[extropy-chat] Mangled Worlds

[Lee Corbin]

Hal writes

> Nothing like a discussion of horrific suffering to pull Lee back onto
> the list!  :-)  That's a smiley.  I too want to welcome him back.

Thank you very much, Hal!

> > So: doesn't this then devolve into the usual mild
> > worry over the small measure hell-branches of the MWI?
> 
> Well, the point of Robin's paper is to eliminate this mild worry by
> showing that (sufficiently) small measure branches (hellish or not) get
> "mangled" and hence (hopefully) are uninhabitable.

Oh.

> The philosophical question I see is this.  Suppose these mangled
> worlds are much more numerous than the "large", conventional worlds.
> And suppose that it turns out that consciousness can survive in such
> worlds, but only for a few moments before it is destroyed.  Then,
> of the total number of conscious observer-moments in the multiverse,
> the great majority are in mangled worlds.
> 
> If this turned out to be the case, would Robin's theory be philosophically
> adequate to explain what we see?

To me, it sounds like the answer must be "yes", in the sense that
Robin's theory is not contrary to what we believe we've seen.
Of course, this emphasizes a difference between what we actually
see at any moment and what we believe we've seen:

At any point in time, of course, we have only memories of what
we have seen and thought. But does this mean that we never
experienced things that we have no memories of?  Of course not!

At least on the pattern theory of identity, which is all that
I claim to be speaking about, at any instant one may have remote
copies, which, on this theory really are the same person. But
this makes a difference here only because of *anticipation*.

I believe that one must anticipate the experiences of future
duplicates whenever and wherever they occur in the universe
(future memory supersets, to be precise). This makes your
concern in my eyes a very real one!  Because one may have
to anticipate all sorts of experiences, without a *particular*
one who writes the histories being aware of the others.

> On one hand, we might say no, because if most observer-moments
> are in mangled worlds, then that is what we would predict we
> would experience, yet it seems that we do not.

It only *seems* so from the perspective of the history we remember.

> OTOH we could say yes, because the mangled-world experiences all
> lead to death (possibly painlessly) and by an extension of the
> anthropic principle, we can only experience worlds where there
> is memory and continuity of consciousness.

Yeah.  And I guess the anthropic principle is a part of my
urge to deny the existence of many real and non-trivial 
universes extending in time in which we begin to notice
a lot of chaotic behavior. But I admit to being confused.

Lee