On 02 Aug 2016, at 20:03, John Clark wrote:
On Tue, Aug 2, 2016 at 12:55 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
> both copies will have a cup of coffee after the
reconstitution. Are you OK that P("experience of drinking coffee") =
1?
Yes, and in this case it doesn't matter if Bruno Marchal says P is
the probability John Clark will drink the coffee or says P is the
probability "you" will drink the coffee, there is no ambiguity
either way.
OK. Good.
QUESTION 2.
The question is not about duplication. But about a very general
principle about uncertainty, generally agreed, or used implicitly in
statistics, belief function theory, etc.
Do you agree that if today, someone is "sure" that tomorrow (or any
precise time later) he will be uncertain of an outcome of a certain
experience, then he can say, today, that he is uncertain about that
future outcome.
For example, if I promise myself to buy a lottery ticket next week. I
am pretty sure now that next week I will be unsure winning something
or not with that ticket, so I consider myself to be uncertain right
now about winning or not the lottery next week.
So I repeat, the principle questioned here says that if at t_0
P("I will be uncertain of the outcome of some experience at t_1") = 1
then
The outcome of the experience at t_1 is uncertain at t_0. (t_1
assumed bigger than t_0)
Put yet in another way: delaying an uncertainty does not make it less
uncertain.
Are you OK with this?
Bruno
However if the Moscow man got the coffee but the Washington man did
not then there would be a 100% probability that John Clark will get
the coffee and also a 100% probability that John Clark will not get
the coffee, just as I would assign a 100% probability that tomorrow
tomatoes will be red and I would also assign a 100% probability that
tomorrow tomatoes will be green.
If Bruno Marchal says the definition of P is the
probability "YOU" will drink the coffee then P would not be
100% or 50% or even 0%, as John Clark has said, some ideas are so
bad they're not even wrong. P would have no value whatsoever because
in a world with "YOU" duplicating machines the very definition of
P would be gibberish.
> Do you think the guy in Helsinki was wrong when he said, in
Helsinki, to expect to drink some coffee soon?
As far as personal identity is concerned it doesn't matter what
the Helsinki man does or does not expect. Our expectations often
turn out to be wrong but we nevertheless retain our feeling of
personal identity, or at least John Clark does.
John K Clark
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