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

Lee Corbin lcorbin at rawbw.com
Tue Mar 11 09:47:15 UTC 2008


In an intriguing essay, Rafal discusses "identical copies" and whether their
runtime, calculated separately and summed, is meaningful or important.

One ultimate purpose of philosophy, and I argue the most important,
is be prescriptive. Philosophy most vitally---for me and for many
others---should instrucs us about what actions to take and what
decisions to make.

I don't have time to digress on modal reality, and the way that I think that
it's subsumed by the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics.
In short, MWI so far as I can tell, provides a complete model for modal
reality. The Wikipedia articles on "modal reality" and "ultimate ensemble"
are very clear, and good. If someone wants to start a new thread about
that, fine. I could stand to be corrected here.

> This form of self-correlation 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.

I presume that these are the SAS (self aware structures) described by Tegmark.

> 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?

Your essay is very clear. 

> 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?

Of course, as you know, this is at extreme variance with our
normal usages of the words "you" and the time/places of your
consciousness. For example, either under modal realism or the
MWI, something extremely similar to me (under the conventional
meanings of words) actually received a phone call a few minutes
ago, and so is not typing this. It's a "possible world" under
modal realism, and equally real under the MWI. Below, you use
"versions of you" to talk about, for example, those Rafals who
get to live forever, or those Lees who got a phone call.

(Now I am actually very sympathetic to a definition of "you" that
states that "you are a fuzzy sphere in the space of all algorithms",
and that (a version of) you traces out some particular path over
time. This moving point may leave the sphere so far behind that
"you become someone else".)

Ultimately, again, I want to know what actions I should take and 
what I can expect the different outcomes to be like. But advice I
find here does a Lee in another branch who's in a different
predicament no good. He may be too busy or too wounded to care.

Now on your usage of words, he and I and all the Lee's who
were/are fighting in the Second World War, are simply a part
of the great Tree of Me. An immediate difficulty you might want
to address is, "Does the tree of Lee overlap with the tree of 
Rafal?"  If not, why not?  My own "fuzzy spheres" do allow
for overlap at their extreme edges.

> 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....

Yes.  We both know enough not to be distracted by the apparent
but false connection to Free Will vs. Determinism.

> Causation is nothing but correlation...if you know what I mean.

Actually, I don't. Many years ago John Clark made an excellent
case that for A to cause B reduces simply to "A always comes
before B". Maybe the current branch of the JC tree is doubtful
of that now, but after lengthy debate he convinced me.

Also, the study of "Causality" conducted by Judea Pearl in the
book of that name makes me highly suspicious of trying to
reduce causality to correlation.

> In case some readers might see this as just my private ravings,
> this notion of causality is actually accepted by some notable
> philosophers, e.g. it is expounded upon by Daniel Dennett in
> "Freedom Evolves".

Dennett has a four page section on causality in "Freedom Evolves",
but he explicitly rejects any simple formulations saying "we should
mistrust any informal arguments that masquerade as "proofs"
validating or debunking particular causal doctrines." The section
is basically a beginner's guide to how Dennett intends to use the
term, and is quite all right. As you know, what is very important
about "Freedom Evolves" is his *evitability*.

> 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.

You mean "this version of you wants to live longer", right?

> 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.

Well yes, but I doubt that they choose death in *every*
possible universe. Without recourse to "possible worlds", one
may simply point out that at 75 years of age one of them
happened to make a friend who was the world's most
persuasive cryonics advocate.

> But what about all those copies and "runtime"?

Yes! 

> 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.

Of course there can be no copy of You the big tree, just as there
can be no copy of a fuzzy sphere in the space of all configurations.

By "copies" in these and similar threads, we always meant copies
of a version-of-you in a tiny branch of the overall multiverse.

* Action Item:  Should I dare teleport?  
                        Analysis: the remote version-of-you is well
                        within the fuzzy sphere (I haven't figured
                        out how to translate this answer into Rafal's
                        language)

> So if you try to make an identical copy of me [the Tree], you
> can't do it. You can produce new nodes on 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 first, by a "copy of you" in all these threads, we mean the
sort of creature that comes out of a teleporter booth, or a
fork that results in two branches where there had been just
one. No one ever meant anything different. Moreover, the
"copies" need not be absolutely identical (more about that
later).

> A million brains running 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 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.

Bryan exploded at this point: "What? A million brains doing the
[exact] same thing is really the same thing? I do not see how
that can be true."  Rafal, who never mentions measure, just
makes the logical point that the "Tree of Rafal" has no new
distinct branches when copies are made that are so exact
that they do not make different thoughts.

* Action Item: Do I benefit from the replication of copies that
                      become a tiny bit different almost at once, and
                      then have different thoughts as they explore
                      many different planets?  Should I pay for that?
                      Analysis: Either on Rafal's analysis or mine,
                      the answer is "YES". He'd say your tree of life
                      is enriched, I'd say you get more runtime.

Left unanalyzed for now:  *Action Item: Do I benefit by the
                      multiplication over space of absolutely quantum-
                      mechanically equivalent copies. Analysis: later.

SO I think we agree that it's better for one to get more
runtime---or as you would say---have more and higher
branches in the Tree-of-You. I'd favor leaving the
"absolutely quantum-mechanically  equivalent copies
case" until after we're seeing a little more eye-to-eye
on the above (or making sure we do)  Even though your
subject line directly implied runtime to be taken merely
as summed over absolutely identical copies!  Grrr. :-)

Lee

> 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 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).




More information about the extropy-chat mailing list