On Jun 28, 2007, at 11:26 PM, Tom McCabe wrote:
--- Randall Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
and
What should a person before a copying experiment
expect to remember, after the experiment? That is,
what should he anticipate?
Waking up as a copy, as this will be true for all the
copies which later remember his anticipation. If he
anticipates waking up as copy A, copy B will think he
was wrong.
Exactly. If the experiment is run 10 times (as in
an earlier iteration), the end copies will find that
a 50% anticipation of waking up as the first copy
and a 50% anticipation of waking up as the second
copy works out closest to accurate viewed across all
of their experiences.
Obviously, the only way to determine the answer to
the second question is to answer the first. Once
you've answered the first, and noted the various
answers from various viewpoints of people that all
remember being the "original", it seems obvious
that the way to handle the anticipation question
is via probability. If A goes to sleep and B and
C wake up remembering having been A, since B doesn't
remember having been C and C doesn't remember
having been B, it's clear that the original, A,
should have expected to wake up B 50%, and C 50%.
This would be true if A were some magical conserved
essence that *could not be created or destroyed* and
was split evenly between B and C. In reality, of
course, A never wakes up (we're assuming A is
destroyed and B and C are preserved, right?) and so
the statement is moot.
I don't understand why you would think that magic
or conservation has anything to do with this. There
are two individuals after the copying. One is B,
and the other is C. Since B will say, "Hey, I woke
up as B, and not as C! How about that!", and C
likewise in reverse, it seems clear that there are
two cases which happened to the set of people who
remember having been A (leaving to the side the
ever argumentative question of whether they "are"
A; it's not important for this). So, there are
two cases, which are exclusive (neither of them
remembers being the other, only A).
I'm not sure how you could come to any other
conclusion, except by asserting that the question
of "what should A expect" is nonsensical.
I've snipped quite a bit of this, because the parts
I snipped don't seem germane to the "what should A
expect?" question that we (I?) started with.
--
Randall Randall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
"This is a fascinating question, right up there with whether rocks
fall because of gravity or being dropped, and whether 3+5=5+3
because addition is commutative or because they both equal 8."
- Scott Aaronson
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