On 10/28/2012 10:23 AM, John Clark wrote:
On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com <mailto:jasonre...@gmail.com>> wrote:

    > I am not sure if you are being consistent here.  Earlier you said you 
said you
    identify yourself with a stream of thoughts


Obviously.

    >If you are identified with a stream of thoughts then you can't simply say 
one brain
    is in Moscow and one is in Washington


Three things:

1) Saying that thoughts have a position (like Moscow or Washington) is not a useful concept.

2) Talking about 2 identical streams of thought is not useful because in that case there is only one stream of thought.

3) It is useful to say that one stream of thought diverged when one started to form memories of Moscow and the other started to form memories of Washington. At that point they were no longer the same but they were both still Jason Resch. Odd certainly but not paradoxical.

    > you must consider the first person continuum of experience


Yes, and both the Washington and Moscow man have a continuum of experience going back to Jason Resch's early childhood, that's why they are both Jason Resch. However the Washington man does not have a continuum of experience of being in Moscow and the Moscow man does not have a continuum of experience of being in Washington, and that's why they are not each other.

    > and what they can predict about where their consciousness will take them.


Nobody can ever do a very good job at predicting where there consciousness will take them, not even in a predictable environment.

    > You agreed if you were instantly halted, taken apart and rebuilt again 
(even with
    different atoms) from your own perspective nothing would have skipped a 
beat, your
    stream of consciousness continues right where it left off.


Yes.

    > But when you are taken apart and two copies are created at two locations 
your
    stream diverges among two paths


Yes because the environments of Washington and Moscow were different, and as weathermen will tell you it's difficult to predict what the environment will be. To ask "but which one is really ME?" presumes that there is only one correct answer but that is not true because you have been duplicated and it was caused by differences in the environment.

    > which gives rise to true unpredictability in the first person perspective.


As Godel and Turing proved 80 years ago even in a unchanging environment there can be unpredictability in the first person perspective.

  John K Clark

So do you agree that there is some kind of uncertainty in the MW thought experiment? I take it to be subjective uncertainty in anticipation of the transport. But for Bruno's theory, whether you call the MW result uncertain or not, the question is whether it models or explains quantum randomness. It seems to me that it models Everett MWI randomness.

Brent

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