On 13 Feb 2013, at 16:25, Jason Resch wrote:
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 9:18 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 13 Feb 2013, at 04:09, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Jason Resch <jasonre...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Consider the following thought experiment, called "The Duplicators":
At 1:00 PM tomorrow, you will be abducted by aliens. The aliens will
tell
you not to worry, that you won't be harmed but they wish to conduct
some
experiments on the subject of pain, which is unknown to them. These
aliens
possess technology far in advance of our own. They have the ability
to scan
and replicate objects down to the atomic level and the aliens use this
technology to create an atom-for-atom duplicate of yourself, which
they call
you2. The aliens thank you for your assistance and return you
unharmed back
to your home by 5:00 PM. You ask them "What about the pain
experiments?" and
they hand you an informational pamphlet and quickly fly off. You
read the
pamphlet which explains that a duplicate of you (you2) was created and
subjected to some rather terrible pain experiments, akin to what
humans call
torture and at the end of the experiment you2 was euthanized. You
consider
this awful, but are nonetheless glad that they tortured your duplicate
rather than you.
Now consider the slightly different thought experiment, called "The
Restorers":
At 1:00 PM tomorrow, you will be abducted by aliens. Unlike the
aliens with
the duplication technology (the duplicators), these aliens possess a
restorative technology. They can perfectly erase memories and all
other
physical traces to perfectly restore you to a previous state. The
aliens
will tell you not to worry, that you won't be harmed but they wish to
conduct some experiments on the subject of pain, which is unknown to
them.
They then proceed to brutually torture you for many hours,
conducting test
after test on pain. Afterwards, they erase your memory of the
torture and
all traces of injury and stress from your body. When they are
finished, you
are atom-for-atom identical to how you were before the torture
began. The
aliens thank you for your assistance and return you unharmed back to
your
home by 5:00 PM. You ask them "What about the pain experiments?" and
they
hand you an informational pamphlet and quickly fly off. You read the
pamphlet which explains that a duplicate of you (you2) was created and
subjected to some rather terrible pain experiments, akin to what
humans call
torture and at the end of the experiment you2 was euthenized. You
consider
this awful, but are nonetheless glad that they tortured your duplicate
rather than you.
My questions for the list:
1. Do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture in the
case of
the Restorers, even though you no longer remember it? If not, why
not.
2. If yes, do you consider yourself to have experienced the torture
in the
case of the Duplicators? If yes, please explain, if not, please
explain.
3. If you could choose which aliens would abduct you, is there one
you would
prefer? If you have a preference, please provide some justification.
The two experiments are equivalent. Rationally, you should not have a
preference for either - though both are bad in that you experience
pain but then forget it.
OK, same answer (assuming comp).
With comp are the probabilities the same? For instance, would there
be a "50% chance of experiencing the torture when duplicated vs.
100% in the case of the memory wipe?
It is counter-intuitive, but if the memory wipe is perfect, the
relative probabilities, evaluated before the experiment, should be the
same. If a future memory wipe is done perfectly, it is analogous to a
reconstitution of a past (3p) state in the future, and before that
first state occurence, you have a probability non null to find
yourself in the future.
It is not clear if such a perfect memory wipe is possible in practice
though.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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