From: gts (gts_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Oct 30 2002 - 10:08:13 MST
Lee Corbin,
I think I understand the reason you cannot seem to see things as I do (and
as others like Eugene do). It seems that I am looking at the forking problem
consistently from a completely objective "bird's eye view," while you are
not.
Allow me to explain with an illustration:
1) You, Lee, are a friend of someone named Bob.
2) Unbeknownst to you, Bob is considering a forking procedure.
3) You have lunch with Bob before he departs on his secret journey to visit
a reputable fork-master in a nearby town.
4) You reason that after Bob's forking there are now two people of relevance
in the nearby town. (Let us call them Bob-A and Bob-B.)
5) You reason [correctly] that if Bob-A returns to your town to visit you,
you will have no way to know anything happened to Bob. Bob-A will appear to
be the same Bob you've always known..
6) Similarly, you reason [correctly] that if Bob-B returns to visit you, you
will have no way to know anything happened to Bob. Bob-B will appear to be
the same Bob you've always known.
7) You reflect upon 5) and 6) and conclude [incorrectly] that Bob-A and
Bob-B must have the same identity.
If you read the above very carefully, you'll see that your perspective on
the problem changes midstream. In 1) through 3) you have no knowledge of
Bob's impending forking procedure. In 4) through 6) you suddenly take the
all-knowing bird's eye view. And here is the real problem: in 5) and 6) you
think of yourself as having the unwitting non-bird's eye view when in fact
you are thinking and reasoning as one with the all-knowing bird's eye view.
Assuming you really believe what you are saying to us, I think your
confusion is due to a shifting of your perspectives similar to that which I
describe above. If you take the bird's eye view throughout the *entire*
problem, (as I and Eugene do); that is if you and your thought-experiment
references to yourself all have knowledge of Bob's forking, then you cannot
fail to realize that Bob-A and Bob-B are similar only in the way that
identical twins are similar. Each of them has his own distinct experience of
life and thus also his own cognitive processes, personality and identity.
It's true that a witness ignorant about the fork would not reach this
conclusion (at least not without meeting both Bob-A and Bob-B at once), but
we here on this discussion list are not ignorant about the fork. We can and
should see the problem from a bird's eye view.
-gts
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