From: Stathis Papaioannou (stathisp@gmail.com)
Date: Sat Mar 07 2009 - 19:08:25 MST
2009/3/8 Matt Mahoney <matmahoney@yahoo.com>:
>
> --- On Fri, 3/6/09, Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> The irreducible randomness of the first person perspective does not
>> come from an inability of an observer to fully know the universe's
>> state. It is easy to imagine special cases where the observer knows
>> everything relevant about the experiment: at 10 AM I will be
>> duplicated, one of the copies will see heads and the other copy will
>> see tails. In the case of a classical coin toss in a non-branching
>> universe, assigning a probability of 1/2 to heads is due to partial
>> ignorance: I know how a series of past coin tosses have turned out,
>> but I don't know how this particular one will turn out, for if I did I
>> would assign heads a probability of either 1 or 0. But in the former
>> example although I know exactly what is going to happen, I don't know
>> what I'm going to experience.
>
> You're asking the wrong question. One of you will experience heads and one will experience tails.
You are dismissing the significance of the difference between
subjective, first person experience and objective, third person
description. You may as well argue that going to the cinema is a waste
of money since what's *really* projected on the screen is a series of
still frames.
-- Stathis Papaioannou
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