On 6/08/2016 12:58 am, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 05 Aug 2016, at 13:23, Bruce Kellett wrote
He writes in the diaries what he sees: it is just a matter of the
protocol whether he writes the name of the city in which each diary
is located in that particular diary, or if he writes in both diaries
what he sees in total, in which case he writes W&M in both diaries.
It need be no different from my seeing one thing with my right eye
and writing that down with my right hand, and seeing something
different with my left eye and writing that down with my left hand,
or writing down both things with both hands. (This is not a
split-brain experiment.)
All the things that you bring up could easily happen without any
differentiation into two separate consciousnesses. You might find the
non-locality of the unified experience a little surprising, but that
is only because you are not used to the concept of non-locality.
I say again, even though it seems obvious to you that the
differentiation must occur,
It is just trivial, by the definition of first person experience.
That is not a suitable answer -- there is only one person experiencing
both cities.
If you were right, and using the definition I provided at the start,
we would have a situation where a guy is in Moscow, and write in his
diary "Washington". But then he did not survive sanely, and if that is
the case, P get ≠ from 1 at step 1.
Your phrasing of this is wrong. There is no such thing as "a guy in
Moscow" -- there is a guy who is in both places simultaneously. If there
are diaries in both W and M, and one person writing in these diaries, it
is not inconsistent to write W in the M diary and vice versa -- maybe
not what was intended, but since it is just one person writing in
diaries, what is written is not incorrect.
that is just a failure of imagination on your part. Try to put
yourself in the situation in which some of the many strands of your
conscious thoughts relate to bodies in different cities. There is no
logical impossibility in this. You seem to accept that a single mind
can be associated with more that one body: "We can associate a mind
to a body, but the mind itself (the 1p) can be (and must be)
associated with many different bodies, in the physical universe and
later in arithmetic." (quoted from your comment above.) Hold on to
this notion, and consider the possibility that there is no
differentiation into separate conscious persons in such a case (the
1p is singular -- there is only ever just one person).
I love the idea, but it is not relevant for the problem of prediction.
There is no problem of prediction -- there is only a question as to
whether differentiation necessarily occurs.
And I am not sure it makes sense, even legally.
Why should it make sense legally? Legal systems were not drawn up to
take account of person duplicating machines.
If the W-man commits a murder in W, with your bizarre theory, we can
put the M man in prison. Your non-locality assumption is a bit
frightening. Some will say, we are all that type of human, but not
this type, etc. If you consider the W-man and the M-man as the same
person, then, all living creature on this earth is the same person,
and 'to eat' becomes equivalent with 'to be eaten'.
Such bizarre consequences do not follow from what I have said -- not all
people are the result of digital duplication experiments.
Why not eventually, but this has no relevance at all in the reasoning,
where we assume digital mechanism, so that the M and W man would not
be aware of their existence in a protocol where they would not known
the protocol.
That doesn't matter -- they would know that they were one person,
experiencing two cities at once.
And the duplications gives a simple distinction between the 1p and
3p, and we can see, in very simple simulation, that all copies feels
1p-separate from the others, in the protocol described.
You have still not proved this, or given any cogent reason as to why it
should be the case. You suffer from what, in the philosophy of science,
is known as the problem of unconsidered alternatives. You simply have
not considered non-differentiation as a relevant possibility in your
theory/model. Now that this alternative has been raised, you have to
give reasons against it, or revise your original thesis.
I hope you understand well that we assume computationalism, with an
open mind that the theory might lead to a contradiction, in which case
we would learn a lot. But up to now, we get only (quantum?) weirdness.
You are very keen to assume computationalism, i.e., that your theory is
at least internally consistent. But I have raised a relevant
consideration that counts against the coherence of your theory. You have
not yet given any substantial argument for your assumption that
differentiation into separate persons is inevitable in the circumstances
described -- lots of assertions, but no arguments.
Bruce
--
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 https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
