On 1 August 2017 at 03:17, John Clark <johnkcl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> You seem to believe the past and future are symmetrical and so can be > treated the same way, but they are not. We can remember the past but not > the future. Yes looking back it makes sense to say " back 5 copies ago I > couldn't predict what city I will be in but now I know" because now the > meaning of the word "I" is clear in the context of the person using the > word. However back then it would make no sense to say "I can't predict what > city I will be in after 5 copies" because then the word "I" was not > uniquely defined, 32 (2^5) individuals will have a equal claim to the title > "I" and nobody can say which one of the 32 people named Mr. I the > prediction is supposed to be about. > People make predictions based on past experience. You don't even need to be human: a rat that experiences positive reinforcement on pressing a certain lever will learn to press the lever in expectation of a reward. So the copies of a rat that goes through a duplicator and end up in a place full of rat goodies will learn to go through the duplicator repeatedly, in expectation of more rewards. You can say to the rat, "personal pronouns have no meaning when there are multiple copies of you, and therefore it is nonsensical to predict that you will get the reward", but the rat won't care, and I think most humans won't care either. -- Stathis Papaioannou -- 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
