[extropy-chat] Mangled Worlds

[Robin Hanson]

At 01:06 PM 2/25/2006, Hal Finney wrote:
>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?  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.  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.

Your picture seems to be of big worlds that spit off tiny worlds which then
immediately start to become mangled.  Instead picture grains of dust which
slowly float and grind each other into smaller pieces, until a big 
cloud of them
smash into an airless moon.   Under this picture most of the experience in
the small worlds is in the floating phase, and only a small part in the smash
phase.


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