On Jun 28, 2007, at 5:59 PM, Tom McCabe wrote:
--- Randall Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
On Jun 28, 2007, at 5:18 PM, Tom McCabe wrote:
How do you get the "50% chance"? There is a 100%
chance of a mind waking up who has been uploaded,
and
also a 100% chance of a mind waking up who hasn't.
Your "100%" is half of the total, which means you've
just relabeled "50%" as "100%", and claiming that it
means something that has to be explained. That
isn't
the case; it's just a label.
"100%" and "50%" are probabilities; they're physical
quantities. Saying that event A and event B both have
probabilities of 100% doesn't mean that they're
mutually exclusive and so we have to renormalize each
of their probabilities to 50%; it means that they're
both certain to occur.
But no single individual will experience both
outcomes. A person will remember waking up either
as the upload or as the other, not both at once.
To make this clearer, let's change the thought
experiment slightly. Let's have a person be
copied into two places or containers as identical
as we can make them: A and B. On copy, we destroy
the original. Then we do the same with the copies.
After ten iterations, we have 1024 copies (having
destroyed all the copies going into the machine,
you remember), and if you ask, you'll find that
50% of total waking-up experiences were in the A
box, and 50% in the B box. This being the case,
it seems that someone going into the machine (and
who is a pattern identity adherent) should
expect to wake up in the A box at 50%, and the B
box at 50%.
--
Randall Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"If we have matter duplicators, will each of us be a sovereign
and possess a hydrogen bomb?" -- Jerry Pournelle
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