>From: Jacques Mallah <jackmallah.domain.name.hidden>
>To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
>Subject: RE: this very moment
>Date: Wed, 10 May 2000 18:43:38 -0700 (PDT)
>
>--- Higgo James <james.higgo.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> > What you have written is in perfect agreement with
> > what I have been trying to say.
>
> James, I guess this ends our alliance :(
>
> > > From: Fritz Griffith
> > > Basically, I realized that if we accept that
> > > everything exists already, then why the hell do we
> > > need to bring up probability?
>
> To get retrodictions.
That's nice... now what does retrodictions mean? I couldn't find the word
in the dictionary, did you mean redtroductions? (it was the closest match).
It means to lead or bring back.
>
> > > probability (1st person), but rather that we
> > > experience everything (3rd person only),
>
> I never understood the 1st/3rd person crap, so I
>don't know what you mean. But I know this: effective
>probabilities are important, and they have absolutely
>nothing to do with the crap known as "1st person
>probabilities".
If you don't understand 1st/3rd person crap, then how do you know it has
nothing to do with effective probability? In fact, it has everything to do
with probability. Probability is the chance that a universe that exists in
the plentitude (3rd person) will be the universe you actually experience
(1st person). Without a 1st person experience, probability would be
useless. You could provide effective measures for all the universes in the
plentitude, but it wouldn't matter because no single universe would be
chosen. Rather, they would ALL be chosen, as a single 3rd person
experience, and it wouldn't matter how unlikely a universe was, it would
happen no matter what, as part of the whole. So probability wouldn't
matter. This turns out to be exactly the situation I proposed in my last
post.
>
> > > is that we experience each and every universe,
> > > guaranteed, but each one feels like it is the only
> > > one. So we'll see things make sense (100%
> > > guaranteed), and we'll see things not make sense
> > > (100% guaranteed), and each of these experiences
> > > will include the lack of knowledge of the other.
>
> You seem to be saying, in effect, that there is
>only one person that has all experiences. It sounds
>like a useless definition.
That is exactly what I am saying, except that 'person' is a subjective word.
It would be more accurate to say that there is only one overall
experience. This is what I call 3rd person experience. It is not a useless
definition because, for the reasons I explained above, having only a single
3rd person experience would differ from many 1st person experiences because
probability would become invalid.
>
> > > In short, every thought exists, so why should I be
> > > surprised to be having this thought? (as you would
> > > say it).
>
> You should only be surprised if your thought has
>characteristics that have an unusually low effective
>probability.
> (Examples: you think of a long bit string, x,
>which you obtained randomly. It looks random, so
>while x has a low probability, you're not surprised.
> If, however, you see the first 100 digits of pi
>and you know you obtained them randomly, it's time to
>be surprised - and suspicious of your random number
>generator. This is a white rabbit.)
Well thank you for your little lecture on how probability works, but I think
you missed my point. I'm saying that with only a 3rd person experience,
probability becomes useless, null, void, obsolete, unimportant and invalid.
I don't care how many facts and figures you can spit out about probability,
it doesn't make my proposition any less acceptable. And because probability
has nothing to do with my theory, no matter how unlikely a universe seems,
it will happen, in some universe, and you will experience it, even though it
won't seem like it in the rest.
ps. We should really get everyone together on IRC to discuss these things,
we would accomplish in a few minutes what would take weeks to argue about on
this discussion board.
>
>
>=====
>- - - - - - -
> Jacques Mallah (jackmallah.domain.name.hidden)
> Physicist / Many Worlder / Devil's Advocate
>"I know what no one else knows" - 'Runaway Train', Soul Asylum
> My URL: http://hammer.prohosting.com/~mathmind/
>
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Received on Thu May 11 2000 - 09:11:21 PDT