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gjm comments on You are (mostly) a simulation. - Less Wrong
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Eitan, I think you should set down exactly what you take "Dust Theory" to mean, for at least the following reasons: Not everyone has read "Permutation City"; those who have may have forgotten some details; the book may not nail down all those details firmly enough to make the term unambiguous; you might mean by it something slightly different from what Egan does.
(For the avoidance of doubt, that last one would not necessarily be a bad thing. The most credible thing deserving the name "Dust Theory" might not be quite the same as what's described in what is, after all, a work of fiction with its own narrative constraints.)
Dust Theory isn't actually relevant to this. I'm discussing practicality rather than interpretation, i.e. "shut up and calculate".
But a lot of what you've been writing makes explicit use of that term. Your post begins "First of all, let's assume that our minds really do work the way Dust Theory tells us". If what follows is less than perfectly clear on its own (as, at least for me, it is) then it's reasonable to try to use your allusion to Dust Theory to help disambiguate. But we can only do that in so far as we understand exactly what you're taking Dust Theory to be.
Basically, all that is required is for two minds in the same conscious state to have only one phenomenological experience. This is something I think is absolutely true.
If you mean that there is literally one experience (numerical identity), not two identical experiences (qualitative identity), that would need support.
And you still need further assumptions to say something interesting about measure, expected experience, personal history etc.
If there are two identical experiences, it doesn't actually affect the argument. Except that you would be wholly in a simulation (or not), and there would be less incentive for future FAIs to simulate you. Grim, if I took it seriously.
If there are two identical experiences, there is no problem of jumping, .or waking up as someone else. Identical twins don't randomly swap identities. Jumping is a dynamical, causal process. You can make it happen by transplanting a brain,or copying a neural pattern, but there is no reason it should happen because of pure logic,
While we're on the subject, if there is a single experience threaded through multiple worlds, there is also no jumping. You can't jump from one version your self another, because there is only one version. You can't jump from one world to another, in the sense of leaving one and ariving at another, because you are always in all of them.
That disposes of jumping, but you seem to have some further concern about simulation.
Sure, but haven't I just said I don't take Duplication seriously?
The whole point is about what happens when my self becomes less detailed. If it resumes its former detail (waking up), all may not be as it was. If a memory is completely extracted from my brain, than my brain ceases to anchor me predominantly in worlds where that memory happened. Other options could fill in the hole.
This has never been about 'jumping' wholesale! I just used the word because there is no other.
"Unification (Bostrom's term) seems to be almost irrefutable"
I would have thought the point was justifying the claim about dissolution.
That is, somehow or other, a claim about causlaity, .transtemporal identity, or something else you have never provided a premise relating to.
I can make some sense of that, assuming duplication. If your brain has been copied N times, then you have a 1/N chance of being the original .... assuming you can only be one at time.
That would create a worry about being in a simulation that wasn't stable, but your actual worry is apparently about lack of reality....although a .simulation still has an indirect connection to reality.
But then you believe in Unification, which would mean you you are indissolubly n whatever world you ate in.
You can use a phrase, or invent a word.