On Sat, 5 Aug 2017 at 4:26 am, John Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 7:14 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > >> You seem to agree that it's obvious the duplicating machine won't make a >> difference. > > > Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. With or without a > duplicating machine > > looking into the past > you will > always know with 100% certainty what you did or did not see, and with > or without a > duplicating machine > looking into the future you can never predict with 100% certainty what > you will see next and the best you can do is resort to probabilities. > However without a duplicating machine, although you still can't make a > prediction beforehand with 100% certainty, afterword you can know with 100% > certainty what the correct prediction would have been, but that's > not possible if duplicating machines are in the mix and it's not > possible > because then the following 2 sentences are NOT equivalent: > > 1) What will you end up seeing? > 2) What did you end up seeing? > > > Although > > both have question marks at the end only one of them > > is a question. The second one has a precise answer, the first one doesn't > have a > n > answer, not even a > > approximate answer, not even in retrospect. They are not equivalent > because the personal pronouns in them are not equivalent, and the personal > pronouns are not equivalent because > people > duplicating machine > s > are used and because the past and the future are not equivalent. We can > remember the past but not the future. > The rat thinks, "I will get a reward if I go through this door". The copies of the rat think, "great, I got the reward", or "no reward, I'm disappointed, but I'll try again by going through this other door ". The rat understands this at a primitive level. There is no issue of the rat misusing pronouns, because rats don't use language. > >> This has been the whole point of the discussion > > > If > > duplicating machine > s > > make no difference why were they introduced into the thought experiment? > And where is this indeterminacy I keep hearing about? > > > >> looking forward to a 30% probability of a certain outcome without >> duplication is equivalent (subjectively and behaviourally) to looking >> forward to being copied multiple times with 30% of the copies experiencing >> that outcome, whether you are a rat or a human. > > > Without the duplicating machine after it's all over you can say > "Yesterday I shouldn't have said there is a 30% chance event B will happen, > yesterday I should have said there is a 100% chance event B will happen", > but if personal pronoun duplicating machines are used then "you" couldn't > say that. And that's not equivalent. > If you are one of the copies experiencing event B, you can say that, had you known, yesterday you should have said there was a 100% chance of event B happening. However, you could not have known, because what each copy experiences is irreducibly random. Not even an omniscient oracle could instil in a person undergoing duplication knowledge of the future which would turn out correct for each copy. > -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
