Magic by forgetting

post by avturchin · 2024-04-24T14:32:20.753Z · LW · GW · 37 comments

Contents

  Thought experiment with curing a disease by forgetting
  There are several caveats for such a line of reasoning
  Why minds in similar states should merge? 
  Theoretical price
None
37 comments

Epistemic – this post is more suitable for LW as it was 10 years ago

 

Thought experiment with curing a disease by forgetting

Imagine I have a bad but rare disease X. I may try to escape it in the following way:

1. I enter the blank state of mind and forget that I had X.

2. Now I in some sense merge with a very large number of my (semi)copies in parallel worlds who do the same. I will be in the same state of mind as other my copies, some of them have disease X, but most don’t.  

3. Now I can use self-sampling assumption for observer-moments (Strong SSA) and think that I am randomly selected from all these exactly the same observer-moments. 

4. Based on this, the chances that my next observer-moment after the blank state of mind will have the disease X are small and equal to the statistical probability of having disease X. Let’s say there are 1000 times more my copies which do not have disease X. Therefore after I return from the meditation, there will be only 0.001 chance that I will have this disease X, as the next state will be randomly selected from all those that can logically follow from the current state. Thus, I will be almost for sure cured!

 

There are several caveats for such a line of reasoning

1. Obviously, I must forget not only about the disease but even about the fact that I was trying to forget something. I have to forget that I tried to forget about X and even used meditation as a magic tool. Therefore, after waking up, I will not know if it works. Also, it will work if not-ill people are often also entering the blank state of mind without attempts to forget something (and accept the risk of getting something bad). Meditation is in some sense such a blank state of mind, and many people meditate just for relaxation or enlightenment. 

2. The state-based, not path-based identity theory must be valid. Not continuity of consciousness, but “I am randomly selected from the same minds”. Note that path-dependent identity also has its own paradoxes: two copies can have different ‘weights” depending on how they were created while having the same measure. For example, if in sleep two copies of me will be created and one of the copies will be copied again – when there will be 3 copies in the morning in the same world, but if we calculate chances to be one of them based on paths, they will be ½ and ¼ and ¼. Path-based identity also claims that a copy of me sent by a tele-transporter is not me, because it has a different path. Path-based identity also is used in the identity of objects of art, in the name of provenance. 

3. Also, MWI or other form of multiverse must be true. 

4. There is a 0.001 chance that someone who did not have the disease will get it. But he can repeat the procedure. 

5. One can try to change other observables this way: age, and height. Small changes will work better, as they are easy to forget.

6. The deeper the meditation (which here is understood as a blank state of mind without any other clarification like contact with atman or jahnas, and deepness is measured only by closeness by the pure blank state without any traces), the more minds are in the same state of consciousness throughout the universe. This means that I somehow can jump into those minds as if through a wormhole.

7. This contradicts all popular theories of magic where a person concentrates on what she wants. Here you need to forget.

8. The bigger the problem, the more difficult is to forget it. 

9. There can’t be observable evidence that magic-by-forgetting actually works.

10. A bad infohazardous consequence: the things you love can disappear forever as soon as you stop looking at them. There was a LW post about this fear in 2015 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/is7ieoWyiyYRc7eXL/the-consequences-of-dust-theory

11. Magic by forgetting will be a necessary consequence of the dust theory (but not vice versa, magic by forgetting can be valid even in no-dust-theory-worlds). One way to solve this is to accept that there is nothing in the world except the chains of mathematical Boltzmann-brains-observer-moments, as Mueller did in his article “Law without Law”. In that case, we can suggest that more stable chains are getting advantage and such stability also implies that there are stronger interconnections between observer-moments (more traces of past moments in the current moment) and there is less magic by forgetting. But glitches can be observable in such a model.

12. An interesting analogy is with a hybrid model of Sleeping Beauty by Bostrom. In it, according to my understanding, the observer, when gets new evidence, should update her reference class to the member of all minds who got the same evidence.

13. Yes, I tried to implement this, but I don’t know if it works.

14. Can I validate magic-by-forgetting, if I precommit to use it any time I have a bad problem? – Will I have eventually fewer bad problems on average (without knowing which bad problems I escaped)? 

15. Small drift of reality. Even if I keep all important things in my mind constantly, there is a bar of error in details. Within this error, two little different things can look the same. After time passes, such small errors may accumulate and reality will change. In a normal world, it is unobservable. In the dust world, it can be observed and will look like the Mandella effect: a strange discrepancy between memory and facts, or generally, between any two long disconnected information channels. 

16. If you are an effective altruist, magic by forgetting doesn’t matter to you. 

17. If you practice magic-by-forgetting 1000 times, it returns to thermodynamic equilibrium, and your chances of getting rid of bad things become equal to getting it.

18. If you have rare but valuable property, it is dangerous for you – you may lose it. 

 

Why minds in similar states should merge? 

They do not merge physically (if dust theory is false), but they merge logically: if there are three different minds with different names A, B and C, and each of them enters into a blank state and forgets its name, each mind can assign the chances that its name is A as 1/3, based on the self-sampling assumption (SIA does not make a significant change here as there are no possible minds in this experiment). 

To strengthen the point, imagine that the minds would actually merge, maybe as uploads which are written down in the same memory block (or whatever way of mind merging you can imagine). You can observe that such merging methods do not assume actual information exchange between copies, as they all have the same information. There is no casual process which connects copies. So, merging into one place plays only a symbolic role, and being in the same state in different locations is the same as being merged into one place.

The point here is not just indexical uncertainty, but that the three minds which are in the same state should be treated as the same mind (from an internal perspective): the same mind, located in three different places. Any argument against it assumes some path-dependent identity or external perspective.

 

Theoretical price

While it is easy to dismiss the idea of magic-by-forgetting as absurd, it may have a theoretical price. Either a strong self-sampling assumption is false and-or path-based identity is true.

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