On 10/2/2013 4:33 PM, LizR wrote:
On 3 October 2013 06:48, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com <mailto:johnkcl...@gmail.com>>
wrote:
On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be
<mailto:marc...@ulb.ac.be>> wrote:
>> philosophically my low-tech experiment works just as well and is
just as
uninformative as your hi-tech version.
> Not at all. In your low tech (using a coin), you get an indeterminacy
from
coin throwing,
And the coin throw was random so you ended up in Moscow rather than
Washington for
no reason at all, but that's OK because there is no law of logic that
demands every
event have a cause.
> You agreed some post before, that anyone remembering having been the
Helsinki
man can consider himself rightfully as the Helsinki man
Agreed? I'm the one who introduced the idea to this list! And I was very
surprised
that I even had to talk about such a rudimentary concept to a bunch of
people who
fancy themselves philosophers.
> he has just been duplicated
Yes.
> and the 1p-indeterminacy comes from this.
Please note, if the following seems clunky it's because it contains no
pronouns, but
a inelegant prose style is the price that must be payed when writing
philosophically
about personal identity and duplicating chambers:
What question about personal identity is indeterminate? There is a 100%
chance that
the Helsinki man will turn into the Moscow man because the Helsinki Man saw
Moscow,
and a 100% chance the Helsinki Man will turn into the Washington Man
because the
Helsinki Man saw Washington, and a 100% chance that the first person view
of the
Helsinki Man will be a view ONLY of Helsinki because otherwise the first
person view
of the Helsinki Man would not be the first person view of the Helsinki man.
And before Bruno Marchal rebuts this by saying John Clark is confusing peas
with
some other sort of peas please clearly explain exactly what question
concerning
personal identity has a indeterminate answer. AND DO SO WITHOUT USING
PERSONAL
PRONOUNS WITH NO CLEAR REFERENT!
This is an interesting way of looking at things. I have always had trouble with the MWI
version of this - it's generally hard to believe that "the person who is having these
experiences" will become "two people who have had different experiences" (to avoid any
personal pronouns in those descriptions). Whether one calls this indeterminacy or not
starts to look like a question of language rather than something more fundamental.
Back-pedalling to the quantum version (to avoid any problems that people have with
comp), we have the equivalent situation where "I" am about to perform a measurement that
has what I would consider, no doubt naively, to have a 50-50 chance of going either way.
Once I have done the measurement, I find that it has result "1", so I would be justified
to think, "Aha, that was a 50% chance which happened to come out this way, rather than
the other way." Meanwhile another version of me has obtained result "2" and thinks the
opposite. Do we call this indeterminacy? And does it relate to personal identity?
We certainly can call this, let's say, "naive indeterminacy", in that it looks like a
coin toss. If I believe the "Copenhagen interpretation" then I think it is genuine
indeterminacy.
Interestingly it appears that most coin tosses may be quantum random, arXiv:1212.0953v1
[gr-qc]
"Randomness in a coin flip comes from a lack of correlation
between the starting and ending coin positions.
The signal triggering the flip travels along human neurons
which have an intrinsic temporal uncertainty of
tn ? 1ms [8]. It has been argued that fluctuations in the
number of open neuron ion channels can account for the
observed values of tn [8]. These molecular fluctuations
are due to random Brownian motion of the polypeptides
in their surrounding fluid. Based on our assessment that
the probabilities for fluctuations in water are fundamentally
quantum, we argue that the value of tn realized in
a given situation is also fundamentally quantum. Quantum
fluctuations in the water drive the motion of the
polypeptides, resulting in different numbers of ion channels
being open or closed at a given moment, in a given
instance realized from the many quantum possibilities.
Consider a coin flipped and caught at about the same
height, by a hand moving at speed vh in the direction
of the toss and with a flip imparting an additional speed
vf to the coin. A neurological uncertainty in the time of
flip, tn, results in a change in flight time tf = tn × vh/(vh + vf ).
A similar catch time uncertainty results
in a total flight time uncertainty tt = ?2 tf . A coin
flipped upward by an impact at its edge has a rotation
frequency f = 4vf /( d) where d is the coin diameter.
The resulting uncertainty in the number of spins is N =
f tt. Using vh = vf = 5m/s and d = 0.01m (and tn =
1ms) gives N = 0.5, enough to make the outcome of the
coin toss completely dependent on the time uncertainty
in the neurological signal which we have argued is fully
quantum."
I say "most" because I know that magicians train themselves to be able to flip a coin and
catch it consistently.
Brent
If I believe the MWI I think it is "apparent indeterminacy". (Comp of course also has
the latter type.) What this says about personal identity is just that certain things
appear indeterminate to people, because a "person" is really something that in the next
instant turns into a sheaf of near-identical people, each with different experiences. I
think the point here is that if you would say in an MWI context that you have a 50%
chance of a measurement coming out one way, and 50% of it coming out another, then you
should say the same thing about the teleporter, because if nothing else, the MWI leads
to a constant version of the teleporter thought experiment actually occurring.
You could in fact do the teleporter experiment by using a "quantum coin flip" and
sending each version of Helsinki man to his destination by conventional means. Obviously
that wouldn't tell us much about the digital nature of consciousness, but if we assume
digital consciousness then there is no reason why it couldn't, very much in theory, be
cut and pasted into two locations. More to the point, if consciousness is a computation,
then it can, rather less in theory, be instantiated in a computer (with sufficient
resources). So instead of Helsinki man we could have the equivalent - HAL, let's say -
who is running inside an android which looks like a human being. HAL steps into the
teleporter, which freezes the state of his processing unit and memory, reads it, and
transmits it to Moscow and Washington, and back in Helsinki reads in a new identity
(sent from some other location). The copies sent to M and W are downloaded into two
other androids.
According to comp, sending a person by teleporter would be equivalent to the above
description, albeit rather more technically challenging. Maybe it would help the
discussion to consider what happens to HAL? He is after all just as conscious as
Helsinki man, but doesn't have a lot of "baggage" attached to him (semantic, emotional,
philosophical, etc). Does it make sense to say that he experiences personal indeterminacy?
Yes, I think it does. He experiences MWI-style "apparent indeterminacy". I can't see any
reasonable objection, given that one copy of HAL is made, duplicated digitally, and sent
to two destinations, which probably involves converting it to a different format and
transmitting it by radio, then writing it onto a new hard disc, which is then copied to
another disc inside another android! It seems silly to worry about which one is the real
copy, or anything like that. For one thing, the real copy has been wiped (or replaced).
But comp says that shouldn't matter, and it certainly doesn't appear to matter to HAL.
Does it? If not then proceed to step 4, and see where the logic leads (if
anywhere).
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything
List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to
everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
No virus found in this message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com <http://www.avg.com>
Version: 2014.0.4142 / Virus Database: 3604/6718 - Release Date: 10/02/13
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.