Le 09-juin-05, à 08:55, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :
>>
>> (a) A coin will be flipped tomorrow. If the result is heads,
>> you will be tortured; if tails, you will not be tortured.
>>
>> (b) You will be copied 10 times tomorrow. One of the copies
>> will be tortured, and the other 9 will not be tortured.
>>
>> By your reasoning, there is a 50% chance you will be tortured
>> in (a) and a 100% chance you will be tortured in (b), so (a)
>> is better. But I would say the probabilities are (a) 50% and
>> (b) 10%, so (b) is clearly the better choice.
>
> Hmmmm...I'd disagree. Emotionally, (a) feels the better choice to me;
> in (b)
> I'm definitely getting tortured, in (a) I may dodge the bullet. On a
> purely
> objective basis (attempting to mimimize the amount of torture in the
> world),
> (a) is also obviously superior.
>
> This would make an interesting poll. Who prefers (a) over (b)?
With comp, and assuming the copies will never be copied again and are
immortal, then "b".
I recall that with comp, although those thought experiment can give
some intuition on the probabilities, in principle the probabilities are
determined by the whole stories going through the relevant states. In
particular if the copy which is tortured will, after the torture, be
mutiplied by 1000, then (counter-intuitively) it is better to choose
"a" (assuming no more copies).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Thu Jun 09 2005 - 04:56:59 PDT