red75prime
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When I said "subjective existence" I've meant some model where we don't need a list of minds or exhaustive search for minds to make them real. After all the brain has its own computing power and requiring additional compute or data to make subjective experiences associated with its computations real looks extraneous. Interactions of a mind with our world, on the other hand, seem crucial for our ability to determine its existence.
BTW, thank you for laying out all this in such detail. It makes reasoning much more focused.
Step 2 codifies objective existence of subjective states. But let's suppose that homomorphic computation can be decrypted in two ways: one is what we encoded and the output is something like "it feels real", other is a minimally conscious state that happened to exist when decoding with a different key and its output is a noisy grunt expressing dissatisfaction with the noisy environment. Should the second one be included in M?
It seems that g and h cannot be efficiently computable if we decide to include the second state into M. On the second thought, if we don't have a list of minds in R, we need to analyze all the (spatially localized?) subsets of R to decide which ones of them are conscious. Could it be done efficiently?
ETA: Also, how to codify subjective existence of subjective states?
What concrete fact about the physical world do you think you're missing? What are you ignorant of?
Let's flip very unfair quantum coin with 1:2^1000000 heads to tails chances (that would require quite an engineering feat to prepare such a quantum state, but it's theoretically possible). You shouldn't expect to see heads if the quantum state is prepared correctly, but the post-flip universe (in MWI) contains a branch where you see heads. So, by your logic, you should expect to see both heads and tails even if the state is prepared correctly.
What I do not know is how it all ties together. MWI is wrong? Copying is not equivalent to MWI branching (thanks to the no-cloning theorem, for example)? And so on
"Thread of subjective experience" was an aside (just one of the mechanisms that explains why we "find ourselves" in a world that behaves according to the Born rule), don't focus too much on it.
The core question is which physical mechanism (everything should be physical, right?) ensures that you almost never will see a string of a billion tails after a billion quantum coin flips, while the universe contains a quantum branch with you looking in astonishment on a string with a billion tails. Why should you expect that it will almost certainly not happen, when there's always a physical instance of you that will see it happened?
You'll have 2^1000000000 branches with exactly... (read more)
I haven't fully understood your stance towards the many minds interpretation. Do you find it unnecessary?
I don’t think either of these Harrys is “preferred”.
And simultaneously you think that existence of future Harries who observe events with probabilities approaching zero is not a problem because current Harry will almost never find himself to be those future Harries. I don't understand what it means exactly.
Harries who observe those rare events exist and they wonder how they found themselves in those unlikely situations. Harries who hadn't found anything unusual exist too. Current Harry became all of those future Harries.
So, we have a quantum state of the universe that factorizes into states with different Harries. OK.... (read more)
For example: “as quantum amplitude of a piece of the wavefunction goes to zero, the probability that I will ‘find myself’ in that piece also goes to zero”
What I really don't like about this formulation is extreme vagueness of "I will find myself", which implies that there's some preferred future "I" out of many who is defined not only by observations he receives, but also by being a preferred continuation of subjective experience defined by an unknown mechanism.
It can be formalized as the many minds interpretation, incurring additional complexity penalty and undermining surface simplicity of the assumption. Coexistence of infinitely many (measurement operators can produce continuous probability distributions) threads of subjective experience in a single physical system also doesn't strike me as "feeling more natural".
First, a factual statement that is true to the best of my knowledge: LLM state, that is used to produce probability distribution for the next token, is completely determined by the state of its input buffer (plus a bit of indeterminism due to parallel processing and non-associativity of floating point arithmetic).
That is LLM can pass only a single token (around 2 bytes) to its future self. That follows from the above.
What comes next is a plausible (to me) speculation.
For humans what's passed to our future self is most likely much more that a single token. That is a state of the human brain that leads to writing (or uttering) the next word... (read more)
Expanding a bit on the topic.
Exhibit A: flip a fair coin and move a suspended robot into a green or red room using a second coin with probabilities (99%, 1%) for heads, and (1%, 99%) for tails.
Exhibit B: flip a fair coin and create 99 copies of the robot in green rooms and 1 copy in a red room for heads, and reverse colors otherwise.
What causes the robot to see red instead of green in exhibit A? Physical processes that brought about a world where the robot sees red.
What causes a robot to see red instead of green in exhibit B? The fact that it sees red, nothing more. The physical instance... (read more)
I have a solution that is completely underwhelming, but I can see no flaws in it, besides the complete lack of definition of which part of the mental state should be preserved to still count as you and rejection of MWI (as well as I cannot see useful insights into why we have what looks like continuous subjective experience).
If we are talking about the real world (to the best of our current knowledge, yada, yada) and not its classical approximation, we have the universal wavefunction as the world model, which is independent of agent's actions as it encompasses them all.
Interacting with the world (by generating a specific pattern) allows to narrow down indexical uncertainty to all the agents that generate the pattern with non-zero probability.