Re: on formally describable universes and measures (fwd)
On 09-Feb-01, Jesse Mazer wrote: So, if continuity of consciousness is real it is reasonable to expect that our theory of consciousness should allow for the possibility of splitting, and that from a first-person point of view, I-before-the-split would have an X% chance of becoming one copy and a Y% chance of becoming another. That is not to deny, though, that the split would happen both ways at once--in other words, each copy would be correct in saying it was continuous with the single consciousness before the split. This seems to me to be a meaningless question. What possible experiment could decide whether I had become the I-in-Washington and not the I-in-Moscow. The very hypothesis of the thought experiment makes this question unaswerable. Of course if we actually did the experiment and I-in-Washington says No I'm not the one who was in Brussels. and the I-in-Moscow says, Yes, I'm the one who was in Brussels. or they thought thusly to themselves then we might have an interesting question. But Bruno postulates in the beginning that they must both say (unless lying), I was the one in Brussels. If you scatter a photon off an excited atom you can get two identical photons - but there is no answer to the question which was the original and which was emitted by the atom. Brent Meeker
Re: on formally describable universes and measures (fwd)
Brent Meeker wrote: So, if continuity of consciousness is real it is reasonable to expect that our theory of consciousness should allow for the possibility of splitting, and that from a first-person point of view, I-before-the-split would have an X% chance of becoming one copy and a Y% chance of becoming another. That is not to deny, though, that the split would happen both ways at once--in other words, each copy would be correct in saying it was continuous with the single consciousness before the split. This seems to me to be a meaningless question. What possible experiment could decide whether I had become the I-in-Washington and not the I-in-Moscow. The very hypothesis of the thought experiment makes this question unaswerable. Yes, I agree--my point was just that a reasonable theory of consciousness should not tell you that one is the real continuation while the other's memories are false. The reason this is worth pointing out is that before the splitting, the original can talk about the probability that he will become one copy or the other, and usually the notion of probability involves mutually exclusive alternatives...so the point about splitting both ways was just to avoid giving the wrong impression. Jesse Mazer _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
