[ExI] The Many Dimensional Sculpture, or dont' bother about runtime

[Bryan Bishop]

Ah, screw it. I have the time. :) Let's get down to business.

On Monday 10 March 2008, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
> I have been thinking about the implications of modal realism for my
> notion of personal identity, and arrived at the conclusion that
> absolutely identical copies and their "runtime" do not matter to me.

You also have to account for divergence of your own self as well; does 
it matter to you that each moment you are changing? That each moment, 
you are no longer yourself? It has been said that "your effort to 
remain what you are is what limits you." But perhaps some people want 
to be limited, perhaps they want to stay the same? This is interesting 
because this leads down to stalemate, down to inaction, down to 
freezing yourself for all eternity so that you may never change again, 
to keeping the same moment running over and over again inside your 
head, which while an interesting offer, many of us here much rather 
prefer the real thing, yes.

> Whatever it means to "be", every event exhibits that property to the
> same degree. Past, present and future exist equally. Time is real,
> yet the ensemble of all events is timeless. This is the core of modal
> realism.

Is it? I'll have to investigate this term, 'modal realism'. Is this the 
same as monads?

> Some small structures within events reflect, or correlate with, their
> surroundings.This special form of reflection or map of surroundings,
> is probably a necessary feature of awareness. In addition to

I do not see this as necessary for the ideas that you go on to discuss. 
How can you have a map of your surroundings? The map is not the 
territory. In Leibniz's monadology, he had an infinite number of monads 
that each contained all infinities of monads and all of their maps, on 
and on and on without end, but how could this be?

> correlations with surroundings, aware structures exhibit also the
> branching, time-axis type of correlation typical of all physical
> objects. Furthermore, there are higher-order correlations, or
> mappings present in some structures - a map of the structure itself,
> reflecting itself in a recursive way. This form of self-correlation

Perhaps mappings and meanings are the fundamentals themselves?

> may be the necessary (although perhaps not sufficient) condition for 
> conscious experience. So you could say that consciousness is a
> property of self-correlated structures, existing timelessly as parts
> of the larger branching chains of world-states. It is possible to

Is consciousness necessarily so fundamental? In answer to my own 
question, I suppose it would have to be, otherwise you are not really 
philosophizing, are you?

> delineate highly complex, many-dimensional, treelike shapes,
> exhibiting these correlations and self-correlations, and being
> separate from other such timeless shapes. Each one of us is a shape
> like this, a miniature tree, or maybe I should say, a seedling of
> conscious life.

But as you go on to later mention, we cannot know this shape, or the 
nature of the seed in its entirety, but this isn't so much of an issue.

> Do I make myself clear? Can you imagine a tree-like, branching,
> mathematical shape, a monumentally huge graph, with every single
> thought and feeling you had, have, and will have in all possible
> worlds, represented simultaneously in its nodes? Like a GLUT (Giant
> Look-Up Table) of you? And this is the only you, the one and unique
> representation and the time/place of your consciousness?
>
> Since every thought and desire correlates with the shape of the tree
> throughout its extent, I see my thoughts, desires and actions as a
> form of sculpture. It is as if time existed, and my decision to write
> this post changed the shape of some branches of my tree of life.
> Every thought, every action chisel out the shape of myself. The shape

Egan explored this concept as well. He wrote that if you are a 
mathematician shuffling neurons around in your brain, you have just 
created a new part of reality, since you're calculating new forms of 
mathematics that might not have otherwise ever been applicable in the 
first place. So, if creation/action is fundamental (thanks Feynman), 
then you are indeed chiseling away, or perhaps adding and being more 
constructive? It would be interesting to explore the idea of everybody 
starting off as a vague mass/chunk of possibility, and then our jobs 
are realizing the entire set of possibilities, and if we can't do that, 
then we have to chisel away some of the fluff and get down to business, 
where we all end up in specialized niches in the end, no?

> itself is timeless, yet what I do correlates with the past, and the
> future. As I wrote in the paragraph about time - time is nothing but
> the existence of correlations between world-states. Causation is
> nothing but correlation...if you know what I mean. In case some
> readers might see this as just my private ravings, this notion of

There are definitely indications of Aristotle's fourth cause, the 'final 
cause', a sort of tautology, which deserves more exploration in the 
context of extropic philosophy.

> Thus I am the many-dimensional sculptor of my past, present and
> future. I do care about the size of my tree of life, which translated
> into time-speak means, I want to live longer. If some of my versions
> in at least some possible universes escape aging and live for
> thousands of years, it is like saying that my tree of life is tall.
> And those who would resolutely refuse life extension? Their trees are
> stunted, mere bushes, since in every possible universe they choose
> death.

Indeed, they did not follow the maximum entropy production principles.

> As I wrote above, each one of us corresponds to only one shape.
> Individual shapes my partially overlap, sharing some parts, and there
> are gazillions of physically distinguishable states in each "I", like
> very close relatives populating the googolplexes of universe-states,
> but there are no "copies". Just like there is only one square, there
> is only one of me-trees. You can't faithfully copy the mathematical
> being, a square. A square that is located in the same place, of the
> same size, with same relation to other mathematical shapes is still
> the same square. To make a copy you need to change its relationship
> to other structures - but maths is unchangeable. Math, the Platonic

Historical context is unchangeable, yes, but perhaps we can cut 
ourselves loose from our histories and become something ... other?

> realm, can be only discovered, not changed. So if you try to make an

I wonder if we need to beat that idea into people's head: discovery, not 
change.

> identical copy of me, you can't do it. You can produce new nodes on

Neither can you. Not completely, that is. :)

> my tree of life by exposing me to new stimuli - to say it timelessly,
> there may be correlations between your actions and the shape of my
> future but you can't copy the whole thing. A million brains running

I am with you, but ...

> exactly the same thought, down to the quantum level or below, is only
> one brain. A million brains that are similar enough to produce the

What? A million brains doing the same thing is really the same thing? I 
do not see how that is true. Suppose we in fact tried that, and we had 
a million brains that were in fact quantumly similiar in most of the 
aspects that matter. Would not their relations and contexts be 
different, wouldn't we have a floating brain field consuming tons of 
resources and so on?

> same macroscopic-level thoughts, words and actions but differing at
> the quantum scale may represent true copies but personally I don't
> care about them - they do not differ in the higher-order correlations
> I mentioned above as necessary for consciousness. Why bother running
> them if they don't materially change the shape of all my thoughts? I
> might object to such copies being tortured, since they would increase
> the measure of pain in the me-tree. Timelessly said, the preference

Are you sure you would object? What is this obsession with "me"ism? 

> inherent in my structure (hopefully) correlates with a small measure
> of quantum-level painful states and with a large number of
> interesting, or pleasant macrostates (i.e. groups of microstates
> corresponding to a single thought).

What?

- Bryan
________________________________________
Bryan Bishop
http://heybryan.org/