From: Mike Dougherty (msd001@gmail.com)
Date: Wed Mar 04 2009 - 20:33:21 MST
On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 8:30 PM, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp@gmail.com>wrote:
>
> Before you toss the coin what should your expectation of tails be?
> Would it be any different in a single world versus many worlds
> cosmology?
>
>
Why do you think you should have an expectation at all? By the time we
raise this coin toss to the abstraction where cosmology has any relevance to
the outcome, I wonder if we should also call into question a priori
knowledge of coin toss or observation memory or every/any damned thing.
With no experience of a coin toss, you can't even assume the outcome is only
heads or tails - it could disappear via slight of hand, it could turn into a
dozen pigeons, it could explode. Your first observation of a coin toss may
likely be so fascinating that you marvel at the trajectory of the object and
the sound of its impact - ignoring the orientation of it faces. If we're
discussing robots easily capable of reproducing the "flip" action, the
result may always be heads due to a carefully controlled application of
forces. Would this observation that the particular flip action results with
100% reproducible outcome indicate anything fundamental about probability?
Is this a completely deterministic cosmology? Oh, so the "flip" needs to be
more 'random' - so where does this randomness come from? It gets computed?
By what mechanism? I propose angels/demons vie for control of the coin's
yin/yang energies and stuff happens below the threshold of observation and
eventually the result becomes known. Simple as that.
Perhaps I've read too many "coin flip" threads. Seems there is a
correlation between this and the wax and wane of personal identity
threads...
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