X-Message-Number: 21628 Date: Sat, 19 Apr 2003 17:49:19 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Qualia and Upmorphing Robert Ettinger, #21618, writes in part: >If my guess about qualia is right, or even close, then the upmorphist view is >not only unproven, but untenable. A quale, once more, may be a kind of >standing wave in the brain, binding space and time. Certainly it could be >described, hence an extreme upmorphist might claim it within bounds--but I >don't know of a single person who holds the most extreme view, namely, that >(say) a written description of a system and its evolution in time "is" the >system. Very roughly speaking (and noting that important clarifications are necessary), the upmorphist holds that "isomorphism is everything": any system should thus be completely equivalent to and interchangeable with its isomorphic image, whatever that image may be. It might be argued then that a universe with real history would be no different in any fundamental way from a (hypothetical) giant book with every event recorded in static form. You could match every actual event with an appropriate description in the record. Assuming the record is not over-rich, you could also go the other direction too, that is, match every event-description with a corresponding actual event to provide a full two-way correspondence. Yet intuition cries out. A static record simply *cannot* be equivalent to something actually happening--can it? Surely a book has no feeling! As an answer to this conundrum (trying to be brief), I would first note that "there are isomorphisms and there are isomorphisms"--only what we should call the "right" isomorphism will establish what should be considered a full equivalence. In particular we want to map events in a reasonable way, one-to-one, between the two systems, with appropriate, corresponding properties holding. Second, it seems safe to say that a book recording all events in the universe could never be present in this very universe, so we should never have to deal with this question in full-blooded form. A book that records *some* events, and very detailed, is certainly a possibility, however. If detailed enough in the right ways I would, I think, concede that it described states of consciousness relative to a "frame of reference" (I call it that for want of a better term, hoping the meaning is clear) that is also described in the book. In a partial way, then, the book would be its own self-contained reality or universe, yet there would be no reason to concede that its characters were conscious in *our* universe, that is to say, relative to our frame of reference, something quite different from that of the book. Moreover, such a record could, at best, possess an acceptable isomorphism with only a limited portion of events in the world at large. So it could never substitute, mathematically or otherwise, for a would-be immortal who hopes to experience an infinite amount of subjective time and events. Stretching our imaginations, however, we might envision a separate universe similar to ours in all respects (events and so on) that is somehow sidewise in time to us, and us to it, so that each reality would serve as a static record ("giant book") of the other. In this case it seems that a full isomorphism would be possible, and we could not distinguish one universe as "real" versus the other being "only a description." In a sense "we" could be said to inhabit both universes on an equal footing so that, in an important way, the two could be taken as one. In summary, I think that for me a static representation of a time-evolving system (call it a "description") could, in very special, hypothetical instances be said to "be" the system. But, for the really important cases involving consciousness and feeling, this would happen, if at all, in ways that are probably unobservable. Yet, as I see it, the upmorphist view is not invalidated by the possibility of a non-standard modeling of time. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21628