On 15 Aug 2017, at 19:26, John Clark wrote:
On Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 9:31 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <[email protected]
> wrote:
>>a rat can remember the past and a rat can use induction to
make a prediction, and most important of all a rat knows if it's
prediction turned out to be correct or not and that enables the rat
to improve its induction process for Mr. Rat's next prediction. But
if Mr. I, who is about to enter a "I" duplicating chamber, asks the
question "Will I see Moscow tomorrow?" the only answer Mr. I will
ever get is "yes and no", and that is not an answer so that was not
a question.
> If even the rat can understand it at a primitive level (as
demonstrated by its behaviour) then I think this goes against your
claim that the question is meaningless.
It's very meaningful when looking from the present back into the
past, but NOT when looking from the present toward the future.
People around here seem to think you can treat the future the same
way you treat the past but you can't, if you could then you couldn't
tell the difference between the past and the future, but you can.
Nobody treat the future like it was the past here, and indeed that
distinction is crucial for the First Person Indeterminacy.
> And I think that if you went through the duplication a few
times your copies would start to behave as if questions about their
future were meaningful.
If you send the rats through the duplicator 10 times you'll end up
with 2^10 or 1024 rats. All 1024 rats will have seen different
things from each other and thus have different memories, and thus
formed different inductive rules,
Only a minority, which decrease exponentially, might differ on the
induction rule. If the guy in Helsinki predict, in the iterated case,
that his future history will describe PI in binary, there will be only
1/2^n who will confirm it. A simple computation shows that the
majority will have their histories random, even incompressible.
and thus will behave differently in the future. And all 1024 rats no
matter how different their individual situation may be now will
remember a single unbroken chain of events going all the way back to
that single original rat. But the question wasn't about any member
of that rat pack,
By computationalism + the definition of first person, you are wrong
here. The question is obviously about the personal experience of all
members of that rat pack, and thus on the majority of them, for the
prediction on first person experience to be correct.
the question was asked 10 days and 10 duplications ago about the
single original rat:
What ONE thing will the ONE rat see in the future after the ONE rat
becomes 1024 rats?
That can't be answered and it's not because the answer is unknown
, its because the answer does not exist and never will.
Of course the answer exist. It is "one of the 1024 experiences" and no
one is more probable than another, so we can apply the mathematics of
the Bernouilli épreuve (as we called it in French). It is the same as
the iteration of throwing a coin.
All answers need a corresponding question and despite its
conspicuous question mark the above is not a question, it's not even
a stupid question, so there can't be an answer to it.
Only because you made the question a bit imprecise, and force us to
mentally add the 1p/3p precision that once again you seem to abstract
from.
What do you expect when you push the button? To die? To live a
superposition of experience? To see a white rabbit? No! You have
already explain that you expect to see one city, and so which one is a
very natural question to ask. And with Mechanism and this very
particular protocol, the answer is quite simple: I expect to feel
myself in the city of Moscow with a doppelganger in Washington, or in
the city of Washington with a doppelganager in the city of Moscow, and
I expect with certainty to never feel myself in both city at once.
The question which is already much more interesting and crucial for
the rest of the reasoning is: does that expectation change if we add a
delay of one year for the reconstitution in one, but not both, city,
say Moscow to fix the thing?
Bruno
John K Clark
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