On Sat, Nov 2, 2013  Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote:

> John, you are the guy who explained Bell's inequality in a very
> compelling way. You're obviously smart
>
>
I’m blushing.


> > so why are you only engaging in personal attacks?
>

If I think somebody's ideas are gibberish I'm going to say their gibberish
without apology because there is nothing personal about it. And are you
prepared to make the case that my attacks were wrong? Do you really think
Bruno can continue to say that "you" will see only one city and also say
that ""you" concerns the guy(s) who will remember having been in Helsinki"?
Of course he can't! He'll just say "you confuse the 1P and the 3P" as if
that makes everything better.


> > Why don't you instead address the issues that have been pointed about
> your position, namely:  that it renders the probability of a coin toss to
> either 0 or 1 - that if you refuse to accept the 1p/3p distinction, then
> you also have to refuse the MWI?
>

I confess this is getting really frustrating for me, again and again I
point out the difference and people neither agree nor disagree but just
continue making the same accusation that I'm being inconsistent. But OK
I'll do it, again.

If a coin is flipped and a prediction is made about whether you will see
heads or tails it's easy to tell after the flip if the prediction was
correct or not because there is no ambiguity regarding the identity of
"you", the pronoun refers to the only guy we see and we just ask him what
he saw. Even if it's a quantum event and not a coin flip and the Many
Worlds Theory is used to calculate if you will see a electron spin up or
spin down we can still tell after the measurement if the prediction was
correct or not because it's still perfectly clear what the pronoun "you"
refers to, namely the only fellow we see. So the statistics that the Many
Worlds Interpretation of Quantum mechanics generates actually mean
something useful.

But now consider Bruno's thought experiment. We predict that you will see
X, after the experiment is over can we say if the prediction was correct or
not? No we can not because we no longer know exactly what the pronoun "you"
refers to. You has been duplicated (and that means the first person point
of view has been duplicated too) and so you standing on my right insists
that you did see X, but you standing on my left, who has every bit as much
reason to call himself "you" as the other one, insists that you did NOT see
X. So was the prediction about you seeing X correct or incorrect? There is
no way to answer that because the meaning of the pronoun "you" is ambiguous
in these circumstances.

And please don't just repeat the mantra "you confuse the 1P and the 3P", I
am not at all confused by the difference between objective and subjective
nor do I think objective is the more important; in fact it is precisely
because I know the difference that I know Bruno's ideas regarding
prediction and probability mean nothing.

And there is a even more fundamental reason I'm frustrated, predictions,
both good and bad and meaningless, and probabilities, and statistics, have
NOTHING to do with the continuous feeling of identity or sense of self, it
only has to do with remembering being you yesterday.

  John K Clark

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