On 24/09/2015 4:02 am, Jason Resch wrote:
On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 8:45 PM, 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.
I don't see how this follows. Are you saying you would cease to exist
as a person if a duplicate of you arose far away in this universe, or
that you would not cease to exist as a person?
The closest continuer account of personal identity would have no
difficulty with this. The remote "copy" is purely a matter of chance,
which has no physical or causal connection with you, so is not a
continuer in the required sense.
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.
This all follows from thw concordance model of cosmology, which is the
"standard model" in cosmology. See:
http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/PDF/multiverse_sciam.pdf
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.
I don't think you grasp the implications of infinity. If there are
infinite worlds, there is effectively 100% probability that an
infinite number of them will be identical to this entire Earth as you
see it.
As I said, that assumes some regular distribution over initial
conditions -- condition for which we have no evidence whatsoever. So
our universe - and our particular personal existences - might be unique,
even in an infinite universe. There can be universes of zero probability
measure.
Pi has infinite digits. Any sequence, however long, the encoding of
any documentary, can be found in the digits of Pi, and moreover, it
recurs an infinite number of times.
That, too, is an unproved assumption about uniformity --essentially the
assumption that pi is a normal number. And that has never been proven.
Bruce
I think you are trying to avoid answering my question.
Jason
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