Kory Heath wrote:
> Sorry for the long delay on this reply.
>
> On Nov 2, 2008, at 7:04 PM, Brent Meeker wrote:
>> Kory Heath wrote:
>>> In this mundane sense, it's perfectly sensible for me to say, as I'm
>>> sitting here typing this email, "I expect to still be sitting in this
>>> room one second from now". If I'm about to step into a teleporter
>>> that's going to obliterate me and make a perfect copy of me in a
>>> distant blue room, how can it not be sensible to ask - in that
>>> mundane, everyday sense - "What do I expect to be experiencing one
>>> second from now?"
>> It's sensible to ask because in fact there is no teleporter or
>> duplicator or simulator that can provide the continuity of experiences
>> that is Kory. So the model in which your consciousness is a single
>> unified "thing" works. But there are hypothetical cases in which it
>> doesn't make sense, or at least its sense is somewhat arbitrary.
>
> If something like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is
> correct, then this kind of duplication is actually happening to me all
> the time. But I should still be able to ask a question like, "What do
> I expect to be experiencing one second from now?", and the answer
> should still be "I expect to still be sitting at this computer, typing
> this email." If the many-worlds theory simply disallows me from making
> statements like that, then there's something wrong with the many-
> worlds theory. But if the many-worlds theory *allows* me to make
> statements like that, then in that same sense, I should be able to ask
> "What am I about to experience?" when I step into a duplicating machine.
I think there is a misunderstanding of the MWI. Although the details haven't
been worked out (and maybe they won't be, c.f. Dowker and Kent) it is generally
thought that you, as a big hot macroscopic body, do not split into significantly
different Korys because your interaction with the environment keeps the Kory
part of the wave function continuously decohered. So in a Feynman path-integral
picture, you are a very tight bundle of paths centered around the classical
path. Only if some microscopic split gets amplified and affects you do you "split".
I doubt that it will ever be possible to build a teleporter. Lawrence Krauss
wrote about the problem in "The Physics of Star Trek". I'm not sure what it
would mean for Bruno's argument if a teleporter were shown to be strictly
impossible; after all it's just a thought experiment.
On the other hand, I think it's probably not that hard to duplicate a lot of
your brain function, enough to instantiate a "consciousness" that at least
thinks it's Kory and fools Kory's friends. But would such an approximate Kory
create the ambiguity in the history of Korys that is inherent in Bruno's argument?
Brent
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Received on Fri Nov 14 2008 - 01:02:31 PST