shminux comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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This seems like a rather simplistic view, see counter-examples below.
"conviction" might not be a great term, maybe what you mean is a careful conclusion based on something.
except that we forget most of them, and that our memories of the same event change in time, and often are completely fictional.
Not sure what you mean by understanding here, feel free to define it better. For example, we often "understand" our memories differently at different times in our lives.
So, if you forgot what you had for breakfast the other day, you today are no longer a continuation of you from yesterday?
That's a rather non-standard definition. If anything, it's close to monotonicity than to accumulation. If you mean the limit point, then you ought to define what you mean by a neighborhood.
To sum up, your notion of Asymptote needs a lot more fleshing out before it starts making sense.
Good point. The description I gave so far is just a first approximation. In truth, memory is far from ideal. However if we assign weight to memories by their potential impact on our thinking and decision making then I think we would get that most of the memories are preserved, at least on short time scales. So, from my point of view, the "you of today" is only a partial continuation of the "you of yesterday". However it doesn't essentially changing the construction of the Hypermind. It is possible to refine the hypothesis by stating that for every two "pieces of knowledge" a and b, there exists a "moment of consciousness" C s.t. C contains a and b.
Actually I overcomplicated the definition. The definition should read "Exists A s.t. for any B > A, B has property P". The neighbourhoods are sets of the form {B | B > A}. This form of the definition implies the previous form using the assumption that for any A, B there is C > A, B.
Hmm, it seems like your definition of Asymptote is nearly that of a limit ordinal.