactly equal persons experiencing the exact same chain of experiences in exactly equal causal worlds, we can see that the causal effect is the exact same in all of them, so if one dies, all the others will die too.)
Now, in MWI it could never work, since we know that the “mes” in all different branches are experiencing different things (if each branch corresponds to a different possibility, then the mes in each branch necessarily have to be experiencing different things).
Anyway, even before all of this, I don’t believe in any kind of computationalism, because information by itself has no experience. The number 7 has no experience. Consciousness must be something more complex. Information seems to be an interpretation of the physical world by a consciousness entity.