On 24 February 2014 01:04, chris peck <[email protected]> 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
