On 04-08-2016 04:13, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On 4/08/2016 11:59 am, smitra wrote:
On 04-08-2016 01:51, Bruce Kellett wrote:
On 4/08/2016 9:30 am, smitra wrote:
On 04-08-2016 01:16, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 8/3/2016 4:09 PM, smitra wrote:
On 04-08-2016 00:12, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
Only if you wake up and find out winning the lottery was a
mistake,
which seems less likely than waking up a winner. Waking up as one
of
the many copies who didn't win is not one of the options - those
copies are not continuations of the you who won the lottery.
I'm imagining waking up after a night of heavy drinking with
memories gradually returning. Now, you can, of course, condition
everything on the person who will find that he won the lottery.
But
making that a hard part of my identity doesn't make sense to me,
otherwise you could not be the same person and forget about it, or
consider being the same person who participated in the lottery who
then went on to win it.
Now,while this boils down to an arbitrary definition of personal
identity, we should be consistent about this; you can be the same
person as the won who had not yet won it, and you could imagine
being a person who did not win it, then you'll likely end up
waking
up as a copy in another branch who did not win it.
That seems to invoke a dualism, such that there's only one real
"you"
who may be in different branches at different times. I'd say that
if
"you" wake up as a copy in another branch where "you" didn't win,
it's
because "you" didn't win. It's the same as saying the man who sees
Moscow didn't "wake up" as the man who sees Washington.
Brent
We can turn this into a reverse Bruno-like problem. If your memory
is temporarily cleared then copies of different branches merge. The
branches will of course be different, but you without a memory of
having won in the branch where you did win is the same you as the
you in another branch were you did not win where you also have
forgotten about not winning.
Actually, there will objective evidence as to whether or not you have
won the lottery. There will be a winning number and you will have a
ticket that will have this number on it or not, regardless of whether
you forget anything or not. The idea that branches in the MWI can
recombine after the relevant quantum measurement has been
irreversibly
recorded is nonsense.
There is no recombination of branches here, it's just that you become
identical to another version of you located in another branch. Then,
upon a new measurement, you'll spit over the different branches again.
If somehow you would not be identical to another copy of you located
on a branch where the outcome of the lottery is different, then that
means that you actually did not forget the outcome as the information
about the outcome is still present in your memory (the algorithm that
defines you).
Forgetting does not involve complete reversal of a particular brain
state, so there will always be traces of the facts that you once knew,
but have recently forgotten -- the memories might come flooding back.
I don't think the subconscious mind is as simple as you seem to
presume. While you were forgetting, the other branches of the wave
funtion have evolved away in different diretions, so it is extremely
unlikey that there will be another copy identical to you
post-forgetting state. If you do another measurement, there is another
branching -- you never go back to an earlier state. Decoherence is
irreversible.
It doesn't matter, because the moment you have forgotten it, the parts
of your brain that do contain the information about the lottery are
external to you. Otherwise, you would not have forgotten it. That
decoherence is irreversible in practice is irrelevant here.
Saibal
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