This post just confirms that you should take your blooking efforts and turn them into money AND reach a much wider and more lasting audience by writing a book. I think you could do a book like GEB ... a long, quirky, multidisciplinary intro to cognitive biases, Bayes' theorem, Physics, the Singularity, and whatever else you might like, and people will buy it if you write like this.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, anonymous; I hope you're right.

By the way, before anyone asks, this post is not intended to suggest that quantum physics takes place in the fourth dimension - I just wanted to present the Ebborians with a different but analogous bizarre puzzle.

How do Ebborians get different names when they fission?

Great writing. It's not hard to see where you took a lot of the debates about your writings and lifted them up into something greater -dare I say, art?

The great thing about novels and plays (this could be either) is it allows the writer to capture and express multiple points of view, without themselves committing to any of them.

I think this post is superior to your past ones in that it reflects a deeper understanding of various viewpoints on this topic, and expresses the best versions of them, rather than caricature views different than a particular one you promote in the post.

So I think you're moving from passion plays towards Shakespeare.

Like I said, great writing!

You could write a fiction short story series (like this but refined for print) with a summary at the end of what your trying to explain. I think it would be worth buying and it could combine entertaining with educational.

this story (and maybe others) could be a bit like the 10,000 year old man movie.

Agree, with anonymous, just can´t wait to read the whole book and deepen my understanding. With the right editing it will certainly be a new and even more important, insightful and rich book in the tradition of GEB! And I can´t wait to give it to all my friends and professors, and I can´t wait to hear the reception from academia, they/we have so much to learn. You will be on TED and on EDGE in no time! Your hard work, and deep thought is so precious, I think it is rather wonderful that a social ape can penetrate so deep into reality. I just think this blogform is a bit strange choice for such high quality material, a wiki would be much more appropriate and easy to use. A table of contents would be of great use in this stage when you try to recommend this stuff to other people!

About the post: I guess you are not completely ruling out the role of physics in the final understanding of consciousness, because even though QM may not play an important role, a deeper understanding of spacetime, may... But hopefully it all lies in mathematics as Hofstadter and Goerzel suggests, that would be the most elegant and also practical reality, sadly reality does not obey hopes...

I also hope that there is not a general bias amongst scientists familiar with physics towards having consciousness interfere with physics, because they are so used to have them in different domains, and because so much confusion has arisen when you have not made this distinction clear. And because so many sloppy theories are riding on this hypothesis that is so much more intuitive. It could still be the case that fundamental physics can explain some aspect of say the hard problem. There seems to be two competing aesthetics in the matter of consciousness and physics, and I am still not convinced it is more than aesthetics, therefor I wait in taking a stance myself.

But I am so grateful Eli convinced me of the impossibility of Zombies, I used to be consider epifenomenalism. But now I know better. But that leads me to the inevitable question of the functional role of qualia. Why chocolate tastes good, which seems to have a causal effect on me wanting to eat it, rather than me just having chocolate eating behavior whiteout the intermediate of qualia. Does a dog have qualia behaviour or just eating beahviour when it finds something good? Qualia and consciousness seems to be an internal monitoring mechanism with very precise input from evolutionary adaptive qualia(like emotions, strong tastes, sensations of the body parts of the opposite sex), but for what purpose, and why the qualia, and what are the effects on neurocomputation? Or if it IS the neurocomputation, then why am I experiencing such a nice whole and not a lot of different processes in my brain, why does it seem that I am only experiencing some output of the work of my brain? Why do I need to expereience anything anyway? What does the resource limitations in my consciousness depend on. Why can´t I experiences all my memories at the same time. Is counsciousness a separate brainsystem(like the thalamocortical loop, bioelectromagnetic field or even quantum mind) or just a product of the whole brain working together. If it is a separable brain system, what are the measurable causal effects. If it is not, what distinguishes conscious from non conscious processing. If consciousness is a mathematical phenomenon, then still, why is qualia so rich and strongly qualitative, compare the feeling of hunger to the color red or to the sound of a piano? Maybe it is just the way information feels in the universe. Which leads to the question if all information feels itself, does a book feel the structure of the words in it, if not then what makes information feel itself, a strange loop? Well what about a TV set and a camera pointing towards each other. But what is it with a universe that allows such strange phenomena. Well anything is strange to us really, and nothing is really strange to the universe. We will probably always find everything rather absurd but wonderful if we think really deep about it, even if we are no longer as confused in our understanding as we are now. But the universe remains neutral on strangeness. "Since the beginning not one unusual thing has happened"

can you tell me why the subjective probability of finding ourselves in a side of the split world, should be exactly proportional to the square of the thickness of that side?

Po'mi runs a trillion experiments, each of which have a one-trillionth 4D-thickness of saying B but is otherwise A. In his "mainline probability", he sees the all trillion experiments coming up A. (If he ran a sextillion experiments he'd see about 1 come up B.)

Presumably an external four-dimensional observer sees it differently: He sees only one-trillionth of Po'mi coming up all-A, and the rest of Po'mi saw about 1 B and are huddled in a corner crying that the universe has no order. (Maybe the 4D observer would be unable to see Po'mi at all because Po'mi and all other inhabitants of the lawful "mainline probablity" that we're talking about have almost infinitesimal thickness from the 4D observer's point of view.)

If I were Po'mi, I would start looking for a fifth dimension.

"But I am so grateful Eli convinced me of the impossibility of Zombies". What does that really mean? That he convinced of the impossibility of something physically identical to you, that behaves just like you, that claims to be conscious? Because that seems to be a silly construct well beyond our discernment technology (whether or not something is "physically identical" to you), and connectedly, not of much practical interest.

Or did he convince you what some people want to seem to believe, even if the evidence doesn't extend that far: that something that would convince the smartest of us today that it's conscious may not actually have your (or more to the point, my) subjective conscious experience, but may be in a real time equivalent to sleep walking and sleep talking or in a real time equivalent to an alcohol blackout -is impossible or unlikely to the point of near impossibility.

That zombie has been branded as the former thing, of little practical concern, rather than the latter thing, which I think would be of reasonable (and possibly near-term) practical concern to us is very annoying to me, because I think it would be a great term for the latter thing.

Good writing, indeed! I also love what you've done with the Eborrian anzrf (spoiler rot13-encoded for the benefit of other readers since it hasn't been mentioned in the previous comments).

The split/remerge attack on entities that base their anticipations of future input directly on how many of their future selves they expect to get specific input is extremely interesting to me. I originally thought that this should be a fairly straightforward problem to solve, but it has turned out a lot harder (or my understanding a lot more lacking) than I expected. I think the problem might be in the group of 500,003 brains double-counting anticipated input after the merge. They don't stay exactly the same through the merge phase; in fact, for each of the 500,000 brains in green rooms, the re-integrated previously-in-green-rooms brain only depends to a very small part on them individually. In this particular case, the re-integrated brain will still be very similar to each of the pre-integration brains; but that is just a result of the pre-integration brains all being very similar to each other. Treating the re-integrated brain as a regular future-self for the purposes of anticipating future experience under these conditions seems highly iffy to me.

Robin Brandt,

I think "chocolate eating behavior" already does "whiteout the intermediate of qualia." We've just confused the issue by associating "the experience I have when eating chocolate" with things generally considered "good." Your experience of eating chocolate is just the sum of cognitive and physiological changes associated with eating chocolate. If we performed an experiment where you were subjected to a pain stimulus but then we subtracted, one by one, the various physiological and cognitive aspects of pain, I think you would be convinced that there isn't a pain qualia per se (that it is rather the sum of these aspects and no one of them is more or less pain-proper than the other).

The more I think about consciousness, the more I think it's ridiculous to have anything but the sparsest take on how to consider it. We should eschew anthropocentrism (mind-centrism? mind projection?) at every step. While it may have some nasty-sounding consequences in areas like ethics, I can't convince myself that conscious minds have any special place in the universe, for any reason. It’s this century’s answer to having the Earth at the centre of the universe.

To relate my point to the parable: I would say that if you have all the information about a brain-split - if you know the exact position and momentum of every particle at every point - but you're still asking 'yes, but when does one consciousness become two?' then you're asking a wrong question. The consequence of this is removing that central name tag called ‘+/-consciousness’ in your neural ‘attributes of consciousness’ network.

When you think about it, drawing a line around all your neurons etc and saying 'this is me’ is ridiculous. What about the dead cells? or the cells that have no observable effect? how many neurons can I remove before you stop being 'you'? If you claim there's a ‘self’ inside your head that emerges, from all the wetware, unified and irreducible, you’re setting yourself up for impossible questions just like the poor Ebboreans. Difficult though it is, you have to drop the mind-centrism. Am I saying that consciousness is an illusion? That’s not how I’d put it – after all, illusions are things that minds perceive. But what is, is real. Consciousness is. It’s just not ‘special’. You have no more ‘weight’ than a copy of yourself that assembles itself at random for a fraction of a second in a distant galaxy. Sorry. (By this rationale, ‘zombies’ are a nonsense too. )

When you ask ‘Why is red red?’, for me you’ve already projected your mind onto the territory. Red isn’t red in the world. It’s red in your map as a result of how your brain entangles itself with photons at a certain wavelength - an artefact of evolution - and I don’t need to explain that any more than I need to explain why you want your eggs sunny side up. Don’t mistake confusion and gaps in our knowledge for mysticism.

Really good stuff, Eliezer. Why do I get the feeling that we won't ever get to hear what the big wonderful theory was? I'm just on the last chapter of GEB, and I've really enjoyed it, but I've no doubt your final piece will be entirely your own - it certainly deserves to be. That said, I like the sound of Jaynes, Einstein, Bayes: A Rational Steel Katana....

In today's post I would like to see De'da and/or Wa'da ask Ha'ro, if worlds are equiprobable, 1) why we're not in a near-maximum-entropy universe, and 2) if we can win the lottery by burning stuff afterward. (Maybe there are legitimate answers, I don't know.)

That zombie has been branded as the former thing, of little practical concern, rather than the latter thing, which I think would be of reasonable (and possibly near-term) practical concern to us is very annoying to me, because I think it would be a great term for the latter thing.

if worlds are equiprobable, 1) why we're not in a near-maximum-entropy universe

It seems to me unlikely that a functioning organism such as ourselves would be able to persist for very long in a near-maximum-entropy universe. Even if we presume the local space were relatively and anomalously ordered, it is far more likely for that to happen at a point in time where the universe as a whole is relatively ordered than at a point where everything else is a mess.

Caledonian, ordinarily that would be true, but the point is that in the MWI the number of worlds increases exponentially as a function of entropy, so very soon high-entropy worlds outnumber low-entropy worlds by a factor of (if I'm not mistaken) ten-to-the-power-avogadrillions. As just one example, there should be a lot more Everett worlds where we used up all the fossil fuels than where we didn't. AFAIK that's still true if you consider only non-mangled worlds, but maybe I misunderstood the model and the number of non-mangled worlds actually stays constant under entropy increase.

Hopefully Anonymous:

It means that I used to belive the experience of consciousness/qualia/the hard problem is just like the sound of the heart, i.e. whitout any functional role. I never thought zombies would really be possible... just in principle. And I had my doubts even then. Don´t laugh at me because the functional role of qualia is not easy to understand.

poke:

I think you missed the point here. The question is why choclate eating feels like anything, it seems that the qulia should be unessecary for the brain function of chocolate eating behavior. The same goes with orgasm. They seem to be things that try to guide one part of the brain system with input with qualia from another in order to guide our behavior towards thinks that statistically makes us survive and reproduce. If qualia has no functional role, then the zombie argument is sound. Or this is how I have understood it attending consciousness studies here at Skövde with professor Antti Revonsuo who published his book Inner Pressence on MIT Press. If qualia would just be a confusion it seems highly unlikely that evolution would have spent any time making qualias just for the fun of it, and qualia has to be a real event taking place in the universe, a real event that needed some energy and information content to produce.

To deny qualia today is like the behaviorists who denied cognitive processes yesterday. You are smarter than that!

Or it may be that some of you actually don´t experience qualia, sometimes I encounter people who I really doubt experiences qualia in the normal way, especially in the autism spectrum. So if you suffer from any disorder, please mention that if you are talking about qualia. But my quess is that everybody has qualia, it may just be easier to deny them if they are not connected to emotions.

Also about the chocolate eating, you can get addicted so that you no longer even need the qualia keep on eating it. There seems to be a distinction between qualia induced choclate eating and addictive choclate eating where you continue eating although it does not taste so good anymore, wich if you notice the lameness of the qualia may make you stop eating. Why is that, if qualia is a mere confusion, there should not be such distinctions. It seems not rational to spend energy on producing qualia if they are not useful in any sense. But useful for what? Still qualia affecting our decisions seems rather impossibe to me, but that has to be a fact about my own confusion not about the territory.

To deny qualia today is like the behaviorists who denied cognitive processes yesterday. You are smarter than that!

Cognitive psychologists not only managed to produce an experiment that would distinguish between "having cognitive processes" and "not having cognitive processes", they performed it and resolved the dispute.

What experimental results would be enough to convince you that 'qualia' did not exist?

As I wrote part of this post to explicitly discuss Mitchell Porter's position, I think it only fair to post Mitchell Porter's comment here, where it should be more at home than in "On Philosophers". -- Eliezer Yudkowsky

**

Mitchell Porter commented:

Before I get lost in these semantic and epistemic complexities, I will say once again what the problem is.

We are endeavoring to interpret the wavefunctions or state vectors of quantum mechanics: to form a hypothesis about the reality they describe. The hypothesis is: before decoherence there is one "quantum world", after decoherence there are many quantum worlds. As the difference between "one world" and "more than one world" is discontinuous, but the process of decoherence is continuous, with no sharp boundary between before and after, I asked exactly where the transition from one world to more than one world occurs. The reply was that that is not an issue, since the answer would make no difference to the argument in the papers. I conceded that it makes no difference to this particular argument, but the issue itself must be faced; the existence of these worlds, if they are to be taken seriously, must be an objective matter.

Somehow, having attempted to argue for that last proposition, I find myself being asked to define what I mean by "existence", to accept that someone's existence can be "vague", and who knows what else is going to come up. I accept the desirability of trying to elucidate fundamental concepts as thoroughly as possible. But can I first ask: If a person said that according to their theory of the universe, at one time you have one of something, and later on you have many copies of that same thing, but there's no particular moment in time when the one becomes the many, and that doesn't matter because the something only has a vague, fuzzy existence... wouldn't you think that the theory might have a few problems, or at least be missing a part?

Everything I have said about worlds, and observers in worlds, and about the certainty of one's own existence as an individual observer, has been meant to drive that home. That chain of relationships is the detailed reason why it is unacceptable to have a blase attitude towards the conditions of existence of quantum worlds. They must be regarded as existing or not existing, in a completely objective, absolute, non-relative way, or the concept becomes a nonsense, because worlds must play the role of hosting entities whose existence is definitely not vague or relative, namely, us.

Does no-one understand or sympathize with this line of thought?

I will get on with the philosophy in a moment. But I ask that those of you who may find yourselves in a protracted debate with me over these tangential questions, please consider anew the foregoing argument and ask yourself whether it is desirable or even possible to settle for a vague notion of "world", given the theoretical burden it has to bear.

Caledonian asks what I mean by "existence". I confess that I am unable to define it without using a synonym, which is not much of a definition. There may be quite a few similar basic indefinables, which we nonetheless manage to talk about; "negation" may be another example. It seems that all I can do is talk about it, and hope some recognition dawns. I know I already have a disagreement with Caledonian in this matter, because earlier this month he wrote here that existence is relative and depends on the possibility of interaction, something I would never say, because it confuses existence per se with something like knowability - the epistemic grounds whereby one observer may assert of one thing that it does indeed exist. We who live now, our existence was not knowable to anyone who lived a thousand years ago. Nonetheless, we do exist, here and now, and it is a fallacy to relativize our existence, and say "we exist for each other, but we don't exist for those people in the past". It is a basic confusion of knowability with reality.

Now, Unknown, what am I to do with you? Your line is that existence is a vague concept because I cannot define it without being circular, or that I cannot define it in a way which offers a clear decision procedure for existence. My line would be that we all know perfectly well what "existence" refers to - the property of being there, the property of being a part of reality, the property of not being nonexistent - but that the metaphysical depths of its nature are not so obvious. Again, one is constantly making implicit judgements about what does and does not exist. Does al Qaeda exist? Does Xenu exist? Does the special discount on milk at the corner store still exist? Existential judgements are ubiquitous in human thought. We all possess a basic facility with the concept. Does the inability to crisply define it or place it in an ontological scheme mean that one only has a vague concept of existence? I don't think so, because I think the criterion of vagueness in a concept is that its referent, the specific thing which it designates, is underdetermined (i.e. there are several different things it might be referring to), not that the nature of the referent remains incompletely specified. I think the particular referent of the human concept of existence is unambiguously known, but the nature of that referent may be obscure to the human mind. But this is a complicated matter.

And one more time: this metaphysics is an interesting and even vital topic, but it is somewhat of a tangent from the main issue, which is the meaning of "world" in many worlds.

"But can I first ask: If a person said that according to their theory of the universe, at one time you have one of something, and later on you have many copies of that same thing, but there's no particular moment in time when the one becomes the many, and that doesn't matter because the something only has a vague, fuzzy existence... wouldn't you think that the theory might have a few problems, or at least be missing a part?"

No. Robin implicitly offered an example: if a galaxy were to divide into two galaxies, it would be impossible to assign an exact moment when the one became two. Nonetheless, there clearly would be a time when it was one, and clearly a time when it was two.

As for the vagueness of existence, it is also vague in having an underdetermined referent. For example, does the truth of a statement exist? If so, then "exists" is underdetermined, because "truth" is underdetermined. The latter is necessary because if you attempt to give a complete definition of truth, you will fall into contradictions (e.g. "this statement is not true".)

I'm sympathetic to Mitchell's position, and would note that anthropic reasoning requires a definite answer to "what observers exist and in what proportion?"

Nick, you are right about the definite proportion, but this doesn't require definite quantities, since the proportion 50 to 100 is the same as the proportion 100 to 200. So anthropic reasoning only requires definite proportions, not definite quantities.

Why do you need anticipation to express surprise at the orderliness of the universe? Thinking like reality would mean abandoning "personal continuity" and just talking about frequencies of experiences, and you can still express your surprise at finding such an orderly experience.

Unknown: suppose I say there's a central singularity in each galaxy, so there's one singularity to begin with, and two at the end, but there's no exact moment when one singularity becomes two. That's what you're doing when you say there's an observer in each world, and then vague out on the concept of "world".

Does the truth of a sentence exist? A proper discussion of that might explode the boundaries of this blog again. But I'll just say that I had ostensive definitions in mind, when I said that the referent of a concept may be known even when its nature is not. If I point to a light in the sky and say, "that's Venus", you know what "Venus" refers to, even though you may not know much about it. And both "existence" and "truth" similarly admit of "definition"-by-example, i.e. by exhibition of an instance.

Tarleton: Thinking like reality would mean abandoning "personal continuity" and just talking about frequencies of experiences, and you can still express your surprise at finding such an orderly experience.

Sure, if I had a well-defined way to talk about frequency (or weight or measure) of experience, it would be a lot easier to toss "personal continuity" out the window. I want to save the notion of conditional measure if I can, but I suppose I could live without it.

I know I already have a disagreement with Caledonian in this matter, because earlier this month he wrote here that existence is relative and depends on the possibility of interaction, something I would never say, because it confuses existence per se with something like knowability

No. That is completely wrong.You are confusing what things ARE, with what we THINK them to be. This is a common problem when dealing with models of reality (in which we exist), models in which we (as external observers) 'know' everything about the model; we tend to confuse the 'we' within the model, which is ignorant, with the 'we' looking at the model, which is essentially omniscient. (This is a simplification, as the full details are beyond the scope of this thread.)

Whether a thing exists has nothing to do with what we know. Whether we can assert that a thing exists has everything to do with what we know. It is entirely possible for properties of the system to be forever unknowable for particular entities within that system, or even entities in general within that system, and still exist. But those entities are not entitled to make any claims about the existence of said properties.

If I throw away the notion of subjective anticipation, then how do I differentiate the chaotic universe from the orderly one?

One can differentiate in a sense with the relevancy razor. The conclusion given by the relevancy razor in this case is that it is safe to assume that you live in the orderly universe because if you lived in the chaotic one, then you have no hope of affecting reality -- no hope of achieving any goal or carrying through any plan.

The relevancy razor is a principle of general applicability much like Occam's Razor is a principle of general applicability.

Here is a statement of the relevancy razor:

Thinking entails the contemplation of "possible worlds". It may be that you are unsure of the nature of the world you find yourself in or it may be that you are facing a decision, and how you decide will determine which possible world you will end up in. In either case, you have to think about possible worlds. The relevancy razor says that you do not have to contemplate any possible world in which you -- the current you, not the you of the future -- cannot affect reality. (Moreover, the greater your ability to affect reality in a possible world, the more attention you should pay to that possible world -- just as the greater the probability of a possible world, the more attention you should pay to it.)

One other thing. Asking, What is the difference in anticipated experience between X and Y? is a useful and powerful question. I applaud Eliezer in encouraging its use.

But there is another question that is just as useful and powerful, namely, What can I predict or control in the objective world if X that I cannot predict or control if Y? (John David Garcia has encouraged the use of this question since the early 1980s.)

I prefer the second question because it does not tend to pull one into viewing subjective experience as what ultimately matters.

If you're joining the conversation late, then hi, I'm Richard Hollerith, and I want you to believe that what matters in the end about you is your effect on reality, not your subjective experience.

(I do not say that subjective experience should be completely ignored: subjective experience can yield valuable information that is impractical or too expensive to acquire any other way, and that valuable information can, in turn, be used to affect reality, whichyou lived in the chaotic one, then you have no hope of affecting reality -- no hope of achieving any goal or carrying through any plan.

I propose the relevancy razor as a principle of general applicability much like Occam's Razor is a principle of general applicability.

Here is a statement of the relevancy razor:

Thinking entails the contemplation of "possible worlds". It may be that you are unsure of the nature of the world you find yourself in or it may be that you are facing a decision, and how you decide will determine which possible world you will end up in. In either case, you have to think about possible worlds. The relevancy razor says that you do not have to contemplate any possible world in which you -- the current you, not the you of the future -- cannot affect reality. (Moreover, the greater your ability to affect reality in a possible world, the more attention you should pay to that possible world -- just as the greater the probability of a possible world, the more attention you should pay to it.)

One other thing. Asking, What is the difference in anticipated experience between X and Y? is a useful and powerful question. I applaud Eliezer in encouraging its use.

But there is another question that is just as useful and powerful, namely, What can I predict or control in the objective world if X that I cannot predict or control if Y? (John David Garcia has encouraged the use of this question since the early 1980s.)

I prefer the second question because it does not tend to pull one into viewing subjective experience as what ultimately matters.

If you're joining the conversation late, then hi, I'm Richard Hollerith, and I want you to believe that what matters in the end about you is your effect on reality, not your subjective experience.

(I do not say that subjective experience should be completely ignored: subjective experience can yield valuable information that is impractical or too expensive to acquire any other way, and that valuable information can, in turn, be used to affect reality, which, again, is the purpose of life.)

Oh crap: I thought I was being careful, previewing before posting, but my comment got jumbled. I'll upload the unjumbled version now, and hope that a moderator will delete what I just uploaded (and this short "oh crap" too).

If I throw away the notion of subjective anticipation, then how do I differentiate the chaotic universe from the orderly one?

One can differentiate with the relevancy razor. The conclusion given by the relevancy razor in this case is that it is safe to assume that you live in the orderly universe because if you lived in the chaotic one, then you have no hope of affecting reality -- no hope of achieving any goal or carrying through any plan.

The relevancy razor is a principle of general applicability much like Occam's Razor is a principle of general applicability.

Here is a statement of the relevancy razor:

Thinking entails the contemplation of "possible worlds". It may be that you are unsure of the nature of the world you find yourself in or it may be that you are facing a decision, and how you decide will determine which possible world you will end up in. In either case, you have to think about possible worlds. The relevancy razor says that you do not have to contemplate any possible world in which you -- the current you, not the you of the future -- cannot affect reality. (Moreover, the greater your ability to affect reality in a possible world, the more attention you should pay to that possible world -- just as the greater the probability of a possible world, the more attention you should pay to it.)

One other thing. Asking, What is the difference in anticipated experience between X and Y? is a useful and powerful question. I applaud Eliezer in encouraging its use.

But there is another question that is just as useful and powerful, namely, What can I predict or control in the objective world if X that I cannot predict or control if Y? (John David Garcia has encouraged the use of this question since the early 1980s.)

I prefer the second question because it does not tend to pull one into viewing subjective experience as what ultimately matters.

If you're joining the conversation late, then hi, I'm Richard Hollerith, and I want you to believe that what matters in the end about you is your effect on reality, not your subjective experience.

(I do not say that subjective experience should be completely ignored: subjective experience can yield valuable information that is impractical or too expensive to acquire any other way, and that valuable information can, in turn, be used to affect reality, which again, is the purpose of life.)

Bravo, great post. It's an argument I've been trying to make forever but never seem to be able to do so in a way that people understand. You seem to have managed what was beyond me.

Hollerith: What subjective experiences will exist in a particular world is an objective question. Now that is indeed different from what experiences I should expect to have but still something we can't solve.

A belated meta-response to Caledonian: this is your earlier remark to which I referred. We may have no more than a terminological difference. As I said above, I would (hope to) never say "A exists relative to B", only that A was detectable, rationally inferable, etc., relative to B. It's too confusing to use "existence" as if it only means "epistemically assertible existence".

Annoying question:

How does an Ebborian fission into more than 2 parts? Surely there aren't enough organs to go round! Unless you allow for unconscious rounds of regrowth and refissioning...

It's a bit late, but the Ebborians still need to work some kinks out of their quantum mechanics equivalent. Amplitude is not a measure, and so it can't be the analogue of thickness.

"There's no third-party experiment you can perform to tell you the answer."

While it's irrelevant to the anthropics/quantum physics debate, I almost immediately thought: let's put an electrode onto one side of an Ebborian brain-paper, and give it a train of pulses while it splits. Ask the Ebborian that "inherits" the other side of the brain, how many pulses it experienced.

The questions surrounding conscious experiences and splits, e.g. which color "I" will likely see afterward, etc, intrinsically use the concept of a first-person perspective. I.e. they take which Ebborian is "I" as something inherently apparent. But physics doesn't answer "why you are you and I am me?", or why "I am experiencing the world from the perspective of this particular object?". It will be a big surprise if the Ultimate Grand Unified Theory of Everything could answer this. Put it another way, if it does answer that, then Po'mi's questions would have been thoroughly explained by the UGUTE. 

If the first-person perspective is not explained by physics, and at the same time plays an integral part in world modeling: -after all, it's all based on the experiences of reading dials and turning knobs-, then maybe the right way is to treat it as something fundamentally primitive. Something all physical reasoning ought to be conducted from.