On Wed, Oct 2, 2013 LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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). >
LizR branching at that point would certainly be odd, but there is nothing logically inconsistent with the idea and it violates no known experimental result. And whatever the correct interpretation of Quantum Mechanics turns out to be we can be certain of one thing, it will be odd. > "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? > I'd call it unpredictable. The result of a quantum coin flip will not be indeterminate or vague, it's just unknown right now. And regardless of how the coin falls LizR will still feel like LizR . > And does it relate to personal identity? > It has nothing to do with personal identity, both would still feel to be LizR , so the entire procedure had zero effect on it. As far as personal identity is concerned nothing has changed, and for both LizR's the future continues to remain unpredictable just as it always has. > If I believe the "Copenhagen interpretation" then I think it is genuine > indeterminacy. If I believe the MWI I think it is "apparent indeterminacy". > I would say that if Copenhagen is correct then probability is a property of the thing itself, but if Everett and the MWI is correct then probability is just a measure of our lack of information. However as far as the nature of personal identity is concerned it doesn't matter if Everett was correct or not because a feeling of self has nothing to do with probability or good predictions or bad predictions. John K Clark -- 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.
