Cool. Now I haven’t quite thought through all this so it’ll be a little vague. It isn’t anywhere close to being an analytic, formalized argument. I’m just going to dump a bunch of examples that invite intuitions. Basically the notion is: all information is type, not token. Consider, to begin with the Catcher in the Rye example. The sentence about the type was about the information contained in the book. This isn’t a coincidence. The most abundant source of types in the history of the world is pure information: not just every piece of text every written but every single computer program or file is a type (with it’s backups and copies as tokens). Our entire information-theoretic understanding of the universe involves this notion of writing the universe like a computer program (with the possibility of running multiple simulations), k-complexity is a fact about types not tokens (of course this is confusing since when we think of tokens we often attribute them the features of the their type, but the difference is there). Persons are types (at least in part, I think our concept of personhood confuses types and tokens). That’s why most people here think they could survive by being uploaded. When Dennett swtiches between his two brains it seems like there is only one person because there is only one person-type, though two person-tokens. I forget who it was, but someone here has argued in regard to decision theory, that we when we act we should take into account all the simulations of us that may some day be run and act for them as well. This is merely decision theory representing the fact that what matters about persons is the type.
So if agents are types, and in particular if information is types… well then they type experiences are what we update on, they’re the ones that contain information. There is no information to tokens beyond their type. RIght? Of course, this is just an intuition that needs to be formalized. But is the intuition clear?
I’m sorry this isn’t better formulated. The complexity justifies a top level post which I don’t have time for until next week.
Makes sense to me.
Cool. Now I haven’t quite thought through all this so it’ll be a little vague. It isn’t anywhere close to being an analytic, formalized argument. I’m just going to dump a bunch of examples that invite intuitions. Basically the notion is: all information is type, not token. Consider, to begin with the Catcher in the Rye example. The sentence about the type was about the information contained in the book. This isn’t a coincidence. The most abundant source of types in the history of the world is pure information: not just every piece of text every written but every single computer program or file is a type (with it’s backups and copies as tokens). Our entire information-theoretic understanding of the universe involves this notion of writing the universe like a computer program (with the possibility of running multiple simulations), k-complexity is a fact about types not tokens (of course this is confusing since when we think of tokens we often attribute them the features of the their type, but the difference is there). Persons are types (at least in part, I think our concept of personhood confuses types and tokens). That’s why most people here think they could survive by being uploaded. When Dennett swtiches between his two brains it seems like there is only one person because there is only one person-type, though two person-tokens. I forget who it was, but someone here has argued in regard to decision theory, that we when we act we should take into account all the simulations of us that may some day be run and act for them as well. This is merely decision theory representing the fact that what matters about persons is the type.
So if agents are types, and in particular if information is types… well then they type experiences are what we update on, they’re the ones that contain information. There is no information to tokens beyond their type. RIght? Of course, this is just an intuition that needs to be formalized. But is the intuition clear?
I’m sorry this isn’t better formulated. The complexity justifies a top level post which I don’t have time for until next week.