Not sure what you mean about Durham's copy (I've only read summaries of Egan)
When a conscious mind is halted all at once, without any destruction, it simply keeps going, finding itself in a universe where those observations are explicable. Your hypothetical death machine wouldn't have an effect on me; I would just keep subjectively beating the odds.
(So even if we are in a simulation and the simulators decide to end it, we don't notice a thing.)
The question is whether having a bunch of measure added to your life and then taken away should be seen as a chance of death.
No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that since my conscious mind is longer functioning at full capacity, I will find myself in other universes where that is proper. And then I just keep degrading. It's death in the fullest sense of the word- the one who wakes up has beaten vast odds. And that isn't evidence for the unlikelihood of the scenario, since each type of observer is infinitely common.
However, I don't think it is simply consciousness that propels our observations. If Dust Theory were true than consciousness is emergent, and the rest of my mind must also play some part in generating the observations. Even a sleeping one is distinctly human enough to keep my reality stable. So I'm no longer worried about dying.
I still don't know about reality changing. Certainly it becomes fuzzier, but do my memories count if I'm not consciously aware of them? They are a part of my psyche, after all. And my dreams, while capable of tricking me into believing outlandish things, still contain almost complete fragments of real memory.
Things like this are also encouraging.
I don't think it makes sense to treat a simulation where you rapidly change into an unrecognizable mind differently from a simulation that halts, except insofar as the transition might be unpleasant. In either case, the experiences you value have a certain measure up to a certain point in time and then they don't.
I agree that dreams are still highly ordered despite being a bit less so than waking life. I think the experience of a human dreaming in an orderly universe is still most likely caused by a human dreaming in an orderly universe. But I don't think ...
Dust theory implies that everything outside of my perception is in flux. Your experiences have to find themselves in a world in which they could have conceivably formed. Of course, you exist in every possible world which would produce that mindstate, but some are 'vaster' than others, leading you down the most probable courses.
Suppose that going to sleep or losing grasp of your surroundings opens a wider space of worlds you could exist in, which jumps you into another reality along with consistent memories of it. I can't figure out if this would be the case, or if my consciousness would most likely just dissolve, with only those beating trillion-to-one odds waking up in the morning. Or maybe my pool of 'experience' stays active when I sleep, even if I'm not aware of it. Either way (though I think Dust Theory is probably false) I'm afraid to go to sleep anymore.
I also do not understand the argument being made here: http://lesswrong.com/lw/1jm/getting_over_dust_theory/. Can someone explain to me please?
I posted these questions on other threads but I didn't get many answers. Sorry.
EDIT: Look, the first question boils down to: does my unconscious mind affect my measure? If so, than it isn't much different from being awake. If not, then all my problems seem to apply.
It occurs to me that not only would signing up for cryonics and then killing yourself before you could sleep is rational under these circumstances, but that the death of the universe can be escaped by simply rearranging your mind to believe it is in a universe where eternal life is possible, then ceasing its activity.