From: Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Date: Mon Aug 17 1998 - 09:47:36 MDT
Nick Bostrom, <bostrom@ndirect.co.uk>, writes:
> Do you know which second you were born? If not, and you were asked to
> guess, you could repond with a probability distribution over a range
> of seconds. The same with minutes; and it's easy to imagine a
> situation where you suffer from amnesia and you are not even sure
> what year you were born. (That is actually quite common among old
> people in some parts of the world where there were no public records
> of births. That's why claims for longevity records tend to come
> from obscure places.) If you can be uncertain what year, then not
> what decade? Are there any clear limits to how far we can push this
> reasoning?
I think there are limits, although not necessarily sharp ones. I cannot
be uncertain about what century I was born in, not if I have enough of
my memories to even be able to know what happened in various centuries.
For one thing, I have memories of 20th century events, so I cannot have
been born earlier than the 20th century. I have no memories whatsoever
about 21st century events, so assuming that the only thing erased from
my memory was my birth date, then I must have been born in the 20th
century.
Similarly I have no personal memories of events from before the decade I
was born, but I do have personal memories of events from that decade and
later ones. Of course my younger memories are hazier and less certain,
but I should be able to narrow down my date of birth to within about a
five to ten year period just based on what I remember experiencing.
This amount of uncertainty is not enough to drive the DA assumption that
I might have been born at any time in human history. I am a product of
my times in a very fundamental way. I would be a very different person
if I were born in the 17th or 23rd centuries.
Hal
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