On 30 June 2014 04:33, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sun, Jun 29, 2014 at 3:54 AM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]> wrote: > > > the H-guy cannot be sure about its future 1-view *from the unique >> 1-view >> > > Unique? That implies that there is one and only one correct answer to the > question of what the Helsinki Man will see, so after the exparament is over > there should be enough information to know what that one correct answer > should have been. So what was it? Would that that one unique correct > prediction have been Washington or Moscow? > > Before you flip a coin you don't know if the correct prediction is heads > or tails, but at least after you flip it you know what the correct > prediction would have been; but in your thought exparament even after all > the dust has settled there still isn't one correct answer. The difference > is that although the bodies of the Helsinki Man is duplicated there is > still only one Helsinki Man until one copy sees something the other > doesn't. The Helsinki Man only turns into the Moscow Man when he sees > Moscow and not before; so the only unique correct prediction is that the > Moscow man will be the Man who sees Moscow. What more could you expect? > > >>> predict with certainlty the unique city you will see >>>> >>> >>> >> The city who will see? >>> >> >> > The H-guy. >> > > I predict that the H-guy will see Helsinki, unless you destroy him > immediately after duplication in which case the H-guy will see absolutely > nothing. I further predict that Mr. You will see Moscow AND Washington > because MR. YOU HAS BEEN DUPLICATED. >
The "yes doctor" thing says that if H-guy is destroyed in the process of being scanned prior to transmission, then he will see M or W (or both, depending on how you want to look at it. I don't want to get into pronouns at this point). This is counter-intuitive, but it assumes that being "cut and pasted" like this preserves personal identity. If you accept that "yes doctor" makes sense (which I have some trouble with myself - as Bruno says, it's a bet) then it follows logically that our moment-to-moment identity is only preserved to the extent that it would be if we were being constantly cut and pasted, like the characters in Star Trek when they go through the transporter. Another way of looking at it is that if H guy is scanned and in the process destroyed, then recreated so that he is identical (below the substitution level -- e.g. this might mean atom for atom, which is where the "Heisenberg compensators" come into play :-) then his identity and consciousness is recreated with him, and they actually *are* his identity and consciousness, not just "a copy which thinks it's him". Yet another way of looking at it is that this sort of process goes on all the time as the cells of our bodies are gradually replaced, and our identity is preserved during cell replacement *to the same extent* that it is preserved by a hypothetical matter transmitter, whatever extent that might be. (PS This is all discussed quite cogently in the Star Trek novel "Spock must die!" by James Blish, in which Dr McCoy worries that every time someone goes through the transporter, he's being murdered and a clone created which only thinks it's the same person. It also has something very similar to Bruno's thought experiment happen ....except that the duplicate is in this case an "evil twin" due to having been mirrored in the process :-) -- 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/d/optout.
