Yet if you insist on an objective population count, for whatever reason, you have Soritic problems whether or not you delve into quantum physics.
Well, yes, because you're trying to objectively count something as poorly defined as "heaps". If you want to have an objective population count of , you need an objective definition of what is a , whether you're counting "heap", "person", or "sound in a forest".
Don't let your intuition mislead you about the problem. Your brain is evolved to deal with human tribal politics, and so has a bunch of baked-in shortcuts about what's a "person" is that speed processing but do not necessarily have to reflect reality.
For example, as soon as you talk about one mind becoming two, you've assumed that minds/people come in integer packages. How do you know that? Maybe a half-split Ebborian is actually 1.5 "people", properly defined. Just because they didn't look like they came in fractions back on the savannah doesn't mean that they can't.
Possible avenue of research: multiple systems over time, especially those whose members change a lot, those who are often blendy, and medians. Though blendiness and much of the rest involves how a person thinks, not destruction of information about them.
I think this is one of the most important posts in the whole quantum mechanics sequence.
Today's post, The Conscious Sorites Paradox was originally published on 28 April 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Decoherence is implicit in quantum physics, not an extra law on top of it. Asking exactly when "one world" splits into "two worlds" may be like asking when, if you keep removing grains of sand from a pile, it stops being a "heap". Even if you're inside the world, there may not be a definite answer. This puzzle does not arise only in quantum physics; the Ebborians could face it in a classical universe, or we could build sentient flat computers that split down their thickness. Is this really a physicist's problem?
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was On Being Decoherent, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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