Every level but the last one is supposed to be wrong.
The point is they're supposed to be wrong in a specifically crafted way.
Most of them I start to agree with and then you add a conclusion that I don't think follows from the lead-in.
This is by design. I tried to make the levels mutually exclusive. The way I did this was by having each level add a significant insight to the truth (as I see it) and then say something wrong (as I see it) to constrain any further insight.
I think you've got an unstated and likely incorrect assumption
that "me" in the past, "me" as experiencing something in the moment and "me" in the future are all singular and
necessarily linked. I think they've been singular in my experience, but that's not... (read 509 more words →)
I hope, at least, that this back-and-forth has been useful?
Absolutely. Talking to you was refreshing, and it helped me not only flesh out my ladder but also pin down my beliefs. Thank you for taking time to talk about this stuff.
so I don’t think I have much to add past what we’ve already gone over.
I did make an attempt to address your last reply. If you still feel that way after, let me know.
I don’t see that understanding QM would suffice to grant #3 and #4 without having solved the Hard Problem. Without actually having a full reduction of consciousness, there’s just no way to be certain that the reasoning you provide makes sense
This should change when you understand QM. I was trying to black box it.
And how do we do this? What makes a person “feel like the same person”, “from the inside”, through the passage of time? Do those quoted phrases even make sense? What do they mean, exactly? We really don’t know.
Can we? It seems like we can, but… is that just an illusion? Somehow? Why... (read 524 more words →)
Fair enough. I don't see them as gibberish, so treating them that way is hard. I admit I didn't actually see what you meant.
I made an attempt to treat it as a black box in a different thread reply, but I still had to use the language of QM. I might be able to sum it up into short sentences as well, but I wanted to start with some amount of formality and explanation.
We gain these:
1. Everything obeys QM. To wit, nothing can exist anywhere/when that is not describable in the math of QM in principle.
2. If everything obeys QM, consciousness obeys QM.
3. As long as consciousness is not or does not consist of some fundamental element that does not obey QM, there is nothing anywhere that can differentiate between copies in principle in any way besides how we can differentiate between a person in the past and the same person in the future, having taken a mundane trajectory through spacetime. This includes how it "feels from the inside." If we can claim consciousness is continuous at all, we can claim it... (read more)
My response here would be the same as my responses to the other outstanding threads.
The limit of [the effect your original prior has on your ultimate posterior] as [the number of updates you've done] approaches infinity is zero. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter what prior your start with. As a convenience, if we have literally no information or evidence, we usually use the uniform prior (equally likely as not, in this case), and then our first update is probably to run it through occam's razor.
The rest of your objections, if I understand QM and its implications right, fall upon the previously unintuitive and possibly incoherent things that become intuitively true as you understand QM. As I said elsewhere:
I truly... (read more)
I was recently arguing in /r/transhumanism on reddit about the viability of uploading/forking consciousness, and I realized I didn't have any method of assessing where someone's beliefs actually lay - where I might need to move them from if I wanted to convince them of what I thought.
So I made an intuition ladder. Please correct me if I made any mistakes (that aren't by design), and let me know if you think there's anything past the final level.
Some instructions on how to use this: Read the first level. If you notice something definitely wrong with it, move to the next level. Repeat until you come to a level where... (read 750 more words →)
Ah. I guess I'm not sure where to go from here, in that case.