From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Mon Jun 04 2001 - 05:38:25 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
> Then you are a statist. Damn it all! I was right about the
I'm not a statist. I don't believe that doing things the
bad old-fashioned way makes sense. I'm not a stateist
either, if you want a label, rather call me a processeist.
(Of course, if you can restart a process from a state,
I'm a stateist, too. But a state is not a process, which is
a sequence of states. Personhood is a process, but one which
can be resumed from a state, if plunged into proper context).
> spelling to begin with. Stupidly I thought that the reason
> that some people weren't understanding was that it was spelled
> wrong. NO: it's "statist" derived from the word "state". In
> politics, a statist is someone who believes in the powers
> of the state and thinks it good. Here, it is someone who
You might observe that if you call anyone a statist on the
street, in 90% you will draw a blank stare, and in the few
percent of cases rightful indignation (I'm not a statist!
I'm a free man!) or in very few cases "Of course I'm a statist.
But you seem to imply it's a bad thing?".
Playing with words is sure fun, but Humpty Dumpty you're not.
> believes that
>
> All important qualities of a system depend only upon the
> present configuration of the system, and in principle any
> given characteristic of the system can be captured by some
> (perhaps extremely large) description.
Yes, but of course you have to include full context to
be able to express the potential included in a state. A
bit vector encoding of a person is useless without at
least a blueprint of a hardware to run it on.
> I hope that this isn't too philosophical for you when it
> comes time to apply it to personal identity. :-) From
> what I've read, Eugene Leitl adheres to the state conception
> of physical identity, although not consistently so.
I'm not sure whether you can catch me not being consistent.
The monkey in me happens to think that terminated forks
are evil, especially unhealed forks, and it's a valid
enough reason to not to do it. With time I might grow
more enlightened, or more fatalistic, but right now I
find forks an abomination.
Thou shalt not have a fork with my name on it.
> First, thanks very much, Eugene. You are making a serious
> effort to understand this other point of view, and I really
> appreciate it, even if you do end up concluding that it's
> hogwash.
It's not hogwash. It's just that we seem to be leaving
the field of facts, and moving into opinionland, which
is perfectly allright, but this is not something which
can (or should) be adressed with argumentation. Different
strokes for different folks.
> You reacted to each separate line of my previous post. I'm
> not sure that you're making it easier to understand what I'm
> saying that way. It's possible that you have to consider a
> whole paragraph at a time.
Good idea. It's just I deliberately attempted to preemptively
truncate erection of several straw men.
> First point: we were talking about the possibility of being
> at two times in the same place. Now first, this is a no brainer.
> In ordinary life we all acknowledge that one can be in the same
> place at two different times.
This is not helping, as ordinary life is perfectly irrelevant
when a new phenomenon occurs. Forking occurs in reality only
in a womb with identical twins, and you might observe a judge
will not make one twin suffer for something another did (telling
them apart might become different, especially if you have to
rely on witnesses, and DNA fingerprints, but it's not relevant
in regards to them being superficially similiar but different
people).
> :-) This part is so simple that I think you're wondering what
> I could mean. If you were on a witness stand and the prosecutor
> asked you if you were sitting in a certain chair on Wednesday
> then left the city and then were later also sitting in that same
> chair, you would understand him exactly. That's all it means
Yes, but common sense is strictly irrelevant here. We don't
have forks, whether reversible, or irreversible. When the
transporter malfunctioned, and the other Ryker commited a
crime you won't get a judge in the Star Trek universe
confusing them, and persecuting the wrong fork prong.
> "for someone to be at two different times in the same place".
> (The obverse, "being in two different places at the same time"
> is another story, and is very debatable, although I won't go
> into it now.)
Hint: invocations of common sense are not valid argument.
If anything, I have learned not to trust common sense when
new phenomena are concerned.
> It's merely that the current state contains all the information.
All information for what? I think I know what you're talking about,
but it is really helpful to spell out the details, even if we're
getting a tad verbose.
> Think thermodynamics. Or think that if you were uploaded, then
> you could be restarted from a single state. Or if your brain
Sure, a checkpoint, and the machine to run it, and you're back
in circulation.
> was frozen to almost absolute zero, then you could in principle
> be restarted from that frozen state.
Actually, that is also a pure gedanken. There's some serious scrambling
going on at the ultrastructural scale, which is provably irreversible.
Some of this can be addressed with new tricks, but some of it
is plain physics, and not fixable. The jury is out, on whether the
ultrastructure scrambling is relevant to functionality. I'm definitely
worried here, and do not understand the relatively laidback attitude
of most cryonicists. Hey, it's your ass that's on the line. Don't
you think it requires a little more thought, then what you apply when
redecorating the fambly estate?
> Yes. Things could be heading there, but it turns out
> that they're not. I know of no paradoxes in the
> information theory of personal identity.
I'm not sure whether I'm getting my Egan right, but I
think he argues that you can make worldline salami
salad (by randomly jumbling the slices), and still
no one gets hurt.
Of course, I would like to see the recipe for that
salad, which doesn't start with "take one baton of
worldline salami, apply Occam's razor such that...."
> I agree, but I am of course suggesting that if people think
> these things through, then there will be some scenarios that
> easily and transparently reduce to others, and so if you
> are not alarmed by the former, then you shouldn't be alarmed
> by the latter. But whatever.
Right, you think it's okay for you personally, I don't think
it's okay for me personally. We agree to disagree, a perfectly
valid outcome.
> I understand. But the very flat case doesn't present a problem.
> Let's say instead that you have to do this, and have to do it
> every day, and it's always one minute in duration (not a very
> flat box). So before entering the black box every day you say,
> "I'm definitely going to come out of this okay no matter which
> one walks out of it. They're all future continuers of me."
Sure, but please let me apply this cattleprod here, and that
hot iron there, and that hammer here, but hey, there's no need
to scream, you'll be perfectly allright in a couple of minutes,
I'm just having a little fun, albeit admittedly at your expense.
> Incidentally, I despise the "continuer" concept---it fools
> even very good statists sometimes. But nonetheless, you will
> probably be thinking something along those lines.
I'm sure I'm thinking. Doctor said it's not good for you, so
I'm trying to pare my vices down to a minimum.
> If this happened every day, you'd get very used to it.
Perhaps I don't want getting used to it. You're
welcome to live your extreme lifestyles of snuff
paraphilia, if it looks like fun, I might even join
you later.
> All 1000 would actually spend the minute thinking about
> other things, because it would get boring. And the you
Okay, no prob, I'll get snuffed in one minute, with a probability
of 1000:1 (hey, that's some pretty lousy odds for Russian roulette),
but it's allright, I'm totally cool with that.
> that emerged would remember that every day he emerges,
> and it's not a problem. (We'll look into the box in
> a second, see below.)
>
> Let's look closely from a physical perspective as to WHY
> Eugene Leitl survives this daily event. The reason is
> that the entity that emerges from the black box is by
> all physical criteria Eugene Leitl. And physical criteria
There's no measurement procedure that can find a
difference. There's your path independence, but nevertheless
some trajectories passing through the not so flat blackbox can
be remarkably painful. There's a reason to demand the
flatness to be below biological chronon, as it doesn't hurt
if you can't become aware of it. But even if it's quick,
the fact remains the same. You truncated the other forks
at the time of forking. I don't like you doing that, it's
a personal thing.
> is all that there is. The 1000 should understand that
> what is going to happen to them is equivalent to being
> replaced by a checkpoint, and then with memories added.
It might be equivalent, but I still will not let you
to make you me a truncated fork. You can be as fatalistic
about it as you wish, there is no reason I have to. It's
sufficient to say that I don't like it. Consistency is
for weenies.
> Now I'm being perhaps unclear again, and so I better slowly
> elaborate. I claim that even if during the moment in the box
> the 999 were identified as those going to be disintegrated
> and the 1 was identified as the one who was going to survive,
> it wouldn't make any difference. Suppose that I was one of
Hah, I would like to see the 1000 of you with the plastique
turban detonators wired to a random number generator trying
to keep your calm. My god, this is going to be such a mess.
> the 999. Here is what I would say to myself: "Well, if
> I knew that I were going to be replaced by a backup that
> was one minute old, that wouldn't worry me. So what do
That would worry me, because it would imply that I kicked
the bucket not long ago. You can be damn sure that a
former version of me who got a flag up saying "I'm a
restart point 1099, time elapsed at copy terminated
is +4353563+/-5 ticks) would look lively indeed, to see
whatever has offed me recently, and whether it's still
around, to finish me off, again.
> we have here, this guy whose going to survive, as opposed
> to me who is going to die? That guy is the same as me
> a minute ago, but with some extra memories added. Big
> deal. One minute's memories mean nothing. The state is
Big deal, killing a few people means nothing.
> all that matters. His state and mine are identical for
> all practical purposes."
I think that mantra does help, but in my case not much.
> and I wouldn't think anything of it. The important point
> is this: I would know that Lee Corbin is going to walk
> out of the box just fine, and that tomorrow a groggy Lee
> Corbin staggers out of bed into the shower just as usual.
> **And that is all that I want of the physics of tomorrow**.
> Namely that a certifiable Lee Corbin exist. (Actually, I'd
> like as many to exist as possible, but that's another story.)
Ah, you're not that bad, after all. Just try to contain it,
as we don't need a Lee Corbin plague on our hands, the 'genes
would also like a little spacetime of their own. We promise
to be very careful not to produce explosive autoamplification.
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