Open Thread: November 2009

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A mind teaser for the stream-of-consciousness folk. Let's say one day at 6pm Omega predicts your physical state at 8pm and creates your copy with the state of mind identical to what it predicts for 8pm. At 9pm in kills the original you. Did your consciousness just jump back in time? When did that happen?

Not sure who the "stream-of-consciousness folk" are, but I don't see any more problem with a timeless stream (we're all timeless folk, I assume) jumping backward than sideways or forward.

0wedrifid17y

To be consistent with the 'stream' metaphor it would seem that you must say it jumped back at 8pm. It is not too much of a stretch for a metaphorical stream to diverge into two, where one branch can be transported back in time and the other end some time later. I'm not sure if 'jump' is the ideal terminology for the transition. Either way, the whole 'stream-of-consciousness' idea seems to be stretched beyond whatever usefulness it may have had.

0DanArmak17y

Your consciousness (the cloned one of the two) experiences a jump back in time, but the universe history it observes between 6 and 8 for the second time diverges from what it observed the first time, because it itself now acts differently. There's no more an actual backward jump in time than there would be in case Omega just implanted (accurate, predicted) memories of 6 through 8 pm in your brain at 6pm, without any duplications.

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