Right. I agree that we don’t know how, but I submit that we know that they do, and we believe strongly in reductionism, and we can condition conclusions on reductionism and the belief that they do, without conditioning them on how they do, and I submit further that limiting ourselves in this way is still sufficient to advance up the ladder.
We have a black box—in computer science, an interface—but we don’t need to know what’s inside if we know everything about its behavior on the outside. We can still use it in an algorithm, and know what to expect will happen.
It doesn’t seem like we can know this much in principle (without access to the inside of the black box) until you understand why we know this much, as EY talks about here.
I’d also like to be clear that “inside the black box” (the answer to the hard problem) is not the same as “the subjective feeling inside the mind” (a physical consequence of whatever the black box is doing).
how the physical consequences of this or that event translate into subjective experience is exactly what’s at issue
I didn’t mean this in the sense of “how is it possible that they do”, but rather in the sense of “in what way do they”. To that formulation, your answer is non-responsive.
We have a black box—in computer science, an interface—but we don’t need to know what’s inside if we know everything about its behavior on the outside.
But we don’t know everything about the black box’s behavior! That’s precisely the problem in the first place! We are, in essence, trying to predict the behavior of the black box. And we’re trying to do it without knowing what’s inside it—which seems futile and ill-advised, given that we can’t exactly observe the box’s behavior, post-hoc!
As for the linked Sequence post—again, I really do take your word for it. I just don’t think that stuff is relevant.
I truly do think we can’t move further from this point, in this thread of this argument, without you reading and understanding the sequence :(
I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that the distinction you’re trying to make between what I’m saying and what I’d have to say for my answer to be responsive dissolves as you understand QM.
I could, of course, be misunderstanding you completely. But there also isn’t anything you’re linking that I’m unwilling to read :P
Well, to be honest, I don’t think there is anywhere further to move.
I mean, suppose I re-read the QM sequence, and this time I understand it. What propositions will I then accept, that I currently reject? What beliefs will I hold, that I currently do not?
If I’ve read your comments correctly thus far, then it seems to me that everything you list, in answer to my above questions, will be things that I have already assented to (at least, for the sake of argument, if not in fact). So what is gained?
1. Everything obeys QM. To wit, nothing can exist anywhere/when that is not describable in the math of QM in principle.
2. If everything obeys QM, consciousness obeys QM.
3. As long as consciousness is not or does not consist of some fundamental element that does not obey QM, there is nothing anywhere that can differentiate between copies in principle in any way besides how we can differentiate between a person in the past and the same person in the future, having taken a mundane trajectory through spacetime. This includes how it “feels from the inside.” If we can claim consciousness is continuous at all, we can claim it is continuous regardless of proximity in spacetime or any other consideration except for a particular change in physical structure across some change in spacetime. There is provably no computable difference, in the structure of our universe, between existing from one second to the next, and blinking out of existence somewhere/when and then into existence somewhere/when else.
4. As long as consciousness is not or does not consist of some fundamental element that does not obey QM, our subjective experience of being in one place at one time is a limitation of our own perceptions. When we exist in multiple places at the same time, each placetime!us perceives a single, unbroken continuity of consciousness in hindsight, but this is an artifact of a failure to perceive or communicate with other placetime!us branches.
5. We constantly exist in multiple places, as decoherence is the rule, and factorable subspaces where a particular placetime!us can exist and identify as a “world” are a significant exception. It just so happens that decoherence of a certain kind tends to create locally factorable subspaces that move away from each other in configuration space, so they can’t meaningfully interact. For any reasonable definition of “we”, “we” are constantly being copied every time there is any detectable (in principle) decoherence anywhere in our “world” (a “universe” that a single placetime!us has access to in principle). By observation, we know that at least every time the “we” we identify as has split, it hasn’t interrupted our continuity of consciousness. As there are decoherence events constantly on scales we have trouble imagining in numbers of places we have trouble imagining at once, we can reason that we didn’t just get absurdly lucky, and every copy of us looks back on these splits with the same feeling of continuity.
6. The splits we’ve observed and cannot interact with are in principle no different from a split in a single “world” where we can interact with our copy.
And possibly more. It’s a lot and I’m doing the best I can from memory.
I grant (for the sake of argument) #1 and #2. I don’t see that understanding QM would suffice to grant #3 and #4 without having solved the Hard Problem. Without actually having a full reduction of consciousness, there’s just no way to be certain that the reasoning you provide makes sense. This is in large part this is because the reasoning has “holes” in it—that is, parts which we currently take essentially on faith, pending a resolution of the Hard Problem.
Some specifics:
in any way besides how we can differentiate between a person in the past and the same person in the future
And how do we do this? What makes a person “feel like the same person”, “from the inside”, through the passage of time? Do those quoted phrases even make sense? What do they mean, exactly? We really don’t know.
If we can claim consciousness is continuous at all
Can we? It seems like we can, but… is that just an illusion? Somehow? Why does it seem like consciousness is continuous? Or is that a confused question (as some people indeed seem to claim)?
As long as consciousness is not or does not consist of some fundamental element that does not obey QM
Well, and what if it does? We’re back to the “conditioning on reductionism” thing; until we actually have a full reduction, we just can’t blithely toss about assumptions like this!
… actually, we needn’t even go that far. It’s not even certainty of reductionism that you’re suggesting we condition on—it’s certainty of… what? Quantum mechanics applying to everything? But that’s a great deal weaker! I am not nearly as certain of that (in fact, I have no real solid belief about it), so by no means will I condition on a certainty of this claim!
our subjective experience of being in one place at one time is a limitation of our own perceptions. When we exist in multiple places at the same time, each placetime!us perceives a single, unbroken continuity of consciousness in hindsight, but this is an artifact of a failure to perceive or communicate with other placetime!us branches
This part I actually just don’t get the point of. I mean, you’re not wrong, but so what?
As for #5 and #6, well, there I just don’t understand what you’re saying, so I can’t judge whether it’s relevant.
I don’t see that understanding QM would suffice to grant #3 and #4 without having solved the Hard Problem. Without actually having a full reduction of consciousness, there’s just no way to be certain that the reasoning you provide makes sense
This should change when you understand QM. I was trying to black box it.
And how do we do this? What makes a person “feel like the same person”, “from the inside”, through the passage of time? Do those quoted phrases even make sense? What do they mean, exactly? We really don’t know.
Can we? It seems like we can, but… is that just an illusion? Somehow? Why does it seemlike consciousness is continuous? Or is that a confused question (as some people indeed seem to claim)?
It doesn’t matter, because we can prove they are the same black box, and thus their behavior is the same, even if we don’t know how it works (or fully what that behavior even is). As long as we have A === B (which QM says we must), we can say (A->C) → (B->C) even if we don’t know whether A->C or how. To the extent that it A gives off some evidence that convinces us of C, B does exactly the same thing.
Well, and what if it does? We’re back to the “conditioning on reductionism” thing; until we actually have a full reduction, we just can’t blithely toss about assumptions like this!
… actually, we needn’t even go that far. It’s not even certainty of reductionism that you’re suggesting we condition on—it’s certainty of… what? Quantum mechanics applying to everything? But that’s a great deal weaker! I am not nearly as certain of that (in fact, I have no real solid belief about it), so by no means will I condition on a certainty of this claim!
1 and 2 imply this, and you were willing to give me those. QM supports reductionism independent of all the classical and empirical reasons we believe in reductionism. Like I said above, you asked me to black box it, and I’m claiming these are things that are clear when you understand QM. QM is brazen about being the exclusive language our universe uses to describe everything. It’s physical nonsense to talk about something that exists and isn’t described by QM. That’s what existence means.
This part I actually just don’t get the point of. I mean, you’re not wrong, but so what?
It’s preparation for the point “we do it all the time and maintain our sense of continuity in every branch” in 5 and 6.
As for #5 and #6, well, there I just don’t understand what you’re saying, so I can’t judge whether it’s relevant.
5 is basically:
When Schrödinger’s cat enters a superposition of alive|dead, so does the entire universe, including us. Like the cat, we split into a!us and d!us (us in the world where the cat is alive and us in the world where it is dead). When we observe the cat, and find it out is alive|dead, we are finding out which world we are in, and correlating our brain state with the state of the cat. This is decoherence, and it pushes a!universe and d!universe apart in the mathematical substrate that defines them (so they can’t interact anymore).
If we observe the cat is alive, we realize we are a!us. But there is still a d!us. We split, and they are observing a dead cat. a!us and d!us both can think back to the time before the split and say “that’s me and I had an unbroken chain of time slices that lead me here—my consciousness was continuous”. Both maintain continuity throughout the process.
6 is basically:
The above experience for a person cannot be described differently in QM (which is the language of existence) from the kind of copying that occurs in one branch!universe, except by differences that can’t in principle have an effect as per point 2, so they black box as the same thing, and implications about one are implications about the other.
Right. I agree that we don’t know how, but I submit that we know that they do, and we believe strongly in reductionism, and we can condition conclusions on reductionism and the belief that they do, without conditioning them on how they do, and I submit further that limiting ourselves in this way is still sufficient to advance up the ladder.
We have a black box—in computer science, an interface—but we don’t need to know what’s inside if we know everything about its behavior on the outside. We can still use it in an algorithm, and know what to expect will happen.
It doesn’t seem like we can know this much in principle (without access to the inside of the black box) until you understand why we know this much, as EY talks about here.
I’d also like to be clear that “inside the black box” (the answer to the hard problem) is not the same as “the subjective feeling inside the mind” (a physical consequence of whatever the black box is doing).
Sorry, I think I wasn’t clear. When I said:
I didn’t mean this in the sense of “how is it possible that they do”, but rather in the sense of “in what way do they”. To that formulation, your answer is non-responsive.
But we don’t know everything about the black box’s behavior! That’s precisely the problem in the first place! We are, in essence, trying to predict the behavior of the black box. And we’re trying to do it without knowing what’s inside it—which seems futile and ill-advised, given that we can’t exactly observe the box’s behavior, post-hoc!
As for the linked Sequence post—again, I really do take your word for it. I just don’t think that stuff is relevant.
I truly do think we can’t move further from this point, in this thread of this argument, without you reading and understanding the sequence :(
I could be mistaken, but it seems to me that the distinction you’re trying to make between what I’m saying and what I’d have to say for my answer to be responsive dissolves as you understand QM.
I could, of course, be misunderstanding you completely. But there also isn’t anything you’re linking that I’m unwilling to read :P
Well, to be honest, I don’t think there is anywhere further to move.
I mean, suppose I re-read the QM sequence, and this time I understand it. What propositions will I then accept, that I currently reject? What beliefs will I hold, that I currently do not?
If I’ve read your comments correctly thus far, then it seems to me that everything you list, in answer to my above questions, will be things that I have already assented to (at least, for the sake of argument, if not in fact). So what is gained?
We gain these:
1. Everything obeys QM. To wit, nothing can exist anywhere/when that is not describable in the math of QM in principle.
2. If everything obeys QM, consciousness obeys QM.
3. As long as consciousness is not or does not consist of some fundamental element that does not obey QM, there is nothing anywhere that can differentiate between copies in principle in any way besides how we can differentiate between a person in the past and the same person in the future, having taken a mundane trajectory through spacetime. This includes how it “feels from the inside.” If we can claim consciousness is continuous at all, we can claim it is continuous regardless of proximity in spacetime or any other consideration except for a particular change in physical structure across some change in spacetime. There is provably no computable difference, in the structure of our universe, between existing from one second to the next, and blinking out of existence somewhere/when and then into existence somewhere/when else.
4. As long as consciousness is not or does not consist of some fundamental element that does not obey QM, our subjective experience of being in one place at one time is a limitation of our own perceptions. When we exist in multiple places at the same time, each placetime!us perceives a single, unbroken continuity of consciousness in hindsight, but this is an artifact of a failure to perceive or communicate with other placetime!us branches.
5. We constantly exist in multiple places, as decoherence is the rule, and factorable subspaces where a particular placetime!us can exist and identify as a “world” are a significant exception. It just so happens that decoherence of a certain kind tends to create locally factorable subspaces that move away from each other in configuration space, so they can’t meaningfully interact. For any reasonable definition of “we”, “we” are constantly being copied every time there is any detectable (in principle) decoherence anywhere in our “world” (a “universe” that a single placetime!us has access to in principle). By observation, we know that at least every time the “we” we identify as has split, it hasn’t interrupted our continuity of consciousness. As there are decoherence events constantly on scales we have trouble imagining in numbers of places we have trouble imagining at once, we can reason that we didn’t just get absurdly lucky, and every copy of us looks back on these splits with the same feeling of continuity.
6. The splits we’ve observed and cannot interact with are in principle no different from a split in a single “world” where we can interact with our copy.
And possibly more. It’s a lot and I’m doing the best I can from memory.
I grant (for the sake of argument) #1 and #2. I don’t see that understanding QM would suffice to grant #3 and #4 without having solved the Hard Problem. Without actually having a full reduction of consciousness, there’s just no way to be certain that the reasoning you provide makes sense. This is in large part this is because the reasoning has “holes” in it—that is, parts which we currently take essentially on faith, pending a resolution of the Hard Problem.
Some specifics:
And how do we do this? What makes a person “feel like the same person”, “from the inside”, through the passage of time? Do those quoted phrases even make sense? What do they mean, exactly? We really don’t know.
Can we? It seems like we can, but… is that just an illusion? Somehow? Why does it seem like consciousness is continuous? Or is that a confused question (as some people indeed seem to claim)?
Well, and what if it does? We’re back to the “conditioning on reductionism” thing; until we actually have a full reduction, we just can’t blithely toss about assumptions like this!
… actually, we needn’t even go that far. It’s not even certainty of reductionism that you’re suggesting we condition on—it’s certainty of… what? Quantum mechanics applying to everything? But that’s a great deal weaker! I am not nearly as certain of that (in fact, I have no real solid belief about it), so by no means will I condition on a certainty of this claim!
This part I actually just don’t get the point of. I mean, you’re not wrong, but so what?
As for #5 and #6, well, there I just don’t understand what you’re saying, so I can’t judge whether it’s relevant.
This should change when you understand QM. I was trying to black box it.
It doesn’t matter, because we can prove they are the same black box, and thus their behavior is the same, even if we don’t know how it works (or fully what that behavior even is). As long as we have A === B (which QM says we must), we can say (A->C) → (B->C) even if we don’t know whether A->C or how. To the extent that it A gives off some evidence that convinces us of C, B does exactly the same thing.
1 and 2 imply this, and you were willing to give me those. QM supports reductionism independent of all the classical and empirical reasons we believe in reductionism. Like I said above, you asked me to black box it, and I’m claiming these are things that are clear when you understand QM. QM is brazen about being the exclusive language our universe uses to describe everything. It’s physical nonsense to talk about something that exists and isn’t described by QM. That’s what existence means.
It’s preparation for the point “we do it all the time and maintain our sense of continuity in every branch” in 5 and 6.
5 is basically:
When Schrödinger’s cat enters a superposition of alive|dead, so does the entire universe, including us. Like the cat, we split into a!us and d!us (us in the world where the cat is alive and us in the world where it is dead). When we observe the cat, and find it out is alive|dead, we are finding out which world we are in, and correlating our brain state with the state of the cat. This is decoherence, and it pushes a!universe and d!universe apart in the mathematical substrate that defines them (so they can’t interact anymore).
If we observe the cat is alive, we realize we are a!us. But there is still a d!us. We split, and they are observing a dead cat. a!us and d!us both can think back to the time before the split and say “that’s me and I had an unbroken chain of time slices that lead me here—my consciousness was continuous”. Both maintain continuity throughout the process.
6 is basically:
The above experience for a person cannot be described differently in QM (which is the language of existence) from the kind of copying that occurs in one branch!universe, except by differences that can’t in principle have an effect as per point 2, so they black box as the same thing, and implications about one are implications about the other.