On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 1:44 AM, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]> wrote:
> meekerdb wrote: > >> On 2/24/2015 10:28 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote: >> >>> Stathis Papaioannou wrote: >>> >>>> On Wednesday, February 25, 2015, Bruce Kellett < >>>> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: >>>> >>>> First person indeterminacy is just another name for "in-principle >>>> unknowable"! >>>> >>>> No it's not. It provides an explanation of how the world can be >>>> completely deterministic but to you as an observer within it appear truly >>>> random, so that not even God would be able to tell you what you will >>>> experience next. >>>> >>> >>> That seems to me to be a very good case of something being "in-principle >>> unknowable". If it is not "in-principle unknowable", the onus is on you to >>> spell out the principles and circumstances in which the time of the >>> radioactive decay of a particular atom is knowable in advance. >>> >> >> MWI means, "I know it when I see it." :-) >> >> But more seriously, for FPI to apply to radioactive decay requires a >> continuum of observers to observe the decay at all times. >> >> Brent >> > > That's what MWI advocates say. But that does not answer the basic question > -- there is nothing in that which will tell /me/ what time or result /I/ > will observe. That piece of information, which might be of some importance > to me, is always "in-principle unknowable". The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote, "consider everything that can be said about the world without employing any token reflexive expressions. This will include the description of all its physical contents and their states, activities and attributes. It will also include a description of all the persons in the world and their histories, memories, thoughts, sensations, perceptions, intentions, and so forth. I can thus describe without token-reflexives the entire world and everything that is happening in it–and this will include a description of Thomas Nagel and what he is thinking and feeling. But there seems to remain one thing which I cannot say in this fashion–namely, which of the various persons in the world *I* am. Even when everything that can be said in the specified manner has been said, and the world has in a sense been completely described, there seems to remain one fact which has not been expressed, and that is the fact that I am Thomas Nagel. This is not, of course, the fact ordinarily conveyed by those words, when they are used to inform someone else who the speaker is–for that could easily be expressed otherwise. It is rather the fact that *I* am the subject of these experiences; this body is my body; the subject or center of my world is this person," We shouldn't be surprised that no physical facts encode token-reflexive facts like who you are or will be. This isn't isolated to the many worlds. Jason -- 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.
