Was Alice conscious in case 1? In case 2? Since the sequence of events in both cases were in fact the same exact sequence of events—not merely identical, but referring to the exact same physically realized sequence of events—up to our quantum coinflip, it’s nonsense to say that one was conscious and the other was not.
that you and I are conscious seems like a pretty clear paradigm-case. On the other hand, that you and I would still be conscious even if there were aliens who could perfectly copy, predict, reverse, and cohere us (very likely by first uploading us into a digital substrate), seems far from a paradigm-case. If anything, it seems to me like a paradigmatic non-paradigm-case.
I disagree with his caveat for consciousness, since I would like to think of myself as conscious even if I am a simulation someone can run backwards, but I am not 100% sure, because reversibility changes the game considerably. Scott alludes to it in the Schrodinger’s cat experiment, by noting that death becomes reversible (in the QM-sense, not the cryonic sense), and thus largely loses its meaning:
I claim that there’s no animal cruelty at all in the Schrödinger’s cat experiment. And here’s why: in order to prove that the cat was ever in a coherent superposition of |Alive〉 and |Dead〉, you need to be able to measure it in a basis like {|Alive〉+|Dead〉,|Alive〉-|Dead〉}. But if you can do that, you must have such precise control over all the cat’s degrees of freedom that you can also rotate unitarily between the |Alive〉 and |Dead〉 states. (To see this, let U be the unitary that you applied to the |Alive〉 branch, and V the unitary that you applied to the |Dead〉 branch, to bring them into coherence with each other; then consider applying U-1V.) But if you can do that, then in what sense should we say that the cat in the |Dead〉 state was ever “dead” at all? Normally, when we speak of “killing,” we mean doing something irreversible—not rotating to some point in a Hilbert space that we could just as easily rotate away from.
Since this changes at least one fundamental concept, I am reluctant to state that it cannot apply to another.
He was willing to bite a big bullet to defend the definition he used. I just applied the definition he’d used, and plopped a much fatter bullet on his plate.
To recap—He would interpret the same sequence of past physical states as conscious or not depending on which branch of a later quantum split he ended up in.
Meanwhile, I provided an alternate very similar interpretation that maintains all of the benefits I can discern of his formulation and dodges both bullets.
Well, Scott disagrees:
I disagree with his caveat for consciousness, since I would like to think of myself as conscious even if I am a simulation someone can run backwards, but I am not 100% sure, because reversibility changes the game considerably. Scott alludes to it in the Schrodinger’s cat experiment, by noting that death becomes reversible (in the QM-sense, not the cryonic sense), and thus largely loses its meaning:
Since this changes at least one fundamental concept, I am reluctant to state that it cannot apply to another.
He was willing to bite a big bullet to defend the definition he used. I just applied the definition he’d used, and plopped a much fatter bullet on his plate.
To recap—He would interpret the same sequence of past physical states as conscious or not depending on which branch of a later quantum split he ended up in.
Meanwhile, I provided an alternate very similar interpretation that maintains all of the benefits I can discern of his formulation and dodges both bullets.
Consider posting your comment on his blog.
Too bad he didn’t consider it worth replying to (yet?)
Too bad indeed. In my experience, if he hasn’t within a day or so, he won’t.
Funny, I just came here to copy it for that purpose.