On Sun, Aug 13, 2017 at 7:35 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stath...@gmail.com>
wrote:

​> ​
> That both refer to themselves as "I" and claim have entered the duplicator
> in Helsinki yesterday and asked "What city will I see?" is not
> grammatically confusing at all.
>

​
The question was asked yesterday so if the question was
​not​
 confusing then today you must know the answer. So what is it?
​With the benefit of the knowledge you gained today w
hat answer
​ ​
should the Helsinki man of yesterday have been told that would have been
100% correct? And I don't want to hear about probabilities, they are
meaningless in this context.

Yesterday a meteorologist
​predicted​
 there
​ ​
will be
​ ​
a 50% chance of rain
​ ​
today
​,​
 ​however
today I know with 100% certainty that it did in fact rain (and I didn't
need to wait until today to predict there was no ghost rain, it didn't rain
and not rain). So I know the meteorologist would have made a better
prediction if
​ ​
yesterday
​ ​
he said there
​ ​
will be
​ ​
a 100% chance of rain
​ ​
tomorrow.
​ ​
If it's a real question then you should be able to do the same thing with
the Helsinki man's question.
​ ​
So today with the benefit of hindsight what answer should the ONE Helsinki
man's question about what ONE city the
​ ​
ONE Helsinki man
​ ​
would see AFTER the
​ ​
ONE Helsinki man became TWO Helsinki men?

And some people don't understand why I call this gibberish! ​

​> ​
> The W copy will say "yesterday I predicted I would be in W today, and I
> was right". The M copy will say "yesterday I predicted I would be in W
> today, and I was wrong".
>

​I know, and both I's remember being the "I" that asked the "question".
So any answer to the "question" will be both right and wrong. So it's not a
question, it's not even a dumb question, it's just words
​followed by​
 a question mark.


> ​>> ​
>> ​Of course the copies couldn't have predicted what city they will see
>> before the duplication, ​they didn't exist then!!
>>
>>
>
> ​> ​
> My tomorrow self doesn't exist yet,
>

​And that's exactly why your tomorrow self can't make predictions today,
and it's not just predictions, your tomorrow self can't do ANYTHING  today.
So why on earth is it suposed to be significant that the copies couldn't
predict what city they will be in?


> ​> ​
> does this mean there is no point in planning anything for tomorrow?
>

​It means there is no point in drawing grand philosophical conclusions
​from the fact that the two copies couldn't predict which city they would
see before they existed.

​The same thing is true for me, I made very few and very poor predictions
before I was born.​


> ​> ​
> Your claim that he is not really the same person the original
>

​*No!* That is not my claim at all. I claim there are TWO people that are
the same as the original, so if you don't specify which one of the two
you're talking about then nonsense soon results.  And if personal pronouns
are used and personal pronoun duplicating machines are also used then its
impossible to know which one of the two you're talking about.

​>> ​
>> What a subject "feels​" depends entirely on the emotional makeup of the
>> specific subject, no doubt some will feel they will end up in
>> Santa Claus's workshop
>> ​, but science is about what will happen not what some
>> hillbilly
>> ​ thinks will happen.
>>  ​And by the way, nothing will happen to *THE* subject, something will
>> happen to TWO subjects.
>>
>
> ​> ​
> An intelligent subject who trusts the experimental setup knows that he
> will end up in one or other city but not both, and not in Santa Claus's
> workshop.
>

​Expecting to see Santa Claus's workshop is no sillier than expecting an
answer to exist to the question "What city will I see?" just before
"I" duplication occurs.


> ​> ​
> A less intelligent subject, such as a rat, will figure this out and set
> his expectations for the future based on his memory of going through the
> duplicator in the past.
>

​As I've said many times,
​it's always possible to trace a unique memory pathway from the present
back into the past, even a rat can do it, but doing the same thing from the
present into the future is impossible because we can remember the past but
not the future.
If after a rat has been duplicated the 2 rats then have different
experiences, such as one getting a electric shock and one not getting one,
then they will no longer be identical and will behave ​differently in the
future. I see no indeterminacy or mystery
​or deep philosophy ​
in any of this.

​> ​
I think you are the only person who would claim to have a problem
understanding this.
​

​Claim? People usually claim to understand things when they really don't
not the other way around. And ​speaking of claims,
I don't claim to be a genius or anything but ​If the above is true then I
can't be the dumbest person you know.

John K Clark​

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