I don’t think the issue of whether “cloning” is possible is actually crucial for this discussion, but since this relates to a common lesswrong sort of assumption, I’ll elaborate on it. I do think that making a sufficiently accurate copy is probably possible in principle (but obviously not now, and perhaps never, in practice). However, I don’t think this has been established. It seems conceivable that quantum effects are crucial to consciousness—certainly physics gives us no fundamental reason to rule this out. If this is true, then “cloning” (not the usual use of the word) by measuring the state of someone’s body and then constructing a duplicate will not work—the measurement will not be adequate to produce a good copy This possibility is compatible with there being some very good memory-erasing drug, which need only act on the quantum state of the person in a suitable way, without “measuring” it in its entirety. So I don’t agree with your statement that “if sleeping beauty problem is physically possible the cloning example must be as well”. And even if true in principle, there is a vast difference in practice between developing a slightly better amnesia drug—I wouldn’t be surprised if this was done tomorrow—and developing a way of measuring the state of someone’s brain accurately enough to produce a replica, and then also developing a way of constructing such a replica from the measurement data - my best guess is that this will never be possible.
This practical difference relates to a different sense in which your cloning example is “fantastic”. Even if we were sure that it was possible principle to “clone” people, we should not be sure that the methods of reasoning that we have evolved (biologically and culturally) will be adequate in a situation where this sort of thing happens. It would be like asking a human from 100,000 years ago to speculate on the social effects of Twitter. With social experience confined to a tribe of a dozen closely-related people, with occasional interactions with a few other tribes, not to mention a total ignorance of the relevant technology, they would be utterly incompetent to reason about how billions of people will interact when reacting to online text and video postings.
In this discussion, I get the impression that considering fantastical things like cloning leads you to discard common-sense realism. Uncrictially apply our current common-sense notions might indeed be invalid in a world where you can be duplicated—with the duplicate having perhaps first had its memories maliciously edited. There are lots of interesting, and difficult, issues here. But these are not issues that need to be settled in order to settle the Sleeping Beauty problem!
In your cloning example, you abandon common sense realism for no good reason. Since you talk about an original versus the clone, I take it that you see the experimenters as measuring the state of the original, without substantially disturbing it, and then creating a copy (as opposed to using a destructive measurement process, and then creating two copies, since then there is obviously no “original” left). In this situation, the distinction between the original and the copy is completely clear to any observer of the process. When they wake up, both the copy and the original do not know whether or not they are the original, but nevertheless one is the original and one is not. They can find out simply by asking the observer (and of course there are other possible ways—as is true for any fact about the world). Before they find out, they can assess the probability that they are the original, if that amuses them, or is necessary for some purpose. Nothing about this situation justifies abandoning the usual idea that probabilities regarding facts about the world are meaningful.
Regarding the cookies, you say “there is no strategy to maximize a “beauty in the moments” overall pleasure”. So once again, I ask: How is Beauty supposed to decide whether to eat a cookie or not?
You mentioned if our consciousness is quantum state dependent then creating a clone with indistinguishable memory would be impossible. (Because to duplicate someone’s memory would require complete information about his current quantum state, if I understand correctly) But at the same time you said sleeping beauty experiment is still possible since memory erasing only requires acting on the quantum state of the person without measuring it in its entirety. But wouldn’t the action’s end goal to revert the current state to a previous (Sunday nights) one? It would ultimately require beauty’s quantum state to be measured at Sunday night. Unless there is some mechanics to exactly reverse the effect of time on something. But that to me appears even more unrealistic. I do agree that the practical difficulty between the two experiment is different. Cloning with memory does require more advanced technology to carry out. However I think that does not change how we analysis the experiments or affect probability calculations. Furthermore, I do not think this difference in technical difficulty means we are too primitive to ponder about the cloning example while sleeping beauty problem is fair game.
The reason I bring out the cloning example is because it makes my argument a lot easier to express than using the sleeping beauty problem. You think the two problem are significantly different because one may be impossible in theory the other problem is definitely feasible. So I felt obligated to show the two problems are similar especially concerning theoretical feasibilities. If you don’t feel the theoretical feasibility is crucial to the discussion I’m ok to drop it from here on. One thing I want to point out is that all argument made by using the cloning experiment can be made by using the sleeping beauty problem. It is just that the expression would be very longwinded and messy.
You mentioning that no matter how we put it one of the copies is the original while the other is the clone. Again I agree with that. I am not arguing “I am the original” is a meaningless statement. I am arguing “the probability of me being the original” is invalid. And it is not because being the original or the clone makes no difference to the participant. But because in this question the first-person self explanatory concept of “me” should not be used. From the participant’s first-person perspective imagine repeating this experiment. You fall asleep and undergone the cloning and wake up again. After this awakening you can guess again whether you are the original for this new experiment. This process can be repeated as many times as you want. Now we have a series of experiment that you have first-person subjective experience. However there is no reason the relative frequency of you being the original in this series of experiments would converge to any particular value.
Of course one could argue the probability must be half because half of the resulting copies are original and the other half is the clone. However this reasoning is actually thinking from the perspective of an outsider. It treats the resulting clones as entities from the same reference class. So it is in conflict with using the first-person “me” in question. This reasoning is applicable if the entity in question is singled out among the copies from a third-person perspective, e.g. “the probability of a randomly selected copy being original.” Whereas the process described in the previous paragraph is strictly from the participants first-person perspective and inline with the use of first-person “me”.
Now we can modify the experiment slightly such that the cloning only happens if a coin toss land on Tails. This way it exactly mirrors the sleeping beauty problem. After wake up we can give each of them a cookie that is delicious to the original but painful to the clone. Because from first-person perspective repeating the experiment would not converge to a relative frequency there is no way to come up with an strategy for the participant to decide whether or not to eat them that will benefit “me” in the long run. In another word if beauty’s only concern is the subjective pleasure and pain of the apparent first-person “me”, then probability calculation could not help her to make a choice. Beauty have no rational way of deciding to eat the cookie or not.
Regarding cloning, we have very good reason to think that good-enough memory erasure is possible, because this sort of thing happens in reality—we do forget things, and we forget all events after some traumas. Moreover, there are plausible paths to creating a suitable drug. For example, it could be that newly-created memories in the hippocampus are stored in molecular structures that do not have various side-chains that accumulate with time, so a drug that just destroyed the molecules without these side-chains would erase recent memories, but not older ones. Such a drug could very well exist even if consciousness has a quantum aspect to it that would rule out duplication.
I don’t see how your argument that the first person “me” perspective renders probability statements “invalid” can apply to Sleeping Beauty problems without also rendering invalid all uses of probability in practice. When deciding whether or not to undergo some medical procedure, for example, all the information I have about its safety and efficacy is of “third-person” form. So it doesn’t apply to me? That can’t be right.
It also can’t be right that Beauty has “no rational way of deciding to eat the cookie or not”. The experiment iis only slightly fantastical, requiring a memory erasing drug that could well be invented tomorrow, without that being surprising. If your theory of rationality can’t handle this situation, there is something seriously wrong with it.
I think while comparing cloning and sleeping beauty problem you are not holding them to the same standard. You said we have good reason to think that “good-enough” memory erasure is possible. By good-enough I think you meant the end result might not be 100% same from a previous mental state but the difference is too small for human cognitives to notice. So I think when talking about cloning the same leniency should be given and we shouldn’t insist on a exact quantum copy either. You also suggested if our mental state is determined by our brain structure at a molecular level then it can be easily revered. But then suggests cloning would be impossible if our mind is determined by the brain at a quantum level. If our mind is determined at a quantum level simply reverting the molecular structure would not be enough to recreate a previous mental state either. I feel you are giving the sleeping beauty problem a easy pass here.
Why would the use of first-person me render all use of probability invalid? Regarding the risk of a medical procedure we are talking about an event with different possible outcomes that we cannot reliably predict for certain. Unlike the color of the eyes example you presented earlier this uncertainty can be well understood from the first-person perspective. For example when talking about the probability of winning the lottery you can interpret it from the third-person perspective and say if everyone in the world enters then only one person would win. But it is also possible to interpret it from the first-person perspective and say if I buy 7 billion tickets I would have only 1 winning ticket (or if I enter the same lottery 7 billion times I would only win once). They both work. Imagine while repeating the cloning experiment, after each wake up you toss a fair coin before going back to sleep again for the next repetition of cloning. As the number of repetitions increases the relative frequency of Heads of the coin tosses experienced by “me” would approach 1⁄2. However there is no reason the relative frequency of “me” being the original would converge to any value as the number of repetitions increase.
The reason there is no way to decide on whether or not to eat the cookie is because the only objective is to maximize the pleasure of the self-explanatory “me” and the reward is linked to “me” being the original. Not only my theory cannot handle the situation. I am arguing the situation is setup in a way no theory could handle it. People claiming beauty can make a rational decision is either changing the objective (e.g. be altruistic towards other copies instead of just the simple self) or did not use the first-person “me” (e.g. trying to maximize the pleasure of the person defined by some feature or selection process instead of this self-explanatory me).
Sleeping Beauty with cookies is an almost-realistic situation. I could easily create an analogous situation that is fully realistic (e.g., by modifying my Sailor’s Child problem). Beauty will decide somehow whether or not to eat a cookie. If Beauty has no rational basis for making her decision, then I think she has no rational basis for making any decision. Denial of the existence of rationality is of course a possible position to take, but it’s a position that by its nature is one that it is not profitable to try to discuss rationally.
Beauty can make a rational decision if she changes the objective. Instead of the first-person apparent “I” if she try to maximize the utility of a person distinguishable by a third-person then a rational decision can be made. The problem is that in almost all anthropic school of thought the first-person center is used without discrimination. E.g. in sleeping beauty problem the new evidence is I’m awake “today”. In Doomsday argument it considers “my” birth rank. In SIA’s rebuttal to Doomsday Argument the evidence supporting more observers is that “I” exist. In such logics it doesn’t matter when you read the argument the “I” in your mind is a different physical person from the “I” in my mind when I read the same argument. Since the “I” or “Now” is defined by first-person center in their logic it should be used the same way in the decision making as well. The fact a rational decision cannot be made while using the self-apparent “I” only shows there is a problem with the objective. That using the self-apparent concept of “I” or “Now” indiscriminately in anthropic reasoning is wrong.
Actually in this regard my idea is quite similar to your FNC. Of course there are obvious differences. But I think a discussion of that deserves another thread.
I got a feeling that our discussion here is coming to an end. While we didn’t convince each other, as expected for any anthropic related discussion, I still feel I have gained something out of it. It forced me to try to think and express more clearly and better structure my argument. I also want to think I have a better understanding of potential counter arguments. For that I want to express my gratitude
I don’t think the issue of whether “cloning” is possible is actually crucial for this discussion, but since this relates to a common lesswrong sort of assumption, I’ll elaborate on it. I do think that making a sufficiently accurate copy is probably possible in principle (but obviously not now, and perhaps never, in practice). However, I don’t think this has been established. It seems conceivable that quantum effects are crucial to consciousness—certainly physics gives us no fundamental reason to rule this out. If this is true, then “cloning” (not the usual use of the word) by measuring the state of someone’s body and then constructing a duplicate will not work—the measurement will not be adequate to produce a good copy This possibility is compatible with there being some very good memory-erasing drug, which need only act on the quantum state of the person in a suitable way, without “measuring” it in its entirety. So I don’t agree with your statement that “if sleeping beauty problem is physically possible the cloning example must be as well”. And even if true in principle, there is a vast difference in practice between developing a slightly better amnesia drug—I wouldn’t be surprised if this was done tomorrow—and developing a way of measuring the state of someone’s brain accurately enough to produce a replica, and then also developing a way of constructing such a replica from the measurement data - my best guess is that this will never be possible.
This practical difference relates to a different sense in which your cloning example is “fantastic”. Even if we were sure that it was possible principle to “clone” people, we should not be sure that the methods of reasoning that we have evolved (biologically and culturally) will be adequate in a situation where this sort of thing happens. It would be like asking a human from 100,000 years ago to speculate on the social effects of Twitter. With social experience confined to a tribe of a dozen closely-related people, with occasional interactions with a few other tribes, not to mention a total ignorance of the relevant technology, they would be utterly incompetent to reason about how billions of people will interact when reacting to online text and video postings.
In this discussion, I get the impression that considering fantastical things like cloning leads you to discard common-sense realism. Uncrictially apply our current common-sense notions might indeed be invalid in a world where you can be duplicated—with the duplicate having perhaps first had its memories maliciously edited. There are lots of interesting, and difficult, issues here. But these are not issues that need to be settled in order to settle the Sleeping Beauty problem!
In your cloning example, you abandon common sense realism for no good reason. Since you talk about an original versus the clone, I take it that you see the experimenters as measuring the state of the original, without substantially disturbing it, and then creating a copy (as opposed to using a destructive measurement process, and then creating two copies, since then there is obviously no “original” left). In this situation, the distinction between the original and the copy is completely clear to any observer of the process. When they wake up, both the copy and the original do not know whether or not they are the original, but nevertheless one is the original and one is not. They can find out simply by asking the observer (and of course there are other possible ways—as is true for any fact about the world). Before they find out, they can assess the probability that they are the original, if that amuses them, or is necessary for some purpose. Nothing about this situation justifies abandoning the usual idea that probabilities regarding facts about the world are meaningful.
Regarding the cookies, you say “there is no strategy to maximize a “beauty in the moments” overall pleasure”. So once again, I ask: How is Beauty supposed to decide whether to eat a cookie or not?
You mentioned if our consciousness is quantum state dependent then creating a clone with indistinguishable memory would be impossible. (Because to duplicate someone’s memory would require complete information about his current quantum state, if I understand correctly) But at the same time you said sleeping beauty experiment is still possible since memory erasing only requires acting on the quantum state of the person without measuring it in its entirety. But wouldn’t the action’s end goal to revert the current state to a previous (Sunday nights) one? It would ultimately require beauty’s quantum state to be measured at Sunday night. Unless there is some mechanics to exactly reverse the effect of time on something. But that to me appears even more unrealistic. I do agree that the practical difficulty between the two experiment is different. Cloning with memory does require more advanced technology to carry out. However I think that does not change how we analysis the experiments or affect probability calculations. Furthermore, I do not think this difference in technical difficulty means we are too primitive to ponder about the cloning example while sleeping beauty problem is fair game.
The reason I bring out the cloning example is because it makes my argument a lot easier to express than using the sleeping beauty problem. You think the two problem are significantly different because one may be impossible in theory the other problem is definitely feasible. So I felt obligated to show the two problems are similar especially concerning theoretical feasibilities. If you don’t feel the theoretical feasibility is crucial to the discussion I’m ok to drop it from here on. One thing I want to point out is that all argument made by using the cloning experiment can be made by using the sleeping beauty problem. It is just that the expression would be very longwinded and messy.
You mentioning that no matter how we put it one of the copies is the original while the other is the clone. Again I agree with that. I am not arguing “I am the original” is a meaningless statement. I am arguing “the probability of me being the original” is invalid. And it is not because being the original or the clone makes no difference to the participant. But because in this question the first-person self explanatory concept of “me” should not be used. From the participant’s first-person perspective imagine repeating this experiment. You fall asleep and undergone the cloning and wake up again. After this awakening you can guess again whether you are the original for this new experiment. This process can be repeated as many times as you want. Now we have a series of experiment that you have first-person subjective experience. However there is no reason the relative frequency of you being the original in this series of experiments would converge to any particular value.
Of course one could argue the probability must be half because half of the resulting copies are original and the other half is the clone. However this reasoning is actually thinking from the perspective of an outsider. It treats the resulting clones as entities from the same reference class. So it is in conflict with using the first-person “me” in question. This reasoning is applicable if the entity in question is singled out among the copies from a third-person perspective, e.g. “the probability of a randomly selected copy being original.” Whereas the process described in the previous paragraph is strictly from the participants first-person perspective and inline with the use of first-person “me”.
Now we can modify the experiment slightly such that the cloning only happens if a coin toss land on Tails. This way it exactly mirrors the sleeping beauty problem. After wake up we can give each of them a cookie that is delicious to the original but painful to the clone. Because from first-person perspective repeating the experiment would not converge to a relative frequency there is no way to come up with an strategy for the participant to decide whether or not to eat them that will benefit “me” in the long run. In another word if beauty’s only concern is the subjective pleasure and pain of the apparent first-person “me”, then probability calculation could not help her to make a choice. Beauty have no rational way of deciding to eat the cookie or not.
Regarding cloning, we have very good reason to think that good-enough memory erasure is possible, because this sort of thing happens in reality—we do forget things, and we forget all events after some traumas. Moreover, there are plausible paths to creating a suitable drug. For example, it could be that newly-created memories in the hippocampus are stored in molecular structures that do not have various side-chains that accumulate with time, so a drug that just destroyed the molecules without these side-chains would erase recent memories, but not older ones. Such a drug could very well exist even if consciousness has a quantum aspect to it that would rule out duplication.
I don’t see how your argument that the first person “me” perspective renders probability statements “invalid” can apply to Sleeping Beauty problems without also rendering invalid all uses of probability in practice. When deciding whether or not to undergo some medical procedure, for example, all the information I have about its safety and efficacy is of “third-person” form. So it doesn’t apply to me? That can’t be right.
It also can’t be right that Beauty has “no rational way of deciding to eat the cookie or not”. The experiment iis only slightly fantastical, requiring a memory erasing drug that could well be invented tomorrow, without that being surprising. If your theory of rationality can’t handle this situation, there is something seriously wrong with it.
I think while comparing cloning and sleeping beauty problem you are not holding them to the same standard. You said we have good reason to think that “good-enough” memory erasure is possible. By good-enough I think you meant the end result might not be 100% same from a previous mental state but the difference is too small for human cognitives to notice. So I think when talking about cloning the same leniency should be given and we shouldn’t insist on a exact quantum copy either. You also suggested if our mental state is determined by our brain structure at a molecular level then it can be easily revered. But then suggests cloning would be impossible if our mind is determined by the brain at a quantum level. If our mind is determined at a quantum level simply reverting the molecular structure would not be enough to recreate a previous mental state either. I feel you are giving the sleeping beauty problem a easy pass here.
Why would the use of first-person me render all use of probability invalid? Regarding the risk of a medical procedure we are talking about an event with different possible outcomes that we cannot reliably predict for certain. Unlike the color of the eyes example you presented earlier this uncertainty can be well understood from the first-person perspective. For example when talking about the probability of winning the lottery you can interpret it from the third-person perspective and say if everyone in the world enters then only one person would win. But it is also possible to interpret it from the first-person perspective and say if I buy 7 billion tickets I would have only 1 winning ticket (or if I enter the same lottery 7 billion times I would only win once). They both work. Imagine while repeating the cloning experiment, after each wake up you toss a fair coin before going back to sleep again for the next repetition of cloning. As the number of repetitions increases the relative frequency of Heads of the coin tosses experienced by “me” would approach 1⁄2. However there is no reason the relative frequency of “me” being the original would converge to any value as the number of repetitions increase.
The reason there is no way to decide on whether or not to eat the cookie is because the only objective is to maximize the pleasure of the self-explanatory “me” and the reward is linked to “me” being the original. Not only my theory cannot handle the situation. I am arguing the situation is setup in a way no theory could handle it. People claiming beauty can make a rational decision is either changing the objective (e.g. be altruistic towards other copies instead of just the simple self) or did not use the first-person “me” (e.g. trying to maximize the pleasure of the person defined by some feature or selection process instead of this self-explanatory me).
Sleeping Beauty with cookies is an almost-realistic situation. I could easily create an analogous situation that is fully realistic (e.g., by modifying my Sailor’s Child problem). Beauty will decide somehow whether or not to eat a cookie. If Beauty has no rational basis for making her decision, then I think she has no rational basis for making any decision. Denial of the existence of rationality is of course a possible position to take, but it’s a position that by its nature is one that it is not profitable to try to discuss rationally.
Beauty can make a rational decision if she changes the objective. Instead of the first-person apparent “I” if she try to maximize the utility of a person distinguishable by a third-person then a rational decision can be made. The problem is that in almost all anthropic school of thought the first-person center is used without discrimination. E.g. in sleeping beauty problem the new evidence is I’m awake “today”. In Doomsday argument it considers “my” birth rank. In SIA’s rebuttal to Doomsday Argument the evidence supporting more observers is that “I” exist. In such logics it doesn’t matter when you read the argument the “I” in your mind is a different physical person from the “I” in my mind when I read the same argument. Since the “I” or “Now” is defined by first-person center in their logic it should be used the same way in the decision making as well. The fact a rational decision cannot be made while using the self-apparent “I” only shows there is a problem with the objective. That using the self-apparent concept of “I” or “Now” indiscriminately in anthropic reasoning is wrong.
Actually in this regard my idea is quite similar to your FNC. Of course there are obvious differences. But I think a discussion of that deserves another thread.
I got a feeling that our discussion here is coming to an end. While we didn’t convince each other, as expected for any anthropic related discussion, I still feel I have gained something out of it. It forced me to try to think and express more clearly and better structure my argument. I also want to think I have a better understanding of potential counter arguments. For that I want to express my gratitude