On 9/09/2015 2:23 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 9 September 2015 at 13:45, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 9/09/2015 1:29 pm, Jason Resch wrote:
On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 9:44 PM, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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.
So if some aliens create a copy of you in Andromeda, then you
cease to exist as a person?
Since I might know if they gathered the requisite information, it
is not an issue.
Note: according to current comological models, space is infinite
and uniform, which means infinite copies of you exist (though
very far away).
Such models make really quite strong assumptions about initial
conditions. You might well have an infinity of worlds with our
present cosmology, but they might all be copies of some bland,
boring model with no intelligent life. An infinite number of
universes does not imply an indefinite number of copies of every
particular universe. There are sets of zero measure, after all. So
again, I don't think there is anything here to concern us. Even if
there are exact duplicates, they are in principle
non-communicating, so are operationally different persons.
If they are exact duplicates which are non-communicating, you cannot
know which duplicate you are. This is why if one duplicate definitely
sees heads and the other duplicate definitely sees tails, you have a
1/2 expectation of either outcome.
If they are strictly independent, and non-communicating in principle,
then the situation is operationally indistinguishable from a single
world in which a coin is tossed at random.
Bruce
--
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.
