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

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 18/06/07, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at rawbw.com> wrote:

I have believed for many decades that almost every time that
> probability is invoked in identity threads, it is misused. For
> example, suppose that you are to walk into Black Box A
> wherein 999 duplicates of you are to be made.  After the
> duplicates are created, only one of you---picked at random---
> is allowed to survive.  Many might suppose that the chances
> of surviving Black Box A is only 1/1000.  But of course, that's
> incorrect.  The chance that you will walk out is exactly 1.
>
> Suppose that I know that ten seconds from now a million
> copies of me will be made, all the new copies somewhere
> on the seashore.  Then yes, I will be surprised to still be
> here.  That is, the one of me who is not at the seashore
> will be surprised.  But our feelings of surprise, anticipation,
> and so on, cannot so far as I know be reduced to a rational
> basis.


Why? It all seems quite reasonable to me. I should be as surprised to find
myself in my room as I should be to find myself winning the lottery.

> I mention this to show that the question of what it feels like to have
> > a lot of copies of yourself - what kind of subjective outcome to
> > predict when you, yourself, run the experiment - is not at all
> > obvious.
>
> Not only would I agree, but I go on to assert that our normal,
> daily, usual feelings of anticipation, dread, surprise, apprehesion,
> and other feelings of subjective probability having to do with identity
> cannot be put upon an entirely rational basis.
>

You can describe objective reality in a completely consistent, unequivocal,
uncontested way, but feelings of anticipation etc. do not always comport
with this objective reality. Nevertheless, feelings are important; to a
human, perhaps the most important thing.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou
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