From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Wed Jun 12 2002 - 07:25:45 MDT
Hal writes concerning the thought experiment
> > 2. You are informed by the OS that you have been scheduled
> > to run exactly twice in the history of the universe.
> > [And you have exactly zero doubt about the truth of it.]
> > Thus, *this* may be the first or second time from your
> > perspective (although since they're identical, the point
> > is moot, and I give it only for the purpose of description).
> > You have the following choice: if you press button A then
> > the second run will be terminated precisely at the moment
> > that the button is pressed. (In other words, your first
> > run continues regardless of whether you press A or not;
> > but the second run is affected.) Do you press the button
> > for ten dollars?
> But in the double-run case, we can't draw that conclusion [that there
> was someone having thoughts, and afterwards there is not] so easily, IMO.
> (This is in fact precisely the issue at dispute.) Before pushing the
> button, we know someone was having those simulated experiences, and after
> pushing the button we know that there is still someone having experiences.
Well, we only know that there *was* someone having experiences.
Perhaps it was very long ago, before the present expansion of
the universe. Perhaps a mathematician only proved a version
of the ergodic theorem, a corollary of which is that for any
given experience, there existed an absolutely identical one
N universes back for some N < 10^(number of atoms in question
or TM states).
Yes, it's true that someone is having experiences from that
person's point of view. Although the concept of "anticipate"
cannot IMO be consistently applied, one ought to still
anticipate a "future event" even if that event formally
happened far in the past. So, just as John has written,
one continues to live---but perhaps billions of years ago,
or in a fantastically distant universe in spacetime.
> There's one copy rather than two, but there's still someone there.
Yes. (except I might quibble about the tense again)
> I'm really still on the fence on this issue. It's not clear to me that
> it can ever be resolved, even in principle, even from the first person
> perspective. If John pushes that button, he learns nothing about whether
> anyone died as a result, and neither does anyone else. Maybe this means
> that the question is meaningless. But it seems important to get it right.
> As Emlyn says... "Interesting."
All we can do is strive for consistency IMO. I give milk
to a starving kitten because of the state that it's in now
---here and now, regardless of extremely remote conditions.
Lee
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