Le 19-juin-05, à 02:39, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :
I'm sure the one in Moscow will also answer that he feels really to be the
one in Moscow.
OK.
But what you haven't answered is in what way the universe is
any different under circumstance (A) than (B). This is because there is
surely *no* difference at all.
There is no 3-difference at all, but only a God can know that. There is a first person difference: it is the difference between writing in my personal diary oh I'm in Moscow and oh I'm in Washington.
Note that here we can understand why the question why I am the one in W or why I am the one in M are 100% meaningless. This does not entail that the question where will I be in the next duplication is meaningless.
This is the reason why it makes no sense (to me) to take the position that
if I copy myself, there is a 50% chance of (A) me being observer A, and a
50% chance of (B) me being observer B. There is no difference between (A)
and (B).
This is because you look at the experiment only from the third person point of view. Suppose we iterate the self-duplication 64 times. Among the 2^64 copies most will acknowledge that they are living a random experiment (it can be shown that most of the 2^64 sequence of W and M (or 1 and 0) are kolmogorov-chaitin-solovay incompressible.
For them, that is from their first person point of view, they are in a state of maximal indeterminacy and their best theories will be that they are confronted to a Bernouilli random experience. Of course, taking your God-like point of view you can tell them that they are under an illusion, giving that there is no 3-person difference (as God knows). Let us call that illusion the first person experience and let us try to explain it. The illusion exists, unless comp is false and the reconstituted people are zombies.
This is also the reason why I choose (A) a 50% chance of torture over (B)
being copied ten times, and one copy getting tortured (where it is suggested
there is only a 10% chance of me getting tortured).
Remember that for me this sort of reasoning always suppose no future merging or duplication and also that the copies have sufficiently diverge (and then the exact computation is most probably intractable, like in real physics).
There are clearly two
different possible universes under (A) (one where I get tortured, one where
I don't). Under (B), there is no way I can make sense of what the 10%
probability applies to. The universe is identical under situation (a) I'm
person 1 who gets tortured and (b) I'm person 2-10 who doesn't.
I am with you here. and if you agree with the 50% I made my point. The 10% was introduced only for treating a case where the copies did not diverge (or the comp histories going through the states of those copies.
To insist that there *is* a difference surely requires some new kind of
dualism. Perhaps it is a valid dualism;
Not this one. Only the duality between 1 and 3 person is valid.
but I think it should be accepted
that theories reifying the 1st person are fundamentally dualistic.
The word dualism is a little too vague. Once you agree with the 50% for a WM duplication, you accept the only sort of dualism I defend, but it is more an epistemological dualism than an ontological one. It is about *knowledge* not *being* (still less substance).
This means you accept the step 3 of the Universal Dovetailing Argument (UDA):
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004Slide.pdf
Explanations in english:
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/SANE2004MARCHAL.htm
But I
know what your response will be..the dualism comes from reifying the 3rd
person independent universe, and if we accept only the 1st person as real,
there is no dualism. It is quite a metaphysical leap, though, to discard the
3rd person universe. I'd like to know how to justify such a shift.
Careful, you are the one making a big leap, here. You go from the 3th step to the 8th step in the Universal Dovetailing Argument. I don't pretend it is easy or obvious. But it is not a metaphysical leap, it is a logical conclusion, once we take the comp hyp seriously enough, and this without hiding the 1-3 distinction under the rug.
It does not seem simpler by Occam, because instead of 1 universe containing
many observers, we have a multiplicity of universes, each with 1 observer.
We have a multiplicity of well defined computations, all statically existing in the arithmetical Platonia. It is simpler by occam (QM also presupposed those computations). Some computations can be seen as histories by internal self-referential inference inductive machine.
How does this differ from solipsism?
Please believe me, if comp leads to solipism, I will take it as a powerful argument against comp. But that would be currently highly premature. The logical possibility that comp makes solipsim false is due to the nuance between first person point of view (as I describe it through the duplication experiment) and
