John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Apr 9, 2015 Telmo Menezes <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > >And now that I have answered you question I repeat my questionthat you dodged: Who is traveling through time in a forward direction, Mr. John Clark or Mr. John Clark The Helsinki Man?> Both are. Everyone is.Then when Mr. John Clark The Helsinki Man says "I will see Moscow" please explain exactly who the prediction is about.>> if just before the multiple duplications John Clark predicted that "you" will see X how could it be determined which one of the 6.02 *10^23 is Mr. You so we could ask Mr, You if he did really did see X and figure out if John Clark's prediction was correct? > John Clark will predict that one will see X1, and that all the other Telmos will see all the other Xs. That prediction will be confirmed with 100% accuracy.Yes. So where is the indeterminacy in that?> If you ask the original Telmo to bet on a destination and he betson X1, the copy at X1 will tell you that he predicted correctly, Yes. So where is the indeterminacy in that?> while the copies at the while the copies at the other Xs will tell you that they were wrong. Xs will tell you that they were wrong.It wasn't wrong if the prediction was "Telmo will see X1" because every one of the 6.02 *10^23 Telmos can clearly see that Telmo did indeed see X1. If the prediction was "I will see X1" then there is no way to know if the prediction was correct or not because of the inherent ambiguity matter duplicating machines brings to personal pronouns.
If I might jump into this protracted argument here, I think that John does have a point in what he is saying about the confusion over personal pronouns. This refers back to the very old philosophical problem of personal identity. The philosophical literature is full of extended discussions on this, and it is widely understood that ideas such as brain transplants and duplicating machines play merry havoc with our intuitive notions of personal identity.
This problem is brought to the fore with the first few steps of Bruno's argument, but he does not really discuss this. The closest I can see is a footnote to step 5 to the effect that Nozick's 'closest continuer' account of personal identity is contradicted. This is true, but one needs to replace this relatively intuitive notion of personal identity with something a little more worked out. The basis of personal identity in computationalism seems to be just the computations underlying a particular consciousness, under which theory a person's identity can be duplicated any number of times. Hence the problems that John has from his more intuitive perspective.
The philosophical literature has not come to any consensus on this matter. One could follow Parfit (Reason and Persons, 1984) and claim that because the original person is not preserved in the teleportation/duplication experiments of steps 1-4, new persons are created each time, and the original person is killed (cut) each time. There is, then, no first person indeterminacy because the first person is always eliminated.
There is a difference in step 5, where the original is duplicated but not destroyed. Then one could follow the standard intuition and say that the original person survives intact in Brussels, and some new person is transported to Amsterdam. Such an approach to person identity would solve John's problems and remove all the ambiguity about personal pronouns.
Because the problem of person identity is not resolved in the philosophical literature, much less in popular intuition, it is clearly premature to simply take over a comp version without further discussion. Sure, in order to succeed, comp needs personal identity to be associated exclusively with some abstract computations that might or might not be performed by a physical brain. But one is equally at liberty to argue that the physical body (extended even to immediate environs and so on) is an essential part of our understanding of personal identity. In other words, Bruno begs the question here, and really does have to give an independent justification of the notion of personal identity which he wants to use.
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