Hi everyone,
I've been in heated discussions about duplicates for 39 years now,
and so I just don't have much patience with it any more.
I have not read many of the recent posts, but I have always gone
along with the viewpoint that more runtime is good, and that
it linearly bestows benefit on one.
I do notice this email:
Jonathan Colvin writes:
>Stathis wrote:
> > When you press the button in the torture room, there is a 50%
> > chance that your next moment will be in the same room and and
> > a 50% chance that it will be somewhere else where you won't be
> > tortured. However, this constraint has been added to the
> > experiment: suppose you end up the copy still in the torture
> > room whenever you press the button. After all, it is certain
> > that there will be a copy still in the room, however many
> > times the button is pressed. Should this unfortunate person
> > choose the coin toss instead?
To me, it's always been a big mistake to employ the language of
probability; you *will* be in the room where the torture is and
you *will* be in the room where it's not, because you *can* be
in two places at the same time.
> > If he shares your beliefs about identity, then if he changes his mind he
> > will be be comitting the gambler's fallacy.
> >
> > However, after having pressed the button 100 times and with nothing to show
> > for it except 100 tortures, his faith that he is a random observer might be
> > shaken :).
You may want to read a story, "The Pit and the Duplicate" that I wrote many
years ago, which dwells on the ironies of being duplicates. It's a little
like Stathis's point here.
http://www.leecorbin.com/PitAndDuplicate.html
Lee
Received on Wed Jun 22 2005 - 23:37:31 PDT