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jacob_cannell comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - October 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I am a distribution over mindspace..? across the multiverse..? Funny, I don't feel like a distribution. Do you have any evidence to support or that's just a word salad?
Identity in general can refer to current self, past self, and future selves all as the same 'person'. That is a set. Mindspace is just the space of all possible minds, so the person-defining set is a distribution over mindspace.
I'm using 'multiverse' in the most general sense (nothing QM specific) to refer to all possible universes/futures etc.
In the same way, is a rock a distribution over rockspace across the multiverse?
Sure, although it doesn't have much temporal evolution.
But still - for some specific rock, we can't describe/model/understand it exactly, so we specify it abstractly in a compressed form, said compressed form specifies a distribution over the space of rock-like objects - rockspace.
A few follow-on questions, then.
You say "we can't describe/model/understand it exactly, so we specify it abstractly" -- does that mean we're talking solely about maps and not about the territory?
What exactly do you mean by a "distribution"? Is it a probability distribution? You made the argument that as things move through time, they are a set of past, present, and (hopefully) future states. Since time is unidirectional, we might even call that an ordered set, a sequence. But a sequence is not a distribution.
The approach "X is a distribution over X-space across the multilverse" seem to be applicable to absolutely everything. If that is so, what is the use of this approach?
Probability distributions can be defined as subsets over possible logical worlds.
Although general, it's not a typical everyday mode of thought. I invoked it specifically in response to the parent comment:
So in some future resurrection, there would be potentially many versions of each mind from different possible worlds. Across the multiverse, many different simulators will recreate many different past historical sims. Each simulation doesn't need to exactly recreate it's own specific history as long as it recreates a specific history. Instead success simply requires adequate coverage across the space of all sims over the multiverse. If you aren't thinking in terms of distributions over mindspace across the multiverse, you can't really understand or reason about these concepts.
I still don't understand.
Let's drastically simplify things. Consider an ordered set of two mes -- me one minute ago and me now. In which sense this set is a probability distribution? What does it mean?
So are you arguing that future resurrections will be, basically, a brute-force approach? In the sense of "We can't be sure whether A or B happened, so we'll simulate both A and B branches"? That doesn't require much in the way of sophisticated concepts, it's sufficient to see it as exhaustive search, I think.
Also, what counts as "success" and what are the incentives and consequences for succeeding or failing?
In the sense that everything is - we have uncertainty over the physical configurations.
No.
That's just how complex multi-modal inference works in general. The multiverse complexity comes in from realizing that it is the whole set of similar future worlds creating past simulations.
But this has nothing to do with physical configurations. We have a set of two things -- to make things even simpler, let's make it a rock -- that differ in time. Unless you're going to posit some Time Lord who soars above the time line, assigning probabilities to time snapshots does not make any sense to me.