From: John K Clark (johnkclark@fastmail.fm)
Date: Sun Mar 08 2009 - 14:10:42 MDT
On Sun, 8 Mar 2009 "Matt Mahoney"
<matmahoney@yahoo.com> said:
> Suppose you are given a choice of (A) being tortured,
> and then having the memory of the torture erased
You mean like a bullet to the brain? That would erase those memories
quite effectively and it’s extremely cost effective.
> (B) not being tortured, but then having a false memory
> of torture programmed into your brain. Our model says
> that after many trials you will consistently choose (A)
> even if you prefer not to be tortured.
Ok I’m not going to waste any more valuable brain cells thinking about
this because it’s all about what individuals would prefer, so this
thought experiment will tell us nothing about the nature of reality. You
may like vanilla ice cream and I may like chocolate, who cares?
Somewhere in a good thought experiment there needs to be something that
can be objectively determined to be true or false; like can the
experimental subject even detect that situation X occurred or can he
not.
John K Clark
-- John K Clark johnkclark@fastmail.fm -- http://www.fastmail.fm - The professional email service
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