On 10/9/2013 6:37 PM, LizR wrote:
If Helsinki man understands the situation, he will assign a 100% probability to him
being duplicated and ending in both places. Similarly a physicist who believes in MWI
will assign a 100% probability to him splitting and observing all possible outcomes.
This is not, however, how people normally view these matters. The physicist feels that
he had a (say) 50% chance of him observing spin-up despite his knowledge of the MWI,
The physicist is only interested in what he can publish in PhysRev. He knows that
replication is essential. So goes back to Helsinki and tries is again...and again...and
again... And he keeps careful notes. After a few thousand replications he is ready to
publish his findings that the probability of arriving in Washington via teleportation from
Helsinki is 0.48_+_0.06. Of course JKC will complain that I have used an ambiguous
pronoun "he", but in this case, except for a group of vanishing measure, it doesn't matter
which "he" is meant.
Brent
and I guess Helsinki man feels the same way about arriving in Moscow, if only because
our brains are "wired" to think in terms of the single universe view. I think Bruno's
take on this is acceptable in terms of how we think about things in everyday life.
Once the duplication has been performed, one copy of the man /then/ has a 50% chance of
being Moscow man, and his (spurious) sense of always only being the single unique copy
of himself would lead him to feel that this was the chance beforehand. So it's fair for
Bruno to ask Helsinki man how he estimates his chances of arriving in Moscow, assuming
"folk psychology" is involved (ditto for the physicist).
However this is only really quibbling about the fact that our everyday attitude often
doesn't cover the realities of how the universe works.
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