From: Nick Bostrom (bostrom@ndirect.co.uk)
Date: Fri Aug 14 1998 - 16:43:22 MDT
Mark wrote:
> Nick Bostrom [bostrom@ndirect.co.uk] wrote:
> >And under these assumptions you should also be more likely to inhabit
> >a later stage of the body of the person who will transcend. Given
> >that you inhabit an early body-segment, you are no more likely than
> >anybody else to become the Superbeing. (And this might even be
> >evidence against the hypothesis that there will be such a
> >Superbeing.)
>
> But this is where I think this argument is fundamentally wrong. I can't
> inhabit a later body-segment without having inhabited all earlier segments
> and having memories of it (or some problem which destroys those memories).
I don't see how that is relevant: the "assumptions" that my reply
referred to included the assumption that the observer-moment version
of the DA works. Given this assumption the reasoning goes as follows:
You could have found that your present consciousness-moment was one
of a late Superbeing (maybe remembering once having been a biological
human). Instead you find that it is one of a biological human. What
does this say about the relative number of the Superbeing
observer-moments compared to the number of human observer-moments? If
the time version of the DA is right, and all these observer-moments
belong to the same reference class, then it says that the number of
Superbeing observer-moments is very likely not very much greater than
the number of human observer-moments. That the Superbeings might
remember once having been human makes no difference.
_____________________________________________________
Nick Bostrom
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk
http://www.hedweb.com/nickb
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