On 5/22/2020 1:48 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 3:27 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 8/4/2019 10:44 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Friday, August 2, 2019, 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List
<[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 8/2/2019 1:06 PM, Jason Resch wrote:
On Fri, Aug 2, 2019 at 1:40 PM 'Brent Meeker' via Everything
List <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 8/2/2019 11:03 AM, Jason Resch wrote:
> It is like Saibal Mitra said, the person he was when
he was 3 is
> dead. Too much information was added to his brain.
If his 3 year old
> self were suddenly replaced with his much older self,
you would
> conclude the 3 year old was destroyed, but when
gradual changes are
> made, day by day, common-sense and convention
maintains that the
> 3-year-old was not destroyed, and still lives. This is
the
> inconsistency of continuity theories.
On the contrary I'd say it illustrates the consistency
of causal
continuity theories.
Your close friend walks into a black box, and emerges 1 hour
later.
In case A, he was destroyed in a discontinuous way, and a
new version of that person was formed having the mind of
your friend as it might have been 1 hour later.
In case B, he sat around for an hour before emerging.
You later meet up with the entity who emerges from this
black box for coffee.
From your point of view, neither case A nor B is physically
distinguishable. Yet under your casual continuity theory,
your friend has either died or survived entering the black
box. You have no way of knowing if the entity you are
having coffee with is your friend or not. Is this a
legitimate and consistent way of looking at the world?
Did the black box take A's information in order to copy him,
or did it make a copy accidentally.
Would that change the result?
Holevo's theorem says it's impossible to copy A's state.
It's a thought experiment. Do you think the quantum state is relevant?
One typically doesn't track of the quantum state of their friend's
atoms and use that information as part of their recognition process.
Incidentally, my not knowing the difference between two
things is not very good evidence that they are the same.
That there's no physical experiment, even in principle, that
could differentiate the two cases, I take as evidence that
notions of identity holding there to be a difference are illusory.
But you haven't postulated a case in which it is impossible to
differentiate the two cases. It's not clear what degree of
differentiation is relevant.
If Holebo's theorem remains fundamental problems, then let's move
everything into virtual reality, and repeat the experiment.
In one case your friend's mind file is deleted and restored from a
backup, and in another he continued without interruption. Do not the
same conclusions I suggest follow?
So you're postulating that your friend has been duplicated but in a way
that you have no way of knowing. And then you ask, "Is this a
legitimate and consistent way of looking at the world?" I guess I don't
understand the question. If you have no way of knowing, then you don't
know...ex hypothesi.
Brnet
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