Assuming the Dust Theory is true (i.e. the continuity of our experience is maintained purely by there somewhere being the next state of the state-machine-which-is-us). It doesn’t need to be causally connected to your current state. So far so good.
What if there is more than one such subsequent state in the universe? No problem so far. Our measure just splits, and we roll the dice on where we’ll find ourselves (it’s a meaningless question to ask if the split happens at the moment of the spatial, or the computational divergence).
But what if something steals our measure this way? What if, while sleeping, our sleeping state is instantiated somewhere else (thereby stealing 50% of our measure) and never reconnects to the main computational stream instantiated in our brain (so every time we dream, we toss a coin to jump somewhere else and never come back)?
One obvious solution is to say that our sleeping self isn’t us. It’s another person whose memories are dumped into our brain upon awakening. This goes well with our sleeping self acting differently than us and often having entirely different memories. In that case, there is no measure stealing going on, because the sleeping stream of consciousness happening in our brain isn’t ours.
To run with the spirit of your question:
Assuming the Dust Theory is true (i.e. the continuity of our experience is maintained purely by there somewhere being the next state of the state-machine-which-is-us). It doesn’t need to be causally connected to your current state. So far so good.
What if there is more than one such subsequent state in the universe? No problem so far. Our measure just splits, and we roll the dice on where we’ll find ourselves (it’s a meaningless question to ask if the split happens at the moment of the spatial, or the computational divergence).
But what if something steals our measure this way? What if, while sleeping, our sleeping state is instantiated somewhere else (thereby stealing 50% of our measure) and never reconnects to the main computational stream instantiated in our brain (so every time we dream, we toss a coin to jump somewhere else and never come back)?
One obvious solution is to say that our sleeping self isn’t us. It’s another person whose memories are dumped into our brain upon awakening. This goes well with our sleeping self acting differently than us and often having entirely different memories. In that case, there is no measure stealing going on, because the sleeping stream of consciousness happening in our brain isn’t ours.
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