From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Nov 14 2002 - 11:27:53 MST
Lee Corbin wrote:
> 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".
No, I mean that if we follow his stream of consciousness -- his
experience in real time -- then we will find that he experiences himself
to walk of out 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.
What do you mean by no? His exit door will be random and unpredictable
even if he enters and leaves only once. Repeated trials will prove this,
sure, but we don't need proof here because we already understand MWI and
QM.
> 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."
"Both and neither"? My goodness, you've been this confused since 1966.
:)
You will experience yourself emerging from one door of the chamber, not
the other door and not both doors. Your alternate, emerging from the
other door, will be related to you in the same way that alternates in
alternate universes are related to you under MWI; that is, your
alternate will share your nominal identity but he will be slightly
different from you in non-nominal ways. Those differences will grow with
time, just as they do under MWI.
Remember that my bifurcation chamber works by harnessing the mechanism
by which the multiverse creates alternate universes. It is a wonder of
technology; by some unforeseen quirk of physics its inventor found a way
to retain an alternate continuation of a person, such that two alternate
continuations of a person can exist in the same universe.
> 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?
I'm not sure what you're asking in the first question or how it relates
to my bifurcation chamber.
As for the second question, if all 1000 alternates are made in the
chamber then there is a .999 chance that the original's stream of
consciousness will end then with disintegration. The one continuation
that emerges unscathed will think he is a continuation of the original,
and rightly so, but there is a .999 probability that the original's
experience of living will have ended.
Note that a continuation of an original can never be the original. This
is very important. The original bifurcates into two equally valid
continuations, neither of which are identical to the original except in
name only. We become different people from moment to moment, even if
only slightly. With bifurcation this is true x 2.
As I've stated several times, the resolution to all the paradoxes is in
the recognition that non-nominal identity is dynamic and that only
nominal identity is static. Our persons change from moment to moment,
except in name only.
-gts
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