On 3/29/2012 6:20 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 29 March 2012 20:47, meekerdb<meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
You don't know that. It's an assumption based on the idea that conscious
experience is something a certain physical body, a brain, does. But if
conscious experience is a process then it is certainly possible to create a
process that is aware of being in both Washington and Moscow at the same
time. Think of a brain wired via RF links to eyeballs in M and W. Or The
Borg of Star Trek. Of course that experience would be strange and we would
tend to say, "Yes but it's still one consciousness." So then the question
becomes what do you mean by not experiencing duplication? Is it a mere
tautology based on how you define 'consciousness'?
Surely it's just a necessary prerequisite for accepting the
possibility of either MWI or comp? IOW, if one rejects, on whatever
grounds, that a unique subjective perspective could be consistent with
the objective existence of multiple copies (as I think is the case
with Kent) then one is forced also to reject both MWI and comp. Given
such a view, neither theory could be a viable explanation for one's
lived experience of observing "one universe at a time".
My reading of Kent is that he rejects MWI. I don't think he believes there is a single
conscious copy and the rest are zombies; he believes there's just one world and it is
'selected' probabilistically.
AFAICS, the more exotic examples you give above, e.g. a distributed
process, or a Borg-type group-mind, present no difficulties beyond
that for "ordinary" consciousness. Again, either one accepts that
duplication of these states of affairs would be compatible, mutatis
mutandis, with the corresponding "single universe" perspective
(however exotic) or not.
Given the above, what makes it difficult to make sense of John's
objections to Bruno's argument is precisely that he accepts the
possibility of multiple copies in a comp or MWI scenario, whilst
ignoring the necessity of recovering a singular perspective.
But in Bruno's transporter experiment there isn't *a* singular perspective, there are two
different ones.
But the
latter step is a prerequisite, in any scenario, for reproducing the
empirically uncertain state of affairs. Without it, the "probability"
of every outcome - as John has continually reiterated - can only ever
be 100%!
"Selection", even if only implicit, is an ineliminable feature of any
theory seeking to explain the empirical facts.
But then Everett's QM doesn't explain the facts - because there is no selection. That's
part of Kent's criticism.
Brent
Kent's proposal is a
process that eliminates all branches but one, albeit on a somewhat
different basis than Copenhagen. Similarly, the heuristic I suggested
in an earlier post entails "selection", but in a non-destructive
manner. BTW, I had long retained a dim recollection of a similar
selection metaphor involving "pigeon holes" from my youthful SF
reading, which I recently re-discovered to be Fred Hoyle's 1960's
novella "October the First is Too Late". I also found that John
Gribbin refers to this very notion in his recent Multiverse book
(apparently he was a student of Hoyle's), relating it to the ideas of
Deutsch and Barbour. This reinforced my suspicion that they do rely
implicitly on such a selection principle, though AFAICS neither of
them acknowledge it explicitly.
David
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