On 13/08/2017 6:00 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
On 13 August 2017 at 16:48, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 13/08/2017 10:01 am, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On Sun, 13 Aug 2017 at 9:19 am, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 13/08/2017 9:05 am, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On 13 August 2017 at 08:48, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 13/08/2017 12:04 am, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:On Sat, 12 Aug 2017 at 4:52 pm, Bruce Kellett <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On 12/08/2017 1:42 pm, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:First person experience is individual and private. The third person point of view is the view of an external observer. Suppose person A is observed laughing by person B. The behaviour - the laughing - can be observed by anyone; this is the third person point of view. Person A might be experiencing happiness or amusement; this is the first person point of view and only person A himself has it. Finally, person B has visual and auditory experiences and knowledge of the outside world (there are laughing entities in it), and this is again from the first person point of view. I would say that knowledge is a type of experience, and therefore always first person and private; information is that which is third person communicable. But perhaps this last point is a matter of semantics.If your knowledge is gained from someone else, it is necessarily communicable information, and thus third person. First person is your personal experience, which is not communicable. However, knowledge gained by experience is communicable, and thus third person. Otherwise, all that you say above is mere logic chopping. Most first person experiences are based on third person information, namely sensory data.How is sensory data 'third person information'? That would make everything 3p, and you have eliminated the first person POV. If I experience the pleasure of sitting in the sun on a fine spring morning, that is surely a first person experience, and entirely sensory in origin.Even a priori knowledge, such mathematical knowledge, starts with learning about the subjectvfrom outside sources. Returning to the point, why were you claiming that the subject on a duplication experiment cannot have first person knowledge of duplication? That would mean no-one could ever have first person knowledge of anything.If you go into the duplicating machine without being told what it is, then you are duplicated and come out in Moscow, you will know that you have been transported from Helsinki, but how can you know anything about any duplicates? As far as you know -- not knowing the protocol -- you could simply have been rendered unconscious and flown to Moscow. How does 1p experience tell the difference? This is why I think some 3p is being mixed in with 1p experiences in this duplication protocol. The subject only knows the protocol by being told about it. How does he know he is not being lied to? This is the case with any experience whatsoever: you come to a conclusion about what has happened based on your observations and deductions, but you could be mistaken.That would appear to put a large hole in Bruno's distinction between quanta and qualia. The sensation of the sun on my face is veridicial -- I might be mistaken about it being the sun, but the sensation is incontrovertible. But things that I am told about are in a different category -- I have no immediate incontrovertible experience associated with them. I am aware of words being spoken, but I am not immediately aware of their veracity. You feel the Sun on your face, see the Sun in the sky and make deductions about a hot, bright object in space. It is an analogous process when you hear human speech and come to conclusions about the world.And I compare notes with other people so that I can be assured that I am not totally deceived. Thus such knowledge becomes 3p. It is not just what I suspect on the basis of immediate experience, but what can be agreed among a large number of people -- those who are independent of me. First person, second person, and third person are basically grammatical categories: first person, I/we, second person, you/you, third person, him/them. The third independent person plays a central role in the interpretation of perceptual evidence in terms of reliable conceptual models of the world. What do you think 3p means?I don't think we really disagree on the distinction between first and third person, but I don't understand your claim that there is a special problem acquiring knowledge in duplication experiments, which is not a problem in other experiences such as taking the train.
I think the problem I see is in the insistence that one restrict the subjects of the duplication to first person knowledge. Their knowledge of the protocol cannot be purely 1p -- there has to be a 3p component in that they are told the set up, and they have sufficient background 3p knowledge to trust the operator, etc. Then, after duplication, they also have access to 3p knowledge about both duplicates -- they can arrange to communicate, for example. So they can easily become aware of the fact that the person that remembers being Helsinki man sees both Moscow and Washington. My point here is that if you restrict them to 1p knowledge after the duplication, you must, in order to be consistent, restrict them to just 1p knowledge before the experiment; in which case they are necessarily unaware of the details of the protocol and will have a different perception of what has happened.
In the case of restriction to 1p knowledge the situation becomes much more analogous to what happens in QM where experiments might have multiple outcomes. In that case there is no possibility of communication between the different branches of the wave function, so there is genuine uncertainty about outcomes, and probabilities are estimated from limiting relative frequencies in the usual way. If one derives and/or applies the Born Rule in QM, then one can assign low probabilities to untypical sequences of results and the like. If you mix 1p and 3p knowledge in the duplication scenario, you lose this parallel with QM because the analogous 3p knowledge is not available in QM.
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