hairyfigment comments on A case study in fooling oneself - Less Wrong
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How? What argument? I may very well have misunderstood the standard LW position here, so perhaps I agree with you and just don't know it yet. But I thought Eliezer did in fact suggest we lack a precise enough definition of consciousness to locate ourselves in the quantum ink-blot picture. And he certainly wants to find a better definition.
Approaching Emile's metaphor from this perspective, I thought it pointed out the need for better understanding of the question.
Getting consciousness confused with QM doesn't sound like Eliezer!
You could blame Robin, of course. But the part about consciousness doesn't actually look like confusion to me:
I alluded to this in the quantum-randomized memory discussion, when I said the configurations we were talking about all seemed to have equal amplitude. (So if we find ourselves definitively living in one of them through observation, Mangled Worlds does not appear to change that earlier question). Then another commenter suggested I read about Mangled Worlds. So clearly someone's missed something.
from my understanding of MW, the question of how many worlds can be answered pretty well by ~2 to the power of the average number of decoherence events since the beginning. Unless there's some wierdness with a lot of worlds getting terminated or still-lifed early.
The difference between counting the states in a quantum computer (for example) as one world or many is at most a constant factor, so the fuzziness on our concept of "world" isn't actually that much of a big deal. (I chose a quantum computer because it is probably the most definition-stretching phenomenon).
barring weird stuff like quantum computers, branches get very separate very fast, so I don't think it's all that weird to talk about number of worlds.
Deocherence evernts aren't well defined .. they are always FAPP. That;s the source of the problem.
Eliezer's objection is more about his distaste for infinite sets than about any mysterious properties of consciousness; he feels that the universe should be a large but finite thing rather than a continuum, and thus the granularity of that finite thing becomes an issue.