Re: Torture yet again

From: Bruno Marchal <marchal.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 19:15:18 +0200

Le 21-juin-05, à 13:05, Jonathan Colvin a écrit :


> Sorry, I can't let go of this one. I'm trying to understand it
> psychologically.
>
> Here's another thought experiment which is roughly equivalent to our
> original scenario.
>
> You are sitting in a room, with a not very nice man.
>
> He gives you two options.
>
> 1) He'll toss a coin. Heads he tortures you, tails he doesn't.
>
> 2) He's going to start torturing you a minute from now. In the
> meantime, he
> shows you a button. If you press it, you will get scanned, and a copy
> of you
> will be created in a distant town. You've got a minute to press that
> button
> as often as you can, and then you are getting tortured.
>
> What are you going to choose (Stathis and Bruno)? Are you *really*
> going to
> choose (2), and start pressing that button frantically? Do you really
> think
> it will make any difference?


I will choose 2, and most probably start pressing the button
frantically. Let us imagine that I press on the button 64 times.
The one who will be tortured is rather unlucky, he has 1/2^64 chance to
"stay" in front of you. He will probably even infer the falsity of
comp, but then you will kill him!
The 63 other "brunos" will infer comp is true, and send 63 more
arguments for it to the list, including the argument based on having
survive your experiment!

OK with the number?

Bruno



http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Tue Jun 21 2005 - 13:27:58 PDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Feb 16 2018 - 13:20:10 PST