On 7/5/2012 12:25 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 04 Jul 2012, at 18:29, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 Bruno Marchal <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>> if you duplicated the entire city of Washington and sent one Bruno
Marchal
to Washington1 and the other Bruno Marchal to Washington2 then there
would only
be one Bruno Marchal having a Washington experience.
> No problem with that.
I'm glad to hear you say that but then it's even more mysterious that you can't
extrapolate that fact to its logical conclusion. When the start button is pushed on
that duplicating machine your brain and body may have been instantly duplicated but
"you", the first person perspective, has not been and will not be until there is
something in the environment in Washington that makes a change to one of your sense
organs that is missing in the environment of Moscow; only then, when there is a
difference between the two, is your first person perspective split and it's meaningless
to ask which one is "really" you.
There is no sense to ask who is "really" me, but this has never been asked. On the
contrary what is asked is the probability of the specific events "seeing Washington ",
or seeing "Moscow".
Both are 'seen'. The question is by whom. It is only related to 1-p indeterminancy by
assuming there is one person who does the seeing. It would no puzzle at all if Moscow
were seen by Putin and Washington was seen by Obama.
I know in advance that it will be only one of them from my future first person
perspective. This is confirmed in all experience, as your own " "1)" and "2)" prediction
illustrates.
But then there is not probability interpretation.
You write, "The theory is P(W) = P(M) = 1/2. the confirmation and refutation of this is
isomorphic to any prediction in a Bernouilli experience (throwing of a coin), both in the
iterated and non iterated cases."
But P(W)=P(M)=1/2 is shorthand and it hides the implicit assumption that there is some X
such that "X is in Washington" or "X is in Moscow". If W="X1 is in Washington" and M="X2
is in Moscow", then there is no probability interpretation of where X0 is.
This is exactly the same problem raised by Everett's interpretation of QM. If everything
happens then what does it mean to say an event has a certain probability?
Brent
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