From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Nov 13 2002 - 10:07:01 MST
gts writes
> Lee Corbin wrote:
>
> > Are you sure that it doesn't matter to you which, if
> > either, got to keep the original atoms?
>
> Yes I'm sure. To make this clear we can assume the bifurcation
> chamber discards the original's atoms and makes two exact copies
> of the original from fresh atoms.
Then allow me to rephrase your very good thought experiment:
> A "bifurcation chamber" has an entrance door on one
> side and two exit doors on the other side. A person
> who walks into this chamber a physical duplicate is
> made (and we are assuming that atoms don't matter, i.e.,
> level 3, or 5---no forking). Both Person-A and Person-B
> would experience a continuation of self and rightly
> believe himself to be a continuation of the original
> Person.
which hasn't changed your meaning any, but has abbreviated
it and has made definite the machinery involved.
> > Now, when you wrote
> >
> > > Both Person-A and Person-B would experience a continuation
> > > of self and rightly believe himself to be a continuation
> > > of the original Person.
> >
> > do you see Person-B having any less claim than person A
> > to be the continuation of the original person?
>
> No. Their claims are equal. They both remember walking into and out of
> the chamber.
>
> However if we follow the stream of consciousness of the original as he
> enters and leaves the chamber, we find that he experiences himself to
> walk out of one door, not two.
Of course, since we are involved in philosophically new territory
(at least for most people), your notion here of "following the
stream of consciousness" may or may not make sense conceptually.
But perhaps you only meant to emphasize the last part of your
sentence: "he [recalls] walking out of one door, not two".
> The exit door experienced by the original would be selected
> randomly as per QM, and cannot be predicted in advance.
Yes and no. If the subject enters into the bifurcation chamber
repeatedly, and examines his memory or records, yes, it will
consist of a random sequence of A's and B's. This corresponds
exactly to a physicist recording beam splitter experiments.
It was your experiment, incidentally, that occurred to me a
few months after I became a materialist in 1966. It seemed
so odd to contemplate an exact molecular copy of myself. I
still have the journal entry: "So which one would I be?
Answer: both and neither." I believe that I was led by
a sort of mathematical taste for symmetry to adopt that
position, and a realization that probably the truth resides
entirely in the physics of the situation.
The bifurcation chamber that I use now has a thousand
copies made (or 999 if you want to keep the original)
and only one of the thousand avoids disintegration.
I ask two questions: (1) What if you take a dangerous
helicopter ride to the other side of the canyon, where
the chance is .25 that the helicopter will fail, and fall
a mile to the canyon floor? (2) what if you will enter
the 1000 way bifurcation chamber tomorrow where only
1 in a thousand exits the chamber and the other 999
are disintegrated? In each case, of course, the question
really is, what do you think that your chances are, and
if you had to choose between them, which would you choose?
Lee
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