Isn’t there still an asymmetry, in that all brains are made of atoms, but few atoms are part of brains, etc? Basically in some sense the higher levels are more rare and fragile than the lower levels.
That’s true, and not something I thought of, since I was focused on ontological rather than statistical asymmetries. Of course, it could turn out to be a temporary condition, once Foomy starts converting its future light-cone to computronium! Also, although most of the bottom levels fail to generate interesting (knowledge-containing) structures, such structures on the higher levels might have the property that—because they squeeze the future—they tend to become present across whole swathes of Everett branches, making them in a full-multiversal sense actually less fragile.
Interesting corollary: one or more levels above morality, in which most moral agents are nonparticipants. I’m not sure where to go with that, so I’m going to just stroke my beard and say “Hmmm” in a wise-sounding way.
The article seems to explicitly state that the blue line mentioned is a deliberate oversimplification for explaining, in general, how to think about knowledge in a reductionist sense. The bigger issue here seems to be that you might be able to build a brain out of something that isn’t atoms, rather than being able to build different things with atoms.
There is a lot less asymmetry between a brain and all the neurons which make it up. However, it is not clear that the forest-trees relationship is genuinely one of identity.
Isn’t there still an asymmetry, in that all brains are made of atoms, but few atoms are part of brains, etc? Basically in some sense the higher levels are more rare and fragile than the lower levels.
That’s true, and not something I thought of, since I was focused on ontological rather than statistical asymmetries. Of course, it could turn out to be a temporary condition, once Foomy starts converting its future light-cone to computronium! Also, although most of the bottom levels fail to generate interesting (knowledge-containing) structures, such structures on the higher levels might have the property that—because they squeeze the future—they tend to become present across whole swathes of Everett branches, making them in a full-multiversal sense actually less fragile.
Interesting corollary: one or more levels above morality, in which most moral agents are nonparticipants. I’m not sure where to go with that, so I’m going to just stroke my beard and say “Hmmm” in a wise-sounding way.
The article seems to explicitly state that the blue line mentioned is a deliberate oversimplification for explaining, in general, how to think about knowledge in a reductionist sense. The bigger issue here seems to be that you might be able to build a brain out of something that isn’t atoms, rather than being able to build different things with atoms.
There is a lot less asymmetry between a brain and all the neurons which make it up. However, it is not clear that the forest-trees relationship is genuinely one of identity.