On 2/14/2020 2:17 PM, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 9:03 AM Quentin Anciaux <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Le ven. 14 févr. 2020 à 22:57, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> a écrit :
On Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 8:50 AM Quentin Anciaux
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Le ven. 14 févr. 2020 à 22:48, Bruce Kellett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> a
écrit :
On Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 1:35 AM Bruno Marchal
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Just to be clear, are you OK with P(W) = 1/2 in
the WM-duplicatipon, when “W” refers to the first
person experience?
No. As I have said before, the H-man has no basis on
which to assign any probability at all to the
possibility that he will see W (or M) tomorrow, The
trouble is that probabilities tend to be defined by
the limit of relative frequencies over a large number
of trials. If you perform the WM-duplication N times,
there will be 2^N "first person experiences" and many
of them will assign probabilities greatly different
from 0.5.
That's false, most of them will infer the correct
probability...
Wrong again. Respond to Kent's argument if you disagree.
(arxiv:0905.0624)
I disagree, that's called statistics.
I attach an extract from Kent's paper. Take up your argument with him
if you think he has got the statistics wrong.
I don't find it very convincing
He asserts “After N trials, the multiverse contains 2 N branches,
corresponding to all 2 N possible binary string
outcomes." which is not true if pushing the red button produces 0 or 1
with some fixed probability p0 (which isn't made clear). There is
nothing which guarantees that all sequences will occur in any finite
sample. But I suppose we can pass over this noting that for large
enough N it is highly probable, though not certain.
He's right that the citizens of different branches of the multiverse
will infer different values of p from their experiments. But isn't it
also true that most of them will infer a value close to the true value.
And the larger is N, the greater the percentage of branches within a
small interval around the true value. Are there some branches in which
the citizen infer values very different from the true value p0? Sure.
But in a single world where N experiments have been performed to use in
estimating p, there is a probability that some value far from p0 will be
observed.
This is untrue: "In the many-worlds case, recall, all observers are
aware that other observers with other data must exist, but each is led
to construct a spurious measure of importance that favours their own
observations against the others" If they have any understanding of
statistics they will infer that it is highly probable that most other
universes obtained a value close to theirs. Of course some of them
will be wrong about that...some of them will be outliers.
So Kent's argument is really that in a universe with randomness we can
never be sure we're not an outlier. But as Ring Lardner would say, "But
that's the way to bet."
Brent
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