[ExI] Let's play What If.

[Richard Loosemore]

John Clark wrote:
> Damien let me ask you something, suppose you were imprisoned in a deep 
> dark dungeon and were told that like it or not tomorrow you would be 
> thrown into the scanning chamber and duplicated and the copy would be 
> horribly tortured, but immediately after the copying the original would 
> receive a full pardon and get to go home. Leaving aside the question of 
> empathy would you be nervous knowing what was going to happen tomorrow 
> or happy at going free? I'd be nervous as hell! I'd rather just stay in 
> the dungeon. 

You can only get over the problem when you understand that your 
nervousness is caused by the fact that your concept of "you" and 
"continuity of self" is broken.  That is why you find this situation so 
frightening.

If you tried the experiment, one of you would wake up and say "phew!" 
and the other would wake up and say "uh oh!".  The question "But which 
one of those would *I* be?" is strictly meaningless.  It is opening and 
closing your mouth without saying anything.

This is a double-slit experiment, but even after the quantum mechanics 
has been made clear to you, you are still insisting on the question "But 
which of the two slits did the electron *actually* go through?"



Richard Loosemore