[ExI] Affecting Past Experience

Stathis Papaioannou stathisp at gmail.com
Sun Jul 22 09:41:38 UTC 2007


On 22/07/07, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:

> That certainly doesn't seem so to me. Consider whether I really
> did commit a crime or only imagined having committed it.  In
> the former case, the police may be hot on my heels!  And as
> for the Martian Adventure, if it really happened and the character
> made a real impact on history, his life will hardly be the same:
> he'll be nominated for Savior of Mars at the very least.  Perhaps
> you mean something else, but I don't see what.

I was thinking of the case where the illusion was perfect, as in a
virtual reality program with all the evidence of the past
pre-programmed so that it is impossible for anyone inside the program
to know whether it had or had not actually happened.

> > My original experiment could conceivably be modelled without the need
> > for godlike powers. Suppose I am informed that I am living in a
> > computer simulation of a special kind. My whole life from birth to
> > death has been determined, and is being run in real time in day long
> > sections simultaneously on geographically separated computers, one
> > computer for each day of my life, so that the whole thing is over and
> > done with in a single day in the real world. I am also aware that
> > these computers are the focus of a bombing campaign by forces who
> > believe sentient software is blasphemous.
>
> Ah, very nice scenario.
>
> > Although it's beyond my control, I fervently hope that the terrorists
> > will not destroy the computers running days in my subjective future,
> > but I don't really care if they destroy computers running days in my
> > subjective past.
>
> I don't really know why you care more about these discrete *future*
> days than you do about the *past* ones. If tomorrow is a day that
> gets bombed (I really like the imagery [1]), then you'll simply not
> experience that.  But the day after tomorrow and all the days
> beyond, it will be exactly the same as if tomorrow happened.
> (Actually, were I scheduled for root canal surgery for tomorrow,
> then I would even hope that it got bombed!)

This brings up another twist in that you wouldn't know if every second
day of your life, or an even larger proportion, did not actually
occur. Would you agree to be given some advantage on your "on" days if
you gave up a proportion of your future runtime as "off" days? I am
not sure how I would answer this question, but it would be much less
problematic if it were only past days that I was giving up.

> > In fact, I would prefer that all my past days be destroyed if it could
> > save one future day, even though that way the total runtime of all
> > instances of me is reduced.
>
> Evidently you and I simply calculate these things differently. I would
> not like losing some actual very pleasant day in my past (retaining
> only the memories).  True, I cannot tell if it gets bombed or not,
> but I have the intellectual knowledge that my life as a whole was
> worse off for not having really experienced that day.

The intellectual knowledge would be worth something, but it wouldn't
be worth as much as actual future experiences. Would you give up the
last ten years for the next ten years, if your and everyone else's
memories of the last ten years remained unchanged?


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou



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