[extropy-chat] Mangled Worlds

[Robin Hanson]

At 03:13 PM 2/24/2006, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> > Couldn't I say something similar if I smashed your head in with a hammer?
> > As I smash your brain I disrupt the causal relations, preventing 
> the relevant
> > computations, and making you cease to exist.   Still might hurt 
> like hell as
> > you died though.
>
>Bearing in mind that I myself am not wholly unconfused...
>
>As you smash my brain, I die in *all* the branches.  The pain and
>suffering occurs while my brain is still processing.  My brain
>experiences a continuous reduction of processing which trails into
>death.  It's not that the computation stops but that my death is what is
>computed.
>
>There are separate questions for (a) whether quantum immortality works,
>that is, the subjective outcome when nearly all computations continue
>with your death but a few continue with you alive; and (b) what happens
>if the underlying computation itself only continues in certain
>directions, all of them containing you.  I don't see any "aborted
>destiny" about the branches that halt at a barrier of mist shadowed from
>other sources; the computation just never goes there to begin with.
>Follow the computation, not the mist; this is a more sophisticated
>version of the mental error of following material substances to
>determine personal identity.
>
>I really have a hard time visualizing any way in which quantum mangling
>would correspond to experienced "mangling".  I think there may be a
>runaway metaphor here.

The question is the speed of the mangling process.  If it were as slow as the
time it takes a hammer to kill your brain, then your brain would similarly
compute your death.   If it only took a nanosecond, you wouldn't notice it.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323