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ike comments on A resolution to the Doomsday Argument. - Less Wrong
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I deny that this is meaningful. If there are two copies of me, both "have my consciousness". I fail to see any sense in which my consciousness must move to only one copy.
I do not claim that. I claim that I exist in both branches, up until one of them no longer contains my consciousness, because I'm dead, and then I only exist in one branch. (In fact, I can consider my sleeping self unconscious, in which case no branches contained my consciousness until I woke up.)
Then many copies of my consciousness will exist, some slowly dying each day.
I don't have any look-ahead required in my model at all.
Can you dissolve consciousness? What test can be performed to see which branch my consciousness has moved to, that doesn't require me to be awake, nor have knowledge of the random data?
OK, now imagine that the computer shows you the number n on it's screen. What will you see? You say that both copies have your consciousness; will you see a superposition of numbers? I don't see how simultaneously being in different branches makes sense from the qualia viewpoint.
Also, let's remove sleeping from the thought experiment. It is an unnecessary complication; by the way, I don't think that consciousness flow is interrupted while sleeping.
And no, I'm currently unable to dissolve the hard problem of consciousness.
No, one copy will see 1, another 2, etc. Something like that will fork my consciousness, which has uncertain effects, which is why I proposed being asleep throughout. Until my brain has any info about what the data is, my consciousness hasn't forked yet. The fact that the info is "out there" in this world is irrelevant; the opposite data is also out there "in this world", as long as I don't know, and both actually exist (although that requirement arguably is also irrelevant to the anthropic math), then I exist in both worlds. In other words, both copies will be "continuations" of me. If one suddenly disappears, then only the other "continues" me.
There's a reason I included it. I'm more confident that the outcome will be good with it than without. In particular, if I'm not sleeping when killed, I expect to experience death.
But the fact that you think it's not interrupted when sleeping suggests we're using different definitions. If it's because of dreaming, then specify that the person isn't dreaming. The main point is that I won't feel pain upon dying (or in fact, won't feel anything before dying), so putting me under general anesthesia and ensuring the death would be before I begin to feel anything should be enough, in that case.
I meant just enough that I could understand what you mean when you claim that consciousness must only go to one path.
I think, the problem with consciousness/qualia discussions is that we don't have a good set of terms to describe such phenomena, while being unable to reduce it to other terms.
I mean, one of the copies would be you (and share your qualia), while others are forks of you. That's because I think that a) your consciousness is preserved by the branching process and b) you don't experience living in different branches, at least after you observed their difference. So, if the quantum lottery works when you're awake, it requres look-ahead in time.
Now about sleeping. My best guess about consciousness is that we are sort-of conscious even while in non-REM sleep phases and under anesthesia; and halting (almost) all electric activity in the brain doesn't preserve consciousness. That's derived from the requirement of continuity of experience, which I find plausible. But that's probably irrelevant to our discussion.
As far as I understand, in your model, one's conscious experience is halted during quantum lottery (i.e. sleep is some kind of a temporary death). And then, his conscious experience continues in one of the survived copies. Is this a correct description of your model?
In my model, all the copies have qualia. Put another way, clearly there's no way for an outside observer to say about any copy that it doesn't have qualia, so the only possible meaning here would be subjective. However, each copy subjectively thinks itself to have qualia. (If you deny either point, please elaborate.) Given those, I don't see any sense that anyone can say that the qualia "only" goes to a single fork, with the others being "other" people.
I agree with a, but I think your consciousness is forked by the branching process. I agree with b, assuming you mean "no one person observes multiple branches after a fork". I don't think those two imply that QL requires look-ahead.
What if I rephrased this in one-world terms? I clone you while you're asleep. I put you in two separate rooms. I take two envelopes, one with a yes on it, the other with a no, and put one in each room. Someone else goes into each room, looks at the envelope, then kills you iff it says yes, and wakes you iff it says no.
Do you think you won't awaken in a room with no in the envelope?
As long as we aren't defining consciousness, I can't really disagree that some plausible definition would make this true.
I don't.
Yes, but I also think conscious experience is halted during regular sleep. Also, should multiple copies survive, his conscious experience will continue in multiple copies. His subjective probability of finding himself as any particular copy depends on the relative weightings (i.e. self-locating uncertainty).
There is no "truth" as to which copy they'll end up in.
I think that I either wake up in a room with no in the envelope, or die, in which case my clone continues to live.
I find this model implausible. Is there any evidence I can update on?
But this world I described is (or can be) completely deterministic; how can you be uncertain of what will happen? I understand how I can be subjectively uncertain due to self-locating uncertainty, but there should be no possible objective uncertainty in a deterministic world. The only out I see if if you think consciousness requires non-deterministic physical processes.
I'm not sure I understand your reasoning here, so I'm not sure. Have you read the Ebborian posts in the quantum sequence?
What exactly do you think would happen when someone is cloned? Why would one copy be "real" and the other not? Would there be any way to detect which was real for outsiders?
OK, either I wake up in a room with no envelope or die (deterministically) depends on which envelope you have put in my room.
What exactly happens in the process of cloning certainly depends on a particular cloning technology; the real one is that which shares continuous conscious experience line with me. The (obvious) way to detect which was real for an outsider is to look at where it came from -- if it was built as a clone, then, well, it is a clone.
Note that I'm not saying that it's the true model, just that I currently find it more plausible; none of the consciousness theories I've seen so far is truly satisfactory.
I've read the Ebborian posts and wasn't convinced; a thought experiment is just a thought experiment, there are many ways it can be flawed (that is true for all the thought experiments I proposed in this discussion, btw). But yes, that's a problem.
I hope you realize that you're just moving the problem into determining which one is "your" room, considering neither room had any of you thinking in it until after one was killed.
The root of our disagreement then seems to be this "continuous" insistence. In particular, you and I would disagree on whether consciousness is preserved with teleportation or stasis.
I could try to break that intuition by appealing to discrete time; does your model imply that time is continuous? It would seem unattractive for a model to postulate something like that.
What arguments/intuitions are causing you to find your model plausible?
I find a model plausible if it isn't contradicted by evidence and matches my intuitions.
My model doesn't imply discrete time; I don't think I can precisely explain why, because I basically don't know how consciousness works at that level; intuitively, just replace t + dt with t + 1. Needless to say, I'm uncertain of this, too.
Honestly, my best guess is that all these models are wrong.
Now, what arguments cause you to find your model plausible?