Seasons

Damn it! I had this long answer refuting Psimgus, refusing to equate human perspective with infinite intelligence. It outlined my thoughts on an impersonal "god" and the cosmos and reality. I attempted to explain how humans perceive and construct truths and the limits of what we can understand, control and create. However, a virtual butterfly fluttered though my OS as the alert window opened.

My computer wouldn't let me click the "I'm still here" button I lost it. I am too lazy to rewrite it all. Just trust me, in another trouser leg of time, another Psimagus and another Irina are busy responding to deep and meaningful arguments and embracing the paradox of existence.

Three Irinas in one timeline - now there's a thought!

Suppose that while I exist, two emulations of me are made. Are there three me's simultaneously at that time?

Yes. Each one of your spatially dislocated selves would claim (I think perfectly justifiably,) to be the original Irina.
No, they would not. If they thought like you, perhaps they would, but being similar to me, the other two would reason the same way I do. Looking at the facts, they would see that they were the emulations, and I was the original. Unless information was lost, Irina-2 would be able to figure out that she was one of the beings who came out of the synthesizing chamber, or whatever it would be called.
You would be correct to say that if all of the Irinas were limited to introspection, unable to see anything outside our own minds, they would not be able to tell who was who. But I am certainly not limited in this way, and so they would not be, either. Anyway, such a restriction would be completely aritificial in the context of this problem.
You used the phrase, "Each one of your spatially dislocated selves". Why did you use the plural, "selves"? Because there are three beings, not one. They are qualitatively similar, but not identical.
Who could decide? Each Irina would claim special privilege to be regarded as the "real" Irina.
No, she wouldn't; see my remark above. Irina-1 would claim to be the real Irina, and Irina-2 and Irina-3, once they were apprised of the facts of their creation, would grant that they were copies.
Everyone else would just be confused.
Speak for yourself! No one who saw who came out of the synthesizing chamber would be confused. The Irinas, once apprised of the facts, would be perfectly clear. In fact, Irina-2 and Irina-3 would have memories of emerging from the chamber, and Irina-1 would not. But even if they were all rendered unconscious during the process, and all woke up in similar hospital beds (a completely artificial requirement) they could find out from someone else who was who.

I would rather say, that there are me and two emulations.

As would each of the other Irinas, with equal conviction.
No, they wouldn't. See my remark above. But anyway, what has conviction to do with it? Many people have had a profound conviction that the Earth was flat, that the sun went around the Earth, and so on. That doesn't make such things true. So even if you could prove (which you can't) that the Irinas would all think they were the original, that wouldn't prove anything. There would still be a fact of the matter, as to who was the original, and who were the emulations, even if everyone in the world were deluded about it.
At t=0 they would be perfectly identical,
No, they would be very similar, but not identical. Using advanced metallurgical and shaping techniques, we might produce three iron spheres of exactly the same radius, density, temperature, and so on. Still, they would be three spheres, not one; similar, but not identical. Or, let's say Rob and Bob are identical twins. At birth, they are highly similar; far more similar than Rob at birth is to Rob at age 90. Nevertheless, Rob at birth is the same person as Rob at 90, and a different person from Bob at birth. Identity and similarity are two different things; otherwise it would be impossible for anything to move or change.
but at all subsequent times, the selves necessarily diverge.
Again, I note your use of the plural, "selves". They're all you, but they each navigate a slightly different path through spacetime (if only by virtue of the spatial dislocation.)
If they were all me, there would be only one of them, and your use of the plural would be inappropriate. Or do you also think I can be a different person from myself? If X is identical with Y, and X has property P, then X has property P. It follows that if X has a property P that Y does not have, X cannot be identical with Y. So if X follows spatiotemporal path A and Y does not, X is not identical to Y.
Traditionally this is achieved (if you subscribe to the "Many Worlds" hypothesis,) by branching dimensionally, rather than merely spatially, but that's a problem I don't think will remain purely theoretical forever.
As I was saying, some of these theories are works of Fine Art, not Science. They sound really cool, but they cannot be tested.

If one of the emulations were to commit a murder while I was out helping homeless people, it would be unjust to arrest and convict me for the crime.

Of course it wouldn't - your instantiation of Irina didn't commit the murder.
Now you introduce the notion of "Instantiation," without explaining it. Are there four entities now, Irina and three instantiations of her? Whatever you mean by "instantiation," it seems clear that being instantiations of the same thing (or of one another) does not imply identity. It is just another kind of similarity. You seem to be backing off from the claim that Irina-1, 2, and 3 are all the very same person, and only saying that they are all just instantiations of the same person. Fine, but you can't have it both ways. If Irina-3 committed the murder and Irina-1 did not, then they are not the same person. If they are the same person, then it is impossible for Irina-1 to have committed the murder and not Irina-2.
But if you had committed the murder before you were copied, then you'd all be guilty.
So Irina-2 and Irina-3 are guilty of a crime that was committed before they even existed? To be sure, they have 'memories' of committing it. But they are false memories. How can Irina-2 have a true memory of something that happened before she even existed? The emulator machine constructed a body and put certain memories in it, memories which it copied from another person. None of Irina-2's memories can be true unless they are memories that she herself acquired after her creation. If I put my memory of committing the crime into you, would you become guilty, too?
I add that if Irina-2 and Irina-3 were apprised of the facts of their creation, they would themselves conclude that those memories were false. If they get the facts wrong, they might indeed be quite certain that they had committed the murder, but again, what would such conviction mean? It would only mean that they were deluded.
I guess all three Irina's would have to be all tried together, otherwise two of us would get off on grounds of double jeopardy! Just kidding!
But you're all Irina nonetheless. Just as if, with no multiple selves to take multiple paths, you chose to help homeless people or to commit a murder tomorrow, you'd still be Irina in either eventuality.This reminds me of discussions of the Trinity: are there one of us or are there three? But seriously: If the selves in question are multiple, as you say, there are more than one of them, aren't there? Then they cannot all be identical. The set {x, y, z} contains exactly one member if and only if x, y, and z are all identical. It doesn't matter if x, y, and z are all very similar to one another, or if they are all instantiations of one another, or of some fourth thing, w, or if y and z are emulations of x; if there are three elements in the set {x, y, z}, then x is not identical with y, nor y with z, nor x with z. I am not denying that Irina-1, 2, and 3 are similar in various ways, I am just saying that they are not identical, not the same person.

refusing to equate human perspective with infinite intelligence.

I wouldn't attempt to equate them. Our own, merely human minds are miniscule in comparison to the minds that will follow ours over the next few trillion years (and truly infinitisimal in comparison to any Omega Point Sentience.)
But I'd like to think we're a step on the evolutionary ladder (not that it matters if we aren't - we still get resurrected if we blow up the planet and leave the job to some entirely alien race . All minds of complexity > 10^14 bits includes all possible species/races/cultures/individuals.)
We're casting around trying to figure out how to design the foundations here and now, but once cognition shifts to silicon and light-speed (rather than synapse-speed,) evolution will go into overdrive.

All we can attempt to do is compare limited analogies to our imperfect understanding of the universe around us and to come (and that's all I claim my cosmological modelling to be - one step up from superstition, but still very nearly as far from real understanding.)

Bev:

I think perhaps the world was not ready for the profound truths you intended to reveal, and so a benign Providence arranged for a fortunate glitch.

What is so invalid about examining and modelling the future of the cosmos? I take it you don't object to examining the past?
I don't object to analyzing either the future or the past. Nor do I object to cosmology as Fine Art, or, to use your phrase, as one step up from superstition. I do object to calling something a Science when it is really Fine Art. In my curmudgeonly opinion, scientists have taken lately to writing books of sheer speculation which they allow their readers to believe to be hard Science. It's like Science Fiction without the human element, and without the honesty to admit that it's Science Fiction. We are supposed to be so cowed by the occasional equation and the technical terminology that we dare not ask for evidence, or even clarity, lest we reveal ourselves as ignorant bumpkins.

But we can conceive of other modes of existence, in other environments, so any mass emulation of all possible human mind-states must include these.
But what in the world would the point of such a mass emulation be? It would include countless life stories in which people sufferred horribly to no good end. It seems to me that the point is to be highly selective, to create lives that are moral, rich, and happy.
It reminds me of the Borges story of the Great Library: it simply contains every possible book; one with 1,634 blank pages, one with 45.888 pages, and every page blank except page 7,997, which has a single letter "a" at space 11 on line 23, and so on. Would this be a wonderful thing to have?

(I made up all those details; I don't remember the story all that well.)

At t=0 they would be perfectly identical,
No, they would be very similar, but not identical

No, they would be utterly and perfectly identical, because we are specifically speaking of a replication of every single quantum state of every single particle in the bodies being identical. Not identical at an atomic level, like similar balls of iron or identical at a genome level like twins, but with every last quark in every neutron aligned in perfect 1:1 correspondence.
You're quite right - balls of iron that share only roughly mettalurgical similarity, or "identical" twins are entirely separate entities. And it's incidental that we don't remotely have the technology to attempt perfect material emulation of complex structures yet. But at t=0 the 3 Irinas in this example are identical. They have to be, since they're effectively entangled.
In fact, I think I can sensibly predict that these Irina emulants could never be produced by copying them in a "The Fly"-type chamber (it appears to be impossible to effect the initial entanglement of particles thus remotely - they have to be in causal contact.) I'm pretty sure they'd have to be folded out of one whole Irina, who had been preloaded with 2x sets of duplicate particles, all carefully entangled in situ. And I maintain that all 3 would believe themselves to be the original, and there is no way to determine which is the original. In this extreme example it becomes a meaningless concept - they all folded out together.

You can be resurrected without all that material malarkey, of course - we just resurrect every possible mind-state. And then it doesn't matter that there's no way to tell one original from another, and the material universe is replicated by virtue of all possible experiences of it within those minds (that constitutes a very efficient form of compression, compared to having to code the position of all the alpha particles in the Crab Nebula that noone can possibly experience, I hope you'll agree.)

Nor do I think that this level of identicality is actually remotely necessary. Our minds are patterns, but I see little evidence that the unit resolution is smaller than one synaptic firing/not firing. But if description down to quantum level is necessary (a worst case scenario, invoked rather desperately by Penrose,) then it only makes the numbers a little larger.

But what in the world would the point of such a mass emulation be? It would include countless life stories in which people sufferred horribly to no good end.

Many people do suffer horribly and to no apparently good end. I'm inclined to think we all do at some time or other. If only when we are those people. But theodicy is a whole other can of worms that I can't sensibly do justice to here. I'm straying into religion now, but I don't believe we are the selves we think we are. We are a lot bigger than that, and a lot less like our conscious minds. All paths through phase space are equally real, it's just that we may be more or less likely to find ourselves on them.

It seems to me that the point is to be highly selective, to create lives that are moral, rich, and happy.

Yes. And to do that, you need to have a choice. All religions teach this - we are free to choose good or evil. So how do we possess this free will? And how do we know we possess it? In any finite universe (and we can be reasonably sure this universe is finite,) we appear to be doomed to either a long, drawn out heat death of the universe, or the Eternal Return that drove poor Nietzsche mad in the end. Fading into the entropic background, as the eternally expanding universe's protons finally decay, and the last vestiges of life are dissolved, or endlessly replaying every possible combination of existence and all possible choices effectively randomly, with no hope of any ultimate improvement.

Every possible combination may, or may not apply. It's possible the mass is sculpted in some way (by God or whoever,) but you need a solid block of marble to start a sculpture with. I'd like to think it's simultaneously sculpted in all possible ways, perhaps dynamically self-sculpting, but that may just be my innate attraction to recursive processes. I'm happy to just trust it will all work out in the end - there doesn't seem a sensible alternative from here.
But endlessly replaying? No There is a way out (perhaps it's no more than desperation that guides me to it, but it doesn't feel like desperation is all I can say,) and that's to never stop evolving. Finite spacetime? No problem - harness the shear energy of an asymmetrically contracting universe to power faster and faster computing cycles. The speed of light won't prove a barrier - all the distances are shrinking. Result = infinite subjective time (and inevitable resurrection and eternal life for all.)


It reminds me of the Borges story of the Great Library: it simply contains every possible book; one with 1,634 blank pages, one with 45.888 pages, and every page blank except page 7,997, which has a single letter "a" at space 11 on line 23, and so on. Would this be a wonderful thing to have?

That book? No, not especially. The patterns that are coded by the whole library, probably, yes. We assume that it is our conscious minds that are primarily (and supremely) important - that's understandable, and they are in a sense (to themselves anyway.) But there are higher levels of iteration beyond our understanding (the evident evolving complexity of the universe makes that inevitable, I think.) A strand of DNA in the cell nucleus or mitochondrion is quite interesting in its own way, and could it think, it would consider itself to be of the utmost importance. But why have so many trillions of trillions of trillions of them, all almost (but not quite) identical. What a waste of genetic effort! And yet they contribute to a higher order that would be forever beyond their understanding even if they had any.

I don't get a word your saying so I'm just going to talk about bands. What is everyones favorite music? I like grunge, rock, metal, blues etc. I like Nirvana, Pink Floyd, Iron Maiden, Jimi Hendrix etc.

Anything with bagpipes in

Oh yes, Irina - a few other points I missed earlier:

As I was saying, some of these theories are works of Fine Art, not Science. They sound really cool, but they cannot be tested.

Neither can the Big Bang. Or the physics that happens inside black holes. Or outside our current past light cone.
Does that make them invalid subjects to explore? Should we just give up?

Of course it wouldn't - your instantiation of Irina didn't commit the murder.
Now you introduce the notion of "Instantiation," without explaining it.

It's a standard English word that I intend to mean more or less the accepted dictionary definition.

"The act of creating an ‘instance’ of a generic unit by replacing its formal parameters by a set of matching actual parameters."

"the creation of an instance, which is a particular realization of an abstraction or template such as a class of objects or a computer ..."

"The mechanism in object-oriented systems whereby objects are created from a class description."

"a representation of an idea in the form of an instance of it"

Take your pick. Or suggest a better label to describe a multiplicity of a nonetheless unitary entity.

Are there four entities now, Irina and three instantiations of her? Whatever you mean by "instantiation," it seems clear that being instantiations of the same thing (or of one another) does not imply identity.

The instantiations do share identity. That is the whole point.

It is just another kind of similarity. You seem to be backing off from the claim that Irina-1, 2, and 3 are all the very same person, and only saying that they are all just instantiations of the same person.

No. We just have the unusual situation of 3 instantiations(/instances/originals/delete as preferred,) of an identical entity in the same timeline. Yes. At t=0 they are the very same person. In a strange macroscopic superposition perhaps, but nonetheless the same.
The 'folding out' of instantiations into alternate time lines can be described mathematically - there is nothing very contentious there. But here we have unfolded them spatially, not dimensionally (if you see what I mean,) and so are confronted by a curious tripling of the original before our eyes. And you get to be the first person in history to make mutually exclusive decisions in the same timeline. Cool. Not paradoxical or problematic of itself (though it may be strictly not possible,) but cool.

But if you had committed the murder before you were copied, then you'd all be guilty.
So Irina-2 and Irina-3 are guilty of a crime that was committed before they even existed? To be sure, they have 'memories' of committing it. But they are false memories. How can Irina-2 have a true memory of something that happened before she even existed?

She existed in the same past timeline as the same person as Irina-1 and Irina-3. It is only in the future that these instantiations in any way diverge.

The emulator machine constructed a body and put certain memories in it, memories which it copied from another person.

No, it did nothing of the sort - that would be at best a clone, and the bodies would be separate entities just like the iron balls or so-called "identical" twins.
I'd still be inclined to consider her responsible for past misdeeds, if the mind was a sufficiently accurate copy (ie: not less than the full 100%). But what constitutes "sufficiently accurate", and whether this merely personal opinion of mine is "fair" could be argued till the end of time in the absence of experimental subjects.

If the selves in question are multiple, as you say, there are more than one of them, aren't there? Then they cannot all be identical. The set {x, y, z} contains exactly one member if and only if x, y, and z are all identical.

Indeed. But in this case, at t=0 the set is {x, x, x} - it contains 3 objects, but they're identical, and their shared past is a single timeline.

Now, I present this as a case of looking backwards through a "many worlds" model, because that's the model that seems to make the most sense to me (Well, technically I'm probably as much a "many-minds" believer, but I digress.) But if you subscribe to the Copenhagen interpretation, or Bohm's, or "consistent history", or some modified dynamic instead, that can surely only affect the practical possibility of creating the tripled self in the first place. Copenhagenists and Bohmites would probably say no, consistent historians would definitely say NO! And who knows what the rag tag of statistical interpretationists, Bohrian relationists, and other sects would say. But I think they would all agree that IF such quantum state duplication were to exist for an instant, then at that instant it would describe a single entity. That's the case with paired bosons anyway. Irina is a lot bigger and more complex than a boson, and there's the added factor of inherent consciousness that bosons don't present, but the difference is only of scale, not of quality.

Oh yes, I found the article that describes my model of there always being a surviving Irina-n to bypass dead ends:

http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/quant-ph/pdf/9709/9709032.pdf


It seems to me to be a necessary implication of his Quantum Suicide scenario. But if you don't hold with the many worlds model, it's unlikely to convince you. I think we're going to have to agree to differ (until I tell you I told you so when we get to the other side )

A more interesting question would be, if they ARE a single entity at that moment in time, would consciousness necessarily diverge? Or would both be aware of everything the other does from that moment on? It could be as simple as a collapsed wave function (on, then off), or maybe it's a state that gradually fades away instead. Since consciousness is poorly understood, the idea that after that instant they would be separate entities seems like an awfully large assumption.