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ChristianKl comments on Memory is Everything - Less Wrong
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That basically the kind of philosophy that got young children tortured in the past because they supposedly were to young to form memories.
The idea of experiencing something without it having an effect on your psychological state is wrong. Memories are not really required for that to happen. You expect the concept of memories to behave in a way that it doesn't. Discussing memories based on bad concept of what it happens to be isn't very useful.
Memories are for example not required for Pavlovian conditioning.
The OP says “your subconscious will also not be affected”, so ISTM you're fighting the hypothetical.
If the hypothesis is contrary to how humans really work, our intuitions may be less relevant here (because they were formed by the real world).
Good point, though there are many many more thought experiments that applies to.
Of course I'm fighting the hypothetical thought experiment. I think the notion of experience without being affected doesn't make any sense.
IMO the question whether you would still value giving your sister penicillin if it didn't cure her pneumonia doesn't completely stop make sense even if it's impossible for penicillin to not cure pneumonia¹, though it does become less useful. Do we value experiences we won't remember terminally, besides their instrumental value for not getting PTSD or whatnot in the future?
That isn't what I'm arguing. In arguing that his notion of experience fundamentally flawed.
If you engage in thought experiments that are build on mistaken assumptions about human cognition you likely won't move in a direction of understanding the subject matter better. Instead you propagate errors across your whole belief system.
There are much nicer real world examples that you can use when you want to speak about trade off between remembered experience and experience as felt in the moment. Problems that actually matter for day to day actions.
It seems rather silly to argue about that, when the thought experiment starts with Omega and bets for amounts of a billion dollars. That allows glossing over a lot of details. Your position is like objecting to a physics thought experiment that assumes frictionless surfaces, while the same thought experiment also assumes mass-less objects.
As a simple example: Omega might make a ridiculously precise scan of your entire body, subject you to the experiment (depending on which branch you chose), then restore each molecule to the same position and state it was during the initial scan, within the precision limits of the initial scan. Sure, there’ll be quantum uncertainty and such, but there’s no obvious reason why the differences would be greater than, say, the differences appearing during nodding off for a couple minutes. Omega even has the option of anesthetizing and freezing you during the scan and restoration, to reduce errors. You’d remember that part of the procedure, but you still wouldn’t be affected by what happened in-between.
(If you think about it, that’s very nearly equivalent to applying the conditions of the bet, with extremely high time acceleration, or while you’re suspended, to a very accurate simulation of yourself. The end effect is the same: an instance of you experienced torture/ultra-pampering for a week, and then an instance of you, which doesn’t remember the first part, experiences gaining/loosing a billion dollars.)
If the goal of the thought experiment is to think about the notion of mass and how it affects frictions that's indeed a bad thought experiment.
Your rephrasing essentially says that you torture an identical copy of a person for a week. It raises all sorts of issues around identity and copying but it ceases to be an experiment that's about memory.
If you read it carefully, my first rephrasing actually says that you torture the original person for a week, and then you (almost) perfectly erase their memories (and physical changes) during that week.
This is not changing the nature of the thought experiment in the OP; it is exactly the same experiment, plus a hypothetical example of how it could be achieved technically, because you implied that the experiment in the OP is impossible to achieve and thus ill-posed.
Or, at least, that’s how I interpreted “Of course I'm fighting the hypothetical thought experiment. I think the notion of experience without being affected doesn't make any sense.” I just gave an example of how one can experience something and not be affected. It was a somewhat extreme example, but it seems appropriate when Omega is involved.
This depends very much on the definition of "original" and notions of identity. You can't expect that they behave in a common sense manner in such a thought experiment.
Sure, but then why do you expect memory and experience would also behave in a common sense manner? (At least, that’s what I think you did in your first comment.)
I interpreted the OP as “I’m confused about memory and experience; let’s try a thought experiment about a very uncommon situation just to see what we think it would happen”. And your first comment reads to me as “you picked a bad thought experiment, because you’re not describing a common situation”. Which seems to completely miss the point, the whole purpose of the thought experiment was to investigate the consequences of something very distinct from situations where “common sense” has real experience to rely on.
The part about torturing children I don’t even get at all. Wondering about something seems to me almost the opposite of the philosophy of “doing something because you think you know the answer”. Should we never do thought experiments, because someone might act on mistaken assumptions about those ideas? Not thinking about something before doing it sounds to me like exactly the opposite of the correct strategy.