On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 5:15 PM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 11/24/2012 10:52 AM, John Clark wrote: > > But consider what would happen before they open the boxes. Bruno Marchal > is exactly duplicated and one copy materializes in Washington and the other > in Moscow but both are inside identical boxes. If the position of the two > were then instantaneously exchanged Bruno Marchal could not tell the > difference and even "you" could not tell the difference using any > definition of "you" that can be thought of. What's more even a third party, > even the very universe itself would not change one bit if you > instantaneously exchanged those 2 identical things. > > > But strictly speaking they cannot be identical. For example it is > statistically certain that they will be thinking different thoughts as they > revive from the transport. The no-cloning theorem already ensures that > they cannot be identical at the level of quantum state and the very > interactions with the environment that make them quasi-classical will > ensure they are not identical even at a much higher level than the > molecular. I'm not sure how this affects Bruno's argument, but it is > different from the 'duplication' in Everett's MWI of QM. > We may be unable to prepare to quantum systems to be in such a state, but if the universe is infinite in size, then we might expect it to be statistically guaranteed that disparate systems converge to identical quantum states. As for how it might effect Bruno's thought experiment, we could avoid the issue of non-clonability by duplicating "uploaded" minds rather than ones supported by biological substrates. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
