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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