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.
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.