On 03 Feb 2013, at 19:58, Jason Resch wrote:
On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 11:02 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 01 Feb 2013, at 17:10, Jason Resch wrote:
Very nice post Bruno. I found your points convincing and
informative.
Thanks Jason. I appreciate.
I really don't know what happens with John K Clark.
At least John K Clark answers mails, and the contradiction can be
made public.
Some other people have not been so polite.
Is there any one on the list who understood Clark's point, and would
like to defend it?
When I first saw the UDA I paused at step 3 as well, and raised the
point on the list that both perspectives are experienced and that
these experience could rightly be said to belong to the same
person. I think you replied that Chalmers had said the same thing
and also that he said it would imply that we are everyone. The
notion of a universal self, however, is advanced and using it here
at step 3 is in a sense "skipping ahead". I think the reasoning on
duplicates eventually leads to the realization on the self, which
John Clark may had already reached with his writing of short stories
on the subject of duplicates. I think I know what he means when he
says "I experience both", but he is using "I" in a different sense
than you mean it. I think he is using "I" in the broad sense of the
universal self rather than the immediacy of "here and now" and "what
is it my mind presently has access to?" Like a split brain patient
experiencing both sides of the screen, but one hemisphere of the
brain not remembering the other hemisphere's experience, you could
in the same sense say John Clark is presently experiencing both W
and M, but suffers from the same amnesia/loss of access of a split
brain patient.
Yes. Indeed. Someone (Lee) made a similar point, and i think agreed
that this entails that we are already all the same person, like the
same amoeba, or the universal self, but John did not reply when I
asked him if that was his view. Then it is also not relevant for the
first person indeterminacy as it concerns the next possible first
person experience about the result of an experiment (like pushing on a
button, and looking which city we feel to be).
Despite that I share this broad sense of self, I came to realize my
problem with step 3 came down to.
Good. It is frequent that some people takes time to get the first
person indeterminacy. I think most people eventually understand, but
some people seems to be unable to acknowlegde it. I guess it is more a
psychological problem than a problem of being able to reason or not.
What I find most surprising about John's position is that he can use
"I" in the same sense you mean in the UDA when referring to many-
worlds thought experiments, but he refuses to use it in that same
sense when it comes to duplication in the UDA.
Yes. And he did become rather delirious when explaining to me and
Quentin why. He introduced the non relevant distinction that in QM the
doppelganger belongs to different universes, like if that could change
the comp probability.
It is a bit sad as being open to the QM MWI is normally a big help to
get the comp MDI (many dreams).
Also, he uses often the mind-brain identity thesis, which is already
non sensical in MWI, and of course also in comp.
But the worst is in his tone, which does not reflect that he is
willing to think on those matter seriously, so he does look like a
sort of priest of the materialist dogma, and at the same time he is
not, as he said he was open to the idea that arithmetic might be the
basic reality. That's what is rather weird. To be continued ...
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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