On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 6:32 AM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> On 12/17/2019 3:54 AM, John Clark wrote: > > > OK, but the very definition of "The Helsinki Man" is the man who is > experiencing Helsinki right now today. Or at least that's the definition on > Mondays Wednesdays and Fridays, but on other days of the week the > definition is the man who REMEMBERS experiencing Helsinki today, and on > those days the Helsinki Man would be a fool to expect that the Helsinki Man > would experience one and only one thing tomorrow. > > > I did use proper nouns. So what is John Clark's answer to the question > what did the Helsinki man expect regarding his future just before he pushed > the button? My guess would be that he expected to experience being in > either Moscow or in Washington, just as if H-man were going to be > anesthetized and flown to one or the other city. > Philip Ball, in his recent book "Beyond Weird" (2018) addresses a similar issue of personal duplication in a quantum many-worlds setting. He remains unconvinced by the rhetoric.... "Imagine that our observer, Alice, is playing a quantum version of a simple coin-toss gambling game ... that hinges on measurement of the spin state of an atom prepared in a 50:50 superposition of 'up' and 'down'. If the measurement elicits 'up', she doubles her money. If it's 'down', she loses it all. "If the MWI is correct, the game seems pointless -- for Alice will, with certainty, both win and lose. And there's no point in her saying 'Yes, but which world will I end up in?' Both of the two Alices that exist once the measurement is made are in some sense present in the 'her' before the toss. "But now let's do the sleeping trick. Alice is put to sleep before the measurement is made, knowing she will be wheeled into one of two identical rooms depending on the outcome. Both rooms contain a chest -- but inside one is twice her stake, while the other is empty. When she wakes, she has no way of telling, without opening the chest, whether it contains the winning money. But she can then meaningfully say that there is a 50% probability that it does. What's more, she can say 'before the experiment' that when she wakes, these will be the odds deduced by her awakened self as she contemplates the still-closed chest. Is 'that' a meaningful concept of probability? "The notion here is that quantum events that occur for certain in the MWI can still elicit probabalistic beliefs in observers simply because of their ignorance of which branch they are on. "But it won't work. Suppose Alice says, with scrupulous care, 'The experience I will have is that I will wake up in a room containing a chest that has a 100% chance of being empty.' The Everettian must accept this statement as a true and rational belief too, for the initial 'I' here must apply to both Alices in the future. "In other words, Alice-Before can't use quantum mechanics to predict what will happen to her in a way that can be articulated -- because there is no logical way to talk about 'her' at any moment except the conscious present (which, in a frantically splitting universe, doesn't exist). Because it is logically impossible to connect the perceptions of Alice-Before to Alice-After, 'Alice' has disappeared. You can't invoke an 'observer' to make your argument when you have denied pronouns any continuity." (Beyond Weird, pp 301-2) Ball concludes, "What the MWI really denies is the existence of facts at all. It replaces them with experience of pseudo-facts (we 'think' that this happened, even though that happened too). In so doing, it eliminates any coherent notion of what we can experience, or have experienced, or are experiencing right now. We might reasonably wonder if there is any value -- any meaning -- in what remains, and whether the sacrifice has been worth it." Bruce -- 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 view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAFxXSLS32zvGrcc_1%3Dd973oBzN0iXonnXn5suEP3RFPf7hSjHw%40mail.gmail.com.
