On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 10:39 AM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
>> the coin throw was random so you ended up in Moscow rather than >> Washington for no reason at all, but that's OK because there is no law of >> logic that demands every event have a cause. >> > > > The point is that in this case the randomness is know to be due to the > lack of precision in the data Exactly, lack of precision in the data. In the Many Worlds interpretation, and in all the duplicating chamber thought experiments I have see on this list, probability is not a property of the thing itself but just a measure of a lack of information. > > Not something like the self-duplication. > What randomness is there in that? > > we know in advance that each copies can only see one city, > > Yes. > > and not both > Yes, Bruno Marchal the Washington Man will not see Moscow, and Bruno Marchal the Moscow Man will not see Washington, and Bruno Marchal the Helsinki Man will not see Moscow or Washington; and of course Bruno Marchal will turn into things (PLURAL because Bruno Marchal has been duplicated) that see all 3 cities. > > and so the immediate result of the self-localization cannot be predicted > by the guy in Helsinki. > Without using personal pronouns please tell John K Clark the precise question to ask "the guy in Helsinki" that has a indeterminate answer, and just as important please make clear exactly who Bruno Marchal is asking the question to. > > You are playing with words > Words are the only way we have to communicate and I am not playing and this is not a game. I have no doubt that if duplicating chambers were in common use in Shakespeare's day by now the English language would be very different, particularly in regard to personal pronouns; but that didn't happen so we are left with a very imperfect instrument to discuss these matters. Thus when talking philosophically about duplicating chambers personal pronouns must be used sparingly and with great care even if that results in inelegant prose. > > I have no clue, and I think that nobody has any clue about what you fail > to understand. > I no longer think there is anything there to understand. > You oscillate between "not new and trivial", and "wrong", Yes, because your statements oscillate between not new, trivial, hopelessly vague, and just wrong. I said a long time ago that no philosopher in the last 200 years has said something that was clear, deep, non-obvious, and true that a scientist or mathematician hadn't said long before, and you are continuing in that grand tradition. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
