[ExI] Problems with Platonia again

[Lee Corbin]

Stathis writes

> Lee wrote:
> 
>> Must personal identity get dragged into this? Personal Identity
>> is very controversial in ways that I think have nothing to do
>> with physical law---yet I do see below that perhaps Platonia
>> is to you like Personal Identity is to me.
> 
> It's not personal identity per se but the role of the observer that
> must be taken into account. Suppose there is some rule that determines
> that for every one world in which physical laws continue as they have
> always appeared to do, there are a million worlds in which these laws
> completely break down in the next moment, as a result of which human
> brains cease to function. Then due to anthropic considerations we will
> only observe reality as orderly, even though it is anything but.

Very helpful. Thanks very much. This is, however, an
extravagant hypothesis which puts MWI to shame :-)
(But I gather that Schmidhuber, Hal Finney, Wei Dai,
and you find some economy somewhere.)

>> But on my concept of identity, "I" is a pattern, and it happens
>> to be present in both places equally. So it's simply not the case
>> that "my" experiences are one of L1 or L2 but not the other.
> 
> I think you're pushing a semantic point here. We can agree that there
> is only "one" you, but there are still two separate physical processes
> manifesting the two components making up the whole, and I could in
> theory shake the hand of each of these two components separately,
> altering the experience of one component but not the other.

I agree with that, though here to me "semantic" would include
the conceptual.

Yes, I would undergo a very minor bifurcation. Tegmark by
the way, has a most excellent picture of branching in his immortal
http://it.arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302131 
which I advertised yesterday in another thread. Something happens
exactly along the lines you suggest here, but instead of a hand being
shaken, a gal turns down a guy for a date, and the worlds never match
up again.

>> To me, it is not true that "I am twice
>> as likely to experience" one of these options rather than the
>> other, since I must experience both (i.e., the LC pattern is
>> executing in both spacetime locations).
> 
> This makes it difficult to talk about probability. If you buy a
> lottery ticket, don't you say you are far more likely to lose than
> win, rather than insisting that, in reality, you will certainly both
> win and lose?

You're quite right, as usual. In fact, subjective probability
is *forced* upon the subject. If every day a million copies
of me are made and sent out yet again to a million new
planets, then the one who stays on the same planet he was
on yesterday is absolutely astonished. (After all, he has
memories of tens of thousands of days where he went
to a new planet each morning, and this would be the
first time in that copy's experience it didn't happen. So
even if he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt about the
process truly in action, he'd still be "surprised". And it
would be sophomoric of me to deny that this forbids
talk of probability. While he'll *know* that everything
is normal on the millions of new planets he went to today,
this particular one still experiences the emotion of surprise,
and on the usual meaning of terms, if someone came up
to him and said, "Did anything unusual happen to you today?",
he'd be forced to say that in the main sense it did, (although
in the deeper way, provided he agrees with me, he would
explain that it really didn't).

>>> The upshot of all this is that in a multiverse, your consciousness can
>>> flit about passing through all physical copies with the right sort of
>>> subjective content.
>>
>> You guys (the everything crowd), when you talk about about consciousness
>> flitting here and there, seem to me to be talking as you would of a soul.
> 
> On the contrary, I've deliberately put everything in very concrete
> terms. Consciousness is due to activity in one, and only one,
> collection of matter, as evidenced by the fact that if you give it a
> kick, you will change its experience but not those of the other
> similar collections of matter. The flitting about is due to the fact
> that where there are multiple identical collections of matter it isn't
> possible to know which one you are.

But if there are "multiple identical collections of matter", what 
is different about the one you are (in your manner of speaking)?
It's *that* awkwardness that drives me to my position.

So you see how to me it looks like you are saying that there
is something special about the one speaking, even though all
the rest are speaking in the same wise?

Lee