On 24 February 2014 01:04, chris peck <chris_peck...@hotmail.com> wrote:
*>>This is the same as saying that I will experience all possible futures > in the MWI - but by the time I experience them, of course, the version of > me in each branch will be different, and it always seems to me, > retrospectively, as though I only experienced one outcome.* > > Each duplicate will only experience one outcome. I don't think there is > any disagreement about that. The problems occur when considering what the > person duplicated will experience and then what probability he should > assign to each outcome and that seems to me to depend on what identity > criterion gets imposed. Its a consideration I've gone into at length and > won't bore you with again. But I will say that where you think that what > Bruno wants is just recognition that each duplicate sees one outcome, I > think that he actually wants to show that 3p and 1p probability assignments > would be asymmetric from the stand point of the person duplicated. > Certainly for me he doesn't manage that. Correct me if I'm misremembering Chris, but I seem to recall proposing to you on a previous occasion that Hoyle's pigeon hole analogy can be a useful way of tuning intuitions about puzzles of this sort, although I appear to be the sole fan of the idea around here. Hoyle's idea is essentially a heuristic for collapsing the notions of identity, history and continuation onto the perspective of a single, universal observer. From this perspective, the situation of being faced with duplication is just a random selection from the class of all possible observer moments. The situations of having been duplicated one or more times are then just non-simultaneous selections from the same class. This gives us a consistent way of considering the 3p and 1p (or bird and frog) probabilities symmetrically. That is, it is now certain that I will confront each and every 3p continuation from a unique 1p perspective, just not simultaneously. That said, this approach retains a quasi-frequency interpretation of probability in the case that there are fungible or equivalent continuations. For example, if the protocol mandates that I will be duplicated 100 times and 99 of my copies will be sent to a red room and one to a blue room, it would be rational to anticipate a higher "probability" of continuation associated with the larger class, even though each continuation is individually certain in a different underlying sense. This is just to say that subjective uncertainty (or the expectation of probabilistic outcomes) is a function of incomplete knowledge at any given point in the sequence. I know that Bruno quarrels with Hoyle's idea as being superfluous to, or possibly even incompatible with, comp but personally I still find it a neat heuristic for pumping one's intuition on the indeterminacy of first-personal expectations. 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.
