X-Message-Number: 9339 Date: Mon, 23 Mar 98 15:03:48 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Re: CryoNet #9336 Andrew S. Davidson, #9336, writes > So, my difficulty is that if the mind is independent of the substrate then what is to stop it > latching onto other substrates across space and time? Perhaps this is happening all the time > but our real world thread is just not aware of the spawned copies - something like the > many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is related to my view, except I would say "we" are "aware" of the "spawned copies"--because they are us too! I think reality probably includes a multiverse where many happenings are duplicated, including instantiations of persons. (By "instantiation" I mean "equivalent emulation," i.e. a process that can be considered the same at an appropriate, informational level.) "You" are not one process in the midst of these, but "you" extend over all your instantiations, more or less equally, or more accurately, weighted by the relative probabilities. One way to justify this is that, by definition, "you" have no way of knowing which of your instantiations "you" really are--so I submit that "you" are not just one of them but all. But surely probabilities do play a part in this. Some of your instantiations are more likely than others, and can thus be taken more seriously. Thus, though in theory I think people could be emulated in Turing machines running on long 1-dimensional tapes in some universe like ours that allows for more usual processing in 3 dimensions, it has a very small likelihood and thus is very rare, though not unknown, in the multiverse. We are "probably" not such emulations, but "more likely" the real thing, though the other possibilities have to be given at least a small weight too. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=9339