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).

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