[ExI] any exact copy of you is you + universe is infinite = you are guaranteed immortality

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 17/06/07, Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net> wrote:

> You are of course completely right, in an objective sense. However, I am
> > burdened with a human craziness which makes me think that I am going to
> be
> > one, and only one, person post-duplication. This idea is at least as
> firmly
> > fixed in my mind as the desire not to die (another crazy idea: how can I
> die
> > when there is no absolute "me" alive from moment to moment, and even if
> > there were why should I be a slave to my evolutionary programming when I
> am
> > insightful enough to see how I am being manipulated?). My question is
> about
> > how wild-type human psychology leads one to view subjective
> probabilities in
> > these experiments, not about the uncontested material facts.
>
> You're abusing the term "subjective probabilities" here, perhaps
> willfully.  Valid use of the term pertains to estimating your
> subjective uncertainty about the actual state of some aspect of
> reality. If your objective is truly "about how wild-type psychology
> leads one..." then your focus should be on the psychology of
> heuristics and biases, definitely NOT philosophy.
>

There MWI of QM is an example of a system where there is no uncertainty
about any aspect of reality: it is a completely deterministic theory, we
know that the particle will both decay and not decay, we know that half the
versions of the experimenter will observe it to decay and the other half
(otherwise identical) will observe it not to decay. This is from an
objective point of view, which is in practice impossible; from the
observer's point of view, the particle will decay with 1/2 probability, the
same probability as if there were only one world with one outcome. I use the
term "subjective probability" because it is the probability the observer
sees due to the fact that future versions of himself will not be in
telepathic communication, even though he is aware that the uncertainty is an
illusion and both outcomes will definitely occur.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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