On 24 Feb 2014, at 02:41, David Nyman wrote:
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.
Well, the "just" might be not that easy to define.
If the universal observer is the universal machine, the probability to
get a computational history involving windows or MacOS might be more
probable than being me or you.
I am not sure that the notion of "observer moment" makes sense,
without a notion of scenario involving a net of computational relative
states.
I think the hypostases describe a universal person, composed from a
universal (self) scientist ([]p), a universal knower ([]p & p), an
observer ([]p & <>p), and a feeler ([]p & <>p & p)).
But I would not say that this universal person (which exist in
arithmetic and is associated with all relatively self-referential
correct löbian number) will select among all "observer moment".
The "hypostatic" universal person is more like a universal baby, which
can split in a much larger spectrum of future 1p histories, but from
its first person perspective it is like it has still to go through the
histories to get the right relative statistics on his most probable
universal neighbors. Of course, in the arithmetical reality, it don't
get it, it is an indexical internal point of view.
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.
OK.
I know that Bruno quarrels with Hoyle's idea as being superfluous
to, or possibly even incompatible with, comp
I think about it. I try to make sense of it. That might have sense,
but then it remains to look at it in arithmetic.
I mean the relations between a person and the universal person "in
her" is complex, and the splitting between []p and []p & p is part of
it.
but personally I still find it a neat heuristic for pumping one's
intuition on the indeterminacy of first-personal expectations.
OK.
It is just that I expect platonism to be counter-intuitive and so
intuition pump must be handled with care. But you know that. I just
try to understand the point.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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