On 16 February 2014 18:10, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote: But that's the ambiguity I see. When you ask the H-man, "Where do you > think you will be?" he has to provide some interpretation to the word > "you". My immediate, intuitive thought was, "I expect to be in both > places." Which depends on what is meant by "I". If "I" is just conscious > experience then there are two "I"s and neither is the H-man because they're > not experiencing Helsinki. So "I" must be experiences and memory. Then > the M-man and the W-man are both "I" the H-man, in which case the H-man > should answer "Both". >
Sure, but in taking this view, which is legitimate in its own terms, you're in danger of turning step 3 into gibberish just to make a point. But the point you make here is precisely not the point of step 3. That point is that *anyone whomsoever*, when considering his or her own future, will reasonably expect to experience it as a single-valued outcome. Therefore, faced with precisely such circumstances as the duplication thought experiment (or MWI), whether the H man plumps for either W or M as that single-valued outcome, one of his successors is bound to discover that he picked wrongly. That said, one may well take the view that "normal" expectations of this sort are derived from a misunderstanding of the true state of affairs. Interestingly, one of the advantages of thinking about the situation in terms of Hoyle's analogy is that it can then make intuitive sense for the H man to predict with certainty that he *will* discover himself to have become both the W man and the M man, but never simultaneously. David -- 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.
