2009/2/10 Jack Mallah <[email protected]>: > This sort of talk about "random sampling" and "luck" is misleading and is > exactly why I broke down the roles of effective probability into the four > categories I did in the paper. > > If you are considering future versions of yourself, in the MWI sense, there > is no randomness involved. Depending on how you define "you", "you" will > either be all of them, or "you" are just an observer-moment and can consider > them to be "other people". Regardless of definitions, this case calls for > the use of Caring Measure for decision making.
It seems that the disagreement may be one about personal identity. It is not clear to me from your paper whether you accept what Derek Parfit calls the "reductionist" theory of personal identity. Consider the following experiment: There are two consecutive periods of consciousness, A and B, in which you are an observer in a virtual reality program. A is your experiences between 5:00 PM and 5:01 PM while B is your experiences between 5:01 PM and 5:02 PM, subjective time. A is being implemented in parallel on two computers MA1 and MA2, so that there are actually two qualitatively identical streams of consciousness which we can call A1 and A2. At the end of the subjective minute, data is saved to disk and both MA1 and MA2 are switched off. An external operator picks up a copy of the saved data, walks over to a third computer MB, loads the data and starts up the program. After another subjective minute MB is switched off and the experiment ends. As the observer you know all this information, and you look at the clock and see that it is 5:00 PM. What can you conclude from this and what should you expect? To me, it seems that you must conclude that you are currently either A1 or A2, and that in one minute you will be B, with 100% certainty. Would you say something else? -- Stathis Papaioannou --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
