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She is not exactly a p zombie. The Mary in sim #1 is not a p-zombie version of the original Mary, because she is only a functional duplicate, not a physical duplicate; and the Mary in Sim #2 is only a behavioural duplicate.
My explanation was a bit confusing, sorry about that! I wasn't intending for there to be an “original” Mary; she and everyone else only ever existed as a simulation. If we were to assume substrate independence, we'd be fine with saying that the denizens of Sim#1 are conscious. And while Sim#2 Mary is not a P-zombie to the alien, she very much is one to the... (read 444 more words →)
When scrubbing around for the authorship of the Sim#1 & Sim#2 thought experiment, I came across mentions of this! I should read Permutation City.
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However, this seems to nullify free will and makes things kind of pointless in the sense that if all moments have already happened, it doesn't really matter what you do, you are just navigating a space that already exists and will always exist. Intuitively, this doesn't sound right, and perhaps there is something missing in this picture.
Sorry to say, I happen to think free will is an illusion! I have three go-to arguments (in no particular order):
Lately I've come to have some frustration with how people speak of consciousness, and I've reached some conclusions that now seem to me somewhat self-evident, but that would also have significant implications. Of course, there is a lot of arrogance in thinking something like this, so it's good to write it down and leave it open for critique. This text is a relatively quick jotting-down of my thoughts, though (hopefully) it should still be relatively coherent. I'm not really citing anyone else in this, but please don't assume that my ideas are wholly original.
I've heard a lot about panpsychists who think that “electrons” (or what-have-you) have a subjective experience. Whether they do... (read 1526 more words →)
This is probably not very ideal for a first post, but I couldn't think of a better platform for a “ramble” like this than Less Wrong. I've listened to and read much on these subjects, but I've never found anyone expressing this precise idea, so I felt that it at least met some degree of originality.
I'm open to feedback on how to improve this to a publishable state; I thought that it might be too long for a “quick take”, but I could be wrong.
In the interest of defending my “credentials,” you might be interested in taking a cursory look at things I've written before. I have a piece about AI welfare (which I submitted as the final essay in a neuroscience course), as well as a piece on gender identity (which I wrote for my former institution's student newspaper). Both of these are quite dated, but they at least serve to show that I can write academically.
Thank you! And thanks for the reply! I'm very curious to read your piece.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "matters," here. The only sense that I can think of is that it matters in the case that we are to interact with the simulation from the outside; otherwise, not really. I also avoided any discussion of Everettian quantum mechanics precisely because I think it really blows up the scope of it all. I actually believe that, because we're not quantum computers, Everettian quantum mechanics isn't important and... (read more)