Le 17-juin-06, à 14:41, Stathis Papaioannou a écrit :
> The problem hinges on an answer to the question, what criteria must
> be satisfied for two instantiations of a person to be the "same"
> person? In the world with which we are familiar, most people would
> agree that there is an objectively right or wrong answer. Our brains
> have evolved so that we are sure that we are the same person today as
> we remember being yesterday, and will remember having been tomorrow. I
> might add that this isn't a view that is subject to revision in the
> light of new information, like the belief that the world is flat;
I am not so sure about that. It is known that people who introspects
themselves can be led to the discovery of delusions about the world and
personal identity. Somehow this what will be mirrored in the interview
of any self-referentially correct universal machine.
> rather, it has been so fundamental to our evolution that it has a
> tenacity at the visceral level that is only otherwise seen in the
> delusions of the psychotic patient. But evolution has not had to cope
> with teleportation, mind duplication, duplication with partial amnesia
> in one copy, partial or complete mind merging, and all the other
> fantastic possibilities which may or may not one day be realised.
... or which have already been realised. And perhaps "Nature" bet on it
all the time. Our brains witness the importance of quick adaptation.
Now I don't think the third person and first person "self" is
necessarily a delusion, but its unicity could be (for some). The same
holds for the MWI.
> If it had (or if it will, in the far future), we might be left with a
> view of personal identity something like that espoused by Lee Corbin,
> where each copy is regarded as "self" and the (selfish) aim of life is
> not to preserve a single linear temporal sequence of related copies,
> but to maximise the total number of copies, even at the cost of a
> single individual's death.
Eventually Corbin accepted the first person indeterminacy. Unlike
people like Chalmers who thinks the first person can split (which
explained why he needs to defend dualism in the philosophy of mind).
With comp there is a definite answer for the notion of personal
identity: it is a personal question no "others" can solve for you.
>
> Returning to the question of teleportation and probabilities, I would
> say that objectively there is only one unequivocal answer: you don't
> survive the experiment at all,
Ok, but do you agree that, keeping comp in front of such a statement,
it means we are dying each night, or even at each instant?
Of course with comp we cannot know that, nor can we know when we are
split, although we can believe it from thrid person available clue
(being the two slit experiment or some concrete doppelganger).
> but people who look like you and believe they are you materialise in
> Washington, Sydney and Beijing with P=1. Subjectively, I would try
> to apply the (delusional, or may as well be delusional) belief that
> you are a single person persisting through time as best as I can to
> the unnatural situation. I think that the best answer in the two-step
> teleportation (Br..>W,M; M..>S,Be) is that you should expect P(W)=1/2,
> P(S)=P(Be)=1/4. I prefer this to an equal P of 1/3 for each
> destination city because (again, due to our evolved psychology, not
> because it is the "truth") we anticipate all possible candidates for
> the "next moment", but once this next moment arrives, all the other
> concurrent copies become irrelevant, and the only thing that matters
> is the *next* next moment. Consistent with this method, if there is
> complete amnesia for all that happens in Moscow, it is as if that
> stage has not occurred, and from Br you can anticipate arriving in W,
> S and Be with equal probability. In the case of intermediate levels of
> amnesia in Moscow, I suppose this would yield intermediate
> probabilities. However, I'm not very confident about this, because our
> minds are simply not made to deal with the situation.
That is why we do mathematics and logic. To escape our "historical"
prejudices and handle counterintuitive propositions. Like in
contemporary physics.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Mon Jun 19 2006 - 04:59:55 PDT