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simplicio comments on Consciousness of simulations & uploads: a reductio - Less Wrong
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What makes me balk at this is that, if it's true, nobody actually has to bother doing the calculation at all. There doesn't even have to be a physical process that, if construed right, does the simulation.
It seems to follow that all of the infinity of different potential subjective consciousnesses are running right now. Nobody told me I was signing up for that ontology!
You mean you haven't signed up yet for the "Tegmark Mathematical Universe"? Shame on you. :)
Permutation City by Greg Egan has a very similar idea at its heart. According to wikipedia Tegmark has cited the novel, so apparently he agrees about the similarity.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1jm/getting_over_dust_theory/
I see several problems with Tegmark's MU theory:
What's the utility? What does this actually differentiate? How would we even know if other universes exist or how many exist if there is no causal relationship between them? The multiverse in QM is quite different: there is a causal connection, but the QM multiverse we inhabit is a strict subset of the TMU, from what I understand.
In Permutation City, the beings end up encoding themselves into a new universe simply by finding a suitable place in the TMU. The problem of course is why would they even need to do that? Whatever universe they thought they encoded themselves into should still exist in the TMU regardless.
Also, I don't see the point of the above in any case, as even if such a metamathical mystical trick was possible, it would just amount to a copy, with which your current version would have no causal connection to.
Edit: comment deleted. I thought I was responding to something else.
One answer is that in a Tegmark multiverse, all possible universes exist, but not to the same degree; that is, each universe or universe-snapshot has a weight, and that weight is higher if it's causally descended from or simulated inside of other universes with large weight.
Oh, I think I see what's confusing you. In the xkcd comic, the pebbles by themselves aren't a universe, it's the pebbles being interpreted by the right interpreter that are the universe. The right interpreter is simply a mechanism that (at its simplest) is caused to do action X by a pebble, and action Y by there not being a pebble, where X never equals Y.
So yes, somebody does actually have to bother doing the calculation, because the calculation is the universe (or consciousness, or whatever).