On 13 Apr 2015, at 05:31, Bruce Kellett wrote:
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
question
that 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 bets
on 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.
UDA is invented to circumscribe that problem, and eventually solve it,
but the solution is not needed to understand the reversal physics/
number's theology.
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.
Yes, it simply vanish. Personal identity is an illusion, but the FPI
is not, and that result is not used in the reversal, so I prefer to
let is for other threads and topics.
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 problem is that John introduces himself an ambiguity, which does
not exost when you apply the definition of 1p and 3p, but he treats it
as "peepee" without any explanation.
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.
Then comp is false, because by definition your first person
consciousness identity is preserved in the duplication. John
understoofd correctly that comp implies that we survive duplication.
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.
Then you must do that at step 4. But step 4 is a direct consequence of
step 2 and 3.
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.
My whole work is on this, and the consensus has always existed among
different school of buddhism, chinese taoism, mystical schools,
neoplatonism (most of it) etc. It is not in fashion today, as it leads
to problem when we believe in substantial physical universe, and
things like that. It is an illusion, unlike consciousness.
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.
We can, and it is natural to do so, but then computationalism is false.
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.
You cannot attack a result in science with philosophy. This means that
you must not introduce non relevant problem (even if interesting, and
solved in other chapters of the book/paper). If you think it is
relevant, you must prove it, and say where and why.
Then, as I knew that some scientist are allergic to thought
experiment, I remind you that UDA is translated in arithmetic, with
the 3p personal identity managed by the computer science solution:
Kleene's second recursion theorem (see my paper "amoeba, planaria and
dreaming machine"). The 1p identity is explained by the fact that
incompleteness makes it possible to apply Theaetetus definition of the
knower, or Plotinus notion of "soul" in arithmetic.
I will give more explanation on this later, but everything is
explained, even in sane04, where you are supposed to look at the
references for more details.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
--
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.
