Some remarks about already old mails!
JM:
> A room with 20 people in it has 20 times the measure of a room
>with 1 person. But a room with 20 of these women would supposedly have
>very small measure. For example, just as it is better to kill 1 person
>than to kill 20, it would be better to kill 20 of these than 1 regular
>person (all else being equal). In the limit as measure goes to zero we
>have a true zombie.
CM:
>I agree that the concept "that one's measure is somehow distributed
>among the so called computational continuations of one's brain activity"
>leads inevitably to the concept of near-zombies. The description of
>making a million copies of one person is a good illustration. Each of
>those copies has only a one millionth chance of "being" the original
>person, so we should not be as concerned when one of those dies as
>when someone else, who has never been copied, dies. But is this a
>refutation of the concept, by reductio-ad-absurdum? I don't think so.
This shows very clearly the absurdity of identifying two copies as the same
individual and divide the "value" of each copy by two. As I argued already,
two instantaneous copies will immediately diverge because they are not at
the same physical place, and must be considered as two persons capable of
different future histories (although sharing the same past), exactly like
two twins. In Wei's argument, we need an external factor (color of the
screen) to differentiate jane 1 from Jane2 : they are different since they
have a different memory of what happened after the duplication. Jacques, do
you mean that it is less crual to kill 5 quins than 5 children from
different families?
Chris, I think that it is misleading to say :
Each of
>those copies has only a one millionth chance of "being" the original
>person, so we should not be as concerned when one of those dies as
>when someone else, who has never been copied, dies.
In fact all copies have 100% chance of being the original person, but this
person will experience a subjective probability of one millionth of being
one of the copies. All copies have by definition the same human features as
the original, and there is no reason to consider them as (near) zombies.
After all during a quantum measurement, you split in many componenets but
you don't feel any reduction of your human nature!
> 5. Subjective probabilities can be computed, and we should expect
> the common-sense results
> P(H, t1) = 1/2
> P(H, t2) = P(H, t3) = 1/2
>
> It's a fair coin, after all, right?
> I think this gets Gilles' and Bruno's vote (and Russell's?)
>
Right. If the experiment can be repeated, which is the case here (but not
always!), the subjective probabilities must be identified with the
experimental probability as measured by the majority of conscious beings,
or at least memory storing devices.
Gilles
Received on Thu Aug 26 1999 - 03:05:09 PDT
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