[extropy-chat] Boltzmann Brains

[Robert Bradbury]

On 2/25/07, Heartland <velvethum at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Stathis Papaioannou:
> You're guaranteed of instant continuation after death, and in
> fact your next conscious moment will most likely be generated by this
> mechanism."
>
> There is no significant difference *in type* between your conscious
> experience and
> a conscious experience of someone else so as long as there exists someone
> who
> remains conscious after you die, you would have to conclude that you'd be
> guaranteed an instant continuation after death, no?


Ah ha, here seems to be the problem.  The questions might be (a) how much
knowledge do you possess of the universe when you "die"; and (b) do you
happen to care if it is still the same when your consciousness starts
running again?

For the "instant continuation" argument to hold, the universe at the point
where the brain reincarnation is activated has to look precisely like the
universe at the point where the original brain incarnation was suspended
(within the limits of ones capability of detecting changes in the state of
the universe).

The question becomes much fuzzier when you consider (b).  Now, I don't tend
to care much if my consciousness recovers itself and various objects in my
bedroom have been moved around.  I might wonder about it but I'm not going
to get really upset.  Similarly, if my bedroom objects are in the same
places but all the detectable pulsars have slowed down by 3 seconds, I'm
going to say hmmm.... but am not going to get really upset.  However, if I
recover my consciousness and things have moved around in my bedroom, and the
pulsars have slowed down, and 6 billion humans have reverted to being slugs,
then I will probably have a problem.

This begs the question.  If I can bring back your brain "state" don't I also
have to bring back everything your brain state depends upon?  [This sounds
like it is leaning in the direction of the years ago blue people discussion
all over again...]

Now, you can escape from this gaping hole in the middle of your driveway by
saying your brain should be recreated in an external universe consistant
state.  But then it seems unlikely that one could claim that is really
*you*.  Its *you* after some electroshock therapy.

Robert
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070225/258612ce/attachment.html>