[ExI] simulation as an improvement over reality.

[John Clark]

On Jan 4, 2011, at 3:27 PM, The Avantguardian wrote:

>> Me:
>> Space-time lines of what, Space-time lines of every atom that was once part of 
>> your body including that atom you pissed down the toilet when you were in the 
>> third grade?
> 
> Yes, that atom's world line orbited a mass of similar lines for some time before 
> being pissed away. That twisted mass of world lines was and is me.

That can't be because the spacetime world lines (a fancy way of saying history) of most things has been erased from the universe; and this has nothing to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it's in addition to it, and it would be true even if you had a magic computer that could instantly perform an infinite number of calculations. Even if the universe were completely deterministic and even if you knew the exact state of the universe as it is right now and even if you had unlimited computational resources at your disposal you still couldn't figure out the complete history of the universe because the same outcome could have been produced in more than one way. Arithmetic is certainly deterministic but if you knew that two positive integers were added and the result was 6 you wouldn't know what those two integers were, they might have been 3 and 3, or 4 and 2, or 5 and 1.

If something no longer exists in the cosmos I don't see how it could be the key to anything, much less identity.

> Atoms come, exchange partners, and go. Some do it quickly, some slowly, but still there is a relatively stable pattern of atomic world lines

Then you also have to assume that one time scale is unique and has properties no other one has, and science can find no evidence of that. On the time scale common in subatomic particles the pattern is indeed extraordinarily stable, but on a geological or astronomical time scale it is extraordinarily ephemeral. 

>> Yet another euphemism for the soul. And please explain why this "autocentric 
>> sense" cannot be copied in a perfect copy.
> 
> But nobody who actually believes in souls would think that I am describing anything remotely like a soul. Furthermore the sense *can* be copied but once it is copied it would become non-identical.

If the copy is non-identical then there is something in the "autocentric sense" that can not be copied, something of ENORMOUS significance that nevertheless cannot be detected by the Scientific Method. There is a word in the English language for something like that and it begins with the letter "s".  

> For some items, perfect copies can't exist.

You seem to have switched tactics, from saying that a perfect copy wouldn't be you to denying it could exist in the first place; but it doesn't matter, the perfect verses the almost perfect dichotomy cannot be the key to identity because otherwise I'd become a different person every time I took a sip of coffee. I don't think I do become a different person, or if I do then I can only conclude that becoming a different person doesn't matter very much.

> imagine you have a perfect replicator that can replicate anything flawlessly and a perfect GPS unit 
> that can measure it's own position with respect to the GPS satellite constellation with indefinitely high precision. Now imagine using the replicator on the GPS unit so that now you have two GPS units. Do the GPS units read *exactly* the same position?

No the GPS units do not read exactly the same position and the reason they do not is due to different environmental conditions that renders them no longer identical, they will have diverged; and if you are being led to a torture chamber and your exact copy is not then the two of you are no longer exact either, you well have diverged.  

> Exchange forces play a role in my argument too because they mediate the Pauli Exclusion Principle that prevents fermions with identical quantum states from occupying the same position in space.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle can be derived by considering 2 identical fermions in different locations and assuming that position is not a unique property of either one so an exchange of the two would not change the universe in any way. The Pauli Exclusion Principle has been observed experimentally proving that the assumption was correct. And you can make a similar deduction concerning 2 identical bosons and conclude that they CAN occupying the same position in space; and again this has been experimentally confirmed to be true. The theory that position is the key to identity just doesn't hold water. 
 
>> So if I give you general anesthesia, put you on a jet to a undisclosed location 
>> and then wake you up Stuart LaForge will be dead and there will just be an 
>> impostor who looks behaves thinks and believes with every fibre of his being 
>> that he is Stuart LaForge
> 
> No because the autocentric sense is about *relative* positioning. It 
> recalibrates wherever I happen to find myself after the anethesia wears off 
> back to being ground zero, the origin of my spatial map.

If the "autocentric sense" recalibrates back to zero and you still feel like you then obviously it has nothing to do with the sense of self; what it actually does have to do with is not clear to me.

> As animals started moving, they developed senses like sight, smell, and hearing. The sense organs were were concentrated on the leading portion of the body in the accustomed direction of movement, because organisms needed to distinguish if they were moving toward predators or other hazards. To void signal propagation delays in processing sensory information from these sense organs, ganglia of nerve cells clustered immediately behind these sensory organs.

Yes, and so these animals felt they were where their sense organs were, and that just happened to be close to where there brain was. But that detail wasn't caused by anything fundamental, just a evolutionary whim and the fact that nerve impulses move very slowly. Light moves about 5 million times as fast as nerve impulses, so your brain could be on the other side of the world but you'd still feel you were where your sense organs were.

  John K Clark


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