X-Message-Number: 14974
Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2000 23:40:08 -0700
From: Mike Perry <>
Subject: Corbin's Duplicates Problem, Other Stuff.

In Message #14960 Lee Corbin writes
>
>In Message #14952 Mike Perry writes
>>>[Dave Pizer writes:]Both you and your double
>>> are told that one of you has to
>>>be destroyed.  Would one of you mind which one it was?
>
>>[MP replies:]In terms of a preference as
>> to which one of the two it would
>>be, I would say defininitely not--I would mind that one of us
>>was to be destroyed, but I would have no preference as to which
>>one it was... I would would view the situation probabilistically,
>>as equivalent to "there is a 50% chance you will be destroyed."
>>Such odds would worry me, but beyond that I make no distinction
>>between "myself" and a double (or triple, etc.) when "I" have no
>>way of distinguishing them. The different instantiations I do not
>>view as separate selves but equal and interchangeable
>>representatives of one self; that is to say, they form an
>>equivalence class.
>
>What exactly are you "worried about"?  Why should probability enter
>into it at all?  Someone hastily reading this might suppose that
>you thought that your soul, or identity, had only a 50% chance of
>surviving.  I hope that I didn't cut out too much of what you wrote,
>but it doesn't look entirely consistent to me.
>
The way the conditions are set up, I feel that the destruction of one of the
copies is not equivalent to the destruction of none, subjectively speaking,
even though I do not believe in a mystical soul. If we imagine that we start
with 1 million (or 10^1000 say) copies and destroy all but one, it seems all
the more so. At some point it's almost certain "you're gonna die," though an
epsilon of chance remains you won't. And what does it mean to say this, you
are going to die? To me it makes a statement about the likely perceptions of
continuers of you which will inevitably arise in the multiverse. Most likely
they will report a certain dislocation--though what it might be I could not
say. I don't think we know enough about reality to give good answers to that
difficult question, but I think we will, eventually. But if you think that
"your" survival is guaranteed so long as some double of yours somewhere
survives, you shouldn't be worried at all if you believe in the many-worlds
possiblity. If a nuclear bomb is falling on your house, there is some
epsilon probability it won't go off, however small, so some double of you in
some parallel universe must come out of it unscathed. It seems to me you
could argue along similar lines that you can't really die of any cause
whatever, because somewhere there's a parallel world where you don't. (So
why bother with cryonics?) But my position instead is that, at the risk of
being misunderstood, there's always an afterlife of sorts for you no matter
what happens, in view of the continuers that must come into existence in a
randomizing multiverse. But if there is a high probability of your
destruction (the destruction of duplicates of you that is) then there's a
high probability that "you" will experience the dislocation, flinging into
the unknown, etc. that will (I conjecture) be the likely consequence when
continuers come into existence whose experience implies that this
destruction occurred to them. I hope that is not too confusing--I also
discuss this point in my book. 

There are a couple of scenarios that have been raised in connection with the
many-worlds hypothesis that are worth commenting on here. One is the
"suicide lottery." You buy a lottery ticket that will make you rich if you
win, but say your odds of winning are the usual very small, say one in a
million. You instruct a confederate to put you under general anesthesia,
which he does and then waits for the winning number to be announced. If you
win, nothing further is done and you wake up rich. But otherwise, you are
euthanized without regaining consciousness. Logically, if you believe in
many-worlds and that you have nothing to lose so long as some duplicate of
you survives, you should go for the suicide lottery, since some of these
duplicates, albeit only a small fraction, will be among the winners. But my
argument above has a very different consequence, which is that it is still
reasonable to say you will probably die, with unknown and (I think) not
preferable consequences when what can be considered "you" does really
awaken. The second scenario is like the suicide lottery, only even more
diabolical. You solve the problem of poverty by selecting  a thousand poor
people at random, providing enough funds to make them all rich, and
euthanizing all the other world's poor, let's say several billion people
(though happily, I think that total is shrinking or will be). By
many-worlds, everybody has a double somewhere that is selected (since the
selection process is to be "random"), so everybody winds up rich and feeling
very lucky--right? Wrong of course, again see above.

Other Stuff: I'm really gratified to read about the apparent progress being
made in studying aging, and like the rest of us hope it leads to some sort
of significant treatments, the sooner the better. On the identity,
personality, survival, uploading, etc. issues, there are some interesting
posts, and I intend to respond to Ettinger's especially, but later--its
getting late.

Best to all,
Mike Perry

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