[extropy-chat] Mangled Worlds

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Robin Hanson wrote:
> At 09:33 PM 2/23/2006, Hal Finney wrote:
> 
>>> http://www.newscientistspace.com/article/dn8766.html
>> 
>> ... The scary part is the possibility that the mangled worlds
>> actually allow a moment of existence before everyone in them is
>> killed.  These mangled worlds are forking off from the "main"
>> branches at every instant.  By some arguments, they are enormously
>> more numerous than the main-branch worlds. If so, it's very likely
>> that our next instant of experience will be death in a mangled
>> world.  One would hope that these deaths are instantaneous. But
>> it's also possible that they are not, ... Meanwhile the main
>> branches carry on, oblivious.  The mangled worlds would be like
>> sparks thrown off from the main branches, brief but far more
>> numerous than the main branch worlds themselves.  The most common
>> experience for each individual, no matter how long he has lived, 
>> would be sudden, violent death, repeated at every instant of his
>> life, an almost infinite number of times.
> 
> I'm not sure you have the details right, though I don't think you 
> will find the right details much more comforting.   Mangled worlds
> are not small because they are mangled, they become mangled as they
> become too small.   At each split, some children are larger than
> others, but the only thing that makes a world mangled is falling
> below a certain crucial size threshold.   Most worlds are near that
> border, so most children cross that border.   But yes, the moment of
> mangling may be the most common human experience, though fortunately
> an experience almost never remembered.

Robin, I don't have time to respond to this in full, at least not today, 
but when you're talking about how mangled worlds look from a 
first-person perspective, you're invoking a transition about whose 
nature you are yourself confused.  It is very dangerous to try and 
manipulate concepts about which you are confused, especially the C-word. 
  Often you overlook the confusing part.

My current *guess* is this:

People are not blobs of quantum mist moving through time, constantly 
splitting and dividing, with most divided blobs being mangled and 
destroyed or assimilated.

People exist atop causal relations in timeless patterns of quantum mist. 
  When a blob of timeless quantum mist branches its determination of 
other sectors of quantum configuration space, this is experienced as a 
split, since multiple computations continue from the same original 
state.  When one of the branches overruns a barrier of mist already 
present in greater intensity as the shadow of other blobs, then that 
branch doesn't govern causal relations in that section of configuration 
space; since there is no causal relation, there is no computation, and 
hence no computation continuing from your current state to experience 
anything continued from your current state.

Don't identify people with blobs of quantum mist.  This is just a more 
refined version of the Substance Error that leads people to argue that 
someone is "just a copy".  Identify people with causal relations in 
patterns of mist.  No causality = no computation = no people.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence