On 9/8/2015 9:20 PM, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 9 September 2015 at 13:40, Bruce Kellett <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 9/09/2015 1:20 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 9 September 2015 at 12:44, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 9/09/2015 12:26 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 9 September 2015 at 10:43, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> 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.
What if you are locked in a prison cell isolated from the world, and
the prison cell is duplicated without your knowledge? What if in a
year you are released and meet your duplicate? What if you are never
released but are informed of the duplication?
What if you didn't believe it?
Brent
Indeed, I would personally find the idea of clones of myself that I
could run into quite disturbing, and the more like me they were, the
worse it would be.
--- Stathis Papaioannou
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