On 9/09/2015 1:20 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 9 September 2015 at 12:44, Bruce Kellett <bhkell...@optusnet.com.au
<mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:
On 9/09/2015 12:26 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 9 September 2015 at 10:43, Bruce Kellett
<bhkell...@optusnet.com.au <mailto:bhkell...@optusnet.com.au>> wrote:
Whether or not all possibilities are realized, they are not
in evidence, so their relevance to the question of
probabilities is questionable.
Your simple model case of a coin toss causing a world split
is just a made-up example to give the result you want, so
again its relevance is dubious. There is no sensible physical
theory in which the world splits on classical coin tosses.
If you can't imagine a world split, consider a virtual reality in
which the program forks every time a coin is tossed, one fork
seeing heads and the other tails. You are an observer in this
world and you have this information, so you know for certain that
"all possibilities are realised" when the coin is tossed. What
would you say about your expectation of seeing heads?
I presume you mean that the world is duplicated on each toss, with
one branch showing each outcome. We are back to the dreaded
"person duplication" problem. My opinion on this is that on such a
duplication, two new persons are created, so the probability that
the original person will see either heads or tails is precisely
zero, because that person no longer exists after the duplication.
After the coin has been tossed a few times, you (or one of the
entities identifying as you) will say that, despite the opinion he
expressed on 9th September on the Everything List, it does seem that
he has survived the duplication and that heads comes up about half the
time.
It is a question whether it is just the person who is duplicated, or
whether it is the whole world split into two non-communicating
replicates. In the former case, two new persons are created and they
will experience normal probabilistic outcomes of coin tosses. The second
case (duplicate, non-interacting worlds), is indistinguishable from a
simple series of coin tosses in this one world -- duplication has added
nothing.
Bruce
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