Dear Bruno,
Does your thesis survive without the notion
of duplicatability or copying? As I have pointed out, QM
does not allow duplication and I am hard pressed to understand how duplication
can be carried out in classical physics.
If we merely consider the Platonia of
mathematics we find only a single example of each and every number. If we
assume digital substitutability there would be one and only one number for each
and every physical object. Where does duplication obtain in Platonia? If
duplicatability is an impossible notion, does your thesis survive?
Stephen
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, June 14, 2004 12:08
PM
Subject: Re: Shadows and smeared
selves
At 14:43 12/06/04 -0400, Jeanne Houston wrote:
I am a quantum physics
enthusiast, but merely an amateur who finds the discussion threads of
this group to be quite interesting. I have never before commented
because, to be honest, I am rather lost in regard to the discussion of
first person and third person.
I have not the time to
explain the use I have made of the 1/3 person distinction in the approach I
develop to tackle the mind body problem. It occurs with the comp hypothesis
in the cognitive sciences, that is the thesis that we are machine
(roughly speaking). Then we are, like amoeba, duplicable. We can imagine
being "cut" at some place and "pasted" in some other place. But then we can
duplicated and pasted in two place at once. It is there that the 1 person
views are qualitatively different from the 3 person views. Let me
quote myself from http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/publications/CC&Q.pdf (Note
that comp entails a form of comp-suicide, and quantum-suicide could be a
particular of it).
<<The first
person discourse is defined by the result of experience/experiment which
are written in a diary which belongs to the experimenter. It is important
that he keeps his diary with him during the self-duplication experiment so
that the diary is duplicated too in the experiment. The third person
discourse is the discourse made by an external observer. Suppose a
candidate goes through a self-duplication experiment, and that he believes
in computationalism. He is scanned and annihilated at Brussels and
reconstituted at both Washington and Moscow. Let us ask him the following
question: where will you be after the experiment is done. He can answer: I
will be in Washington and
Moscow. Right, with that question, he can indeed use a third
person discourse about himself. Let us ask him more cautiously the
following question: where will you feel yourself, i.e. from your first person subjective point of
view, after the experiment? More precisely: what will you note in
your diary after the experiment is completed? In that case, if we assume
both the computationalist hypothesis and if we assume that the experimenter
has some minimal introspection abilities it is easy to understand he must
answer ‘I will feel myself in Washington or Moscow’. The fact is that he will not write in his
diary something like ‘I feel myself being both in Washington and Moscow’.
In particular he will have a personal knowledge of Moscow
(resp. Washington) and only an intellectual, 3-person knowledge, of the
existence of his doppelganger in Washington (resp. Moscow). And he can
predict that very fact—that he will feel himself at one
place—although he is unable to predict which one, and this shows that
computationalism entails a strong first person indeterminacy, and this
happens in the context of a strong third person
determinism.>>
Hoping that helps. That distinction is akin
to the distinction between subjective and objective in Everett's "relative
state/many-world" papers. I will probably say a little more in my
discussion with George asap (on the
everything-list).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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