Now my mind is blown. Great post, and great response to HA.
There is an old saying: “Correlation does not imply causation.” I don’t know if this is my own thought, or something I remember hearing, but on seeing this saying, a phrase ran through my mind: If correlation does not imply causation, what does?
“Imply” here means “imply with certainty”, making the saying good advice for people who don’t understand probability.
It still seems to me that there is some actual connection that makes it more likely for me to wake up tomorrow as Eliezer Yudkowsky, than as Britney Spears.
This, at least, is naive—what is the “me” that is more likely to wake up as EY? If “you” woke up as Britney Spears, “you” would be Britney Spears, with her memories and everything. I’d be very surprised if this sentence proved to mean anything, even if a long-term connected picture is necessary for anticipation. (Incidentally, an intermediate view is possible, where experience-moments supervene on short-but-nonzero-duration causal structures—in order to evade Dust Theory—but nothing (except memory) links the experience-moments.)
IL, to do what you suggest you’d have to actually compute the history of your universe, meaning the causal relations would exist, so there wouldn’t be any problem with there being consciousness.
Now my mind is blown. Great post, and great response to HA.
“Imply” here means “imply with certainty”, making the saying good advice for people who don’t understand probability.
This, at least, is naive—what is the “me” that is more likely to wake up as EY? If “you” woke up as Britney Spears, “you” would be Britney Spears, with her memories and everything. I’d be very surprised if this sentence proved to mean anything, even if a long-term connected picture is necessary for anticipation. (Incidentally, an intermediate view is possible, where experience-moments supervene on short-but-nonzero-duration causal structures—in order to evade Dust Theory—but nothing (except memory) links the experience-moments.)
IL, to do what you suggest you’d have to actually compute the history of your universe, meaning the causal relations would exist, so there wouldn’t be any problem with there being consciousness.